The Unquiet

I myself am Hell,

nobody’s here-

– ROBERT LOWELL, “SKUNK HOUR”

Chapter XV

It didn’t take long to find out the name of the lawyer who had represented Andy Kellog during his most recent brushes with the law. Her name was Aimee Price, and she had an office in South Freeport, about three miles away from the tourist-trap bustle of Freeport itself. The contrast between the towns of Freeport and South Freeport was striking. While Freeport had largely given up the ghost to the joys of outlet shopping, its side streets now converted to extended parking lots, South Freeport, which extended from Porter Landing to Winslow Park, had preserved most of its old nineteenth-century homes, built when the shipyards on the Harraseeket were booming. Price worked out of a small complex that had been created from a pair of carefully restored ship captains’ houses on Park Street, part of an area two blocks square that constituted the town center, situated just above the Freeport Town Landing. She shared the space with an accountant, a debt-restructuring service, and an acupuncturist.

Although it was Saturday, Price had told me that she would be working on case files until about one. I picked up some fresh muffins at the Carharts’ Village Store and strolled over to her office shortly before noon. I entered the reception area, and the young woman behind the desk pointed me in the direction of a hallway to my left, after calling ahead to inform Price’s secretary that I had arrived. Her secretary was male, and in his early twenties. He wore suspenders and a red bow tie. In someone else his age, it might have come across as trying too hard to appear eccentric, but there was something about the crumpled cotton of his shirt and the ink stains on his tan pants that suggested his eccentricity was pretty genuine.

Price herself was in her forties, with red curly hair cut short in a style that might have suited a woman twenty years older. She wore a navy suit, the jacket of which was slung across her chair, and had the tired look of someone who was fighting too many losing battles with the system. Her office was decorated with pictures of horses, and while there were various files on the floor, the windowsill, and on her desk, it was still a lot more welcoming than the offices of Eldritch and Associates, mainly because the people here seemed to have figured out how to use computers and dispose of some of their old paper.

Instead of sitting at her desk, Price cleared some space on a couch and invited me to sit there, while she took an upright chair alongside it. There was a small table between us, and the secretary, whose name was Ernest, set down some cups and a coffeepot, and took one of the muffins for his trouble. The seating arrangement left me sitting slightly lower, and slightly less comfortably, than Price. It was, I knew, quite deliberate. It seemed like Aimee Price had learned the hard way always to assume the worst, and to take every advantage available in anticipation of the battles to come. She wore a large diamond engagement ring. It sparkled in the winter sunlight as if there were bright living things moving within the stones.

“Nice rock,” I said.

She smiled. “Are you an appraiser as well as a detective?”

“I’m multitalented. In case the whole detecting thing doesn’t work out, I’ll have something to fall back on.”

“You seem to be doing okay at it,” she said. “You make the papers a lot.” She reconsidered what she had just said. “No, I guess that’s not true. It’s just that when you do make the papers, it kind of stands out. I bet you have all your press framed too.”

“I’ve built a shrine to myself.”

“Well, good luck attracting fellow worshipers. You wanted to talk to me about Andy Kellog?”

It was straight down to business.

“I’d like to see him,” I said.

“He’s in the Max. It’s off-limits to everyone.”

“Except you.”

“I’m his lawyer and even I have to jump through hoops to get near him in there. What’s your interest in Andy?”

“Daniel Clay.”

Price’s face grew stony. “What about him?”

“His daughter hired me. She’s been having some trouble with an individual who’s anxious to trace her father. It seems this individual was an acquaintance of Andy Kellog’s in jail.”

“ Merrick,” said Price. “It’s Frank Merrick, isn’t it?”

“You know about him?”

“I couldn’t help but be aware of him. He and Andy were close.”

I waited. Price leaned back in her chair.

“Where to begin?” she said. “I took on Andy Kellog pro bono. I don’t know how much of his circumstances you’re familiar with, but I’ll give you a short summary. Abandoned as a baby, taken in by his mother’s sister, brutalized by her and her husband, then passed around to some of the husband’s buddies for the purposes of sexual abuse. He started running away at the age of eight, and was practically wild by twelve. Medicated from the age of nine; severe learning difficulties; never made it past third grade. Eventually, he ended up in a halfway house for severely disturbed children, run on a wing and a prayer with minimal state funding, and that’s when he was referred to Daniel Clay. It was part of a pilot program. Dr. Clay specialized in traumatized children, particularly those who had been victims of physical or sexual abuse. A number of children were selected for the program, and Andy was one of them.”

“Who decided which kids were admitted?”

“A panel of mental health workers, social workers, and Clay himself. Apparently, there was some improvement in Andy’s condition right from the start. The sessions with Dr. Clay seemed to be working for him. He grew more communicative, less aggressive. It was decided that he might benefit from interaction with a family outside of the environment of the state home, so he began to spend a couple of days each week with a family in Bingham. They ran a lodge for outdoor pursuits: you know, hunting, hiking, rafting, that kind of thing. Eventually, Andy was allowed to live with them, with the mental health workers and child protection people keeping in regular touch on him. Well, that was the idea, but they were always overstretched, so as long as he wasn’t getting into any trouble, they left well enough alone and moved on to other cases. He was allowed a certain degree of freedom, but mostly he preferred to stay close to the family and the lodge. This was during the summer season. Then things got busier, there wasn’t always time to watch Andy twenty-four/seven, and-”

She stopped.

“Do you have children, Mr. Parker?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t. I thought I might have wanted them once, but I don’t think it’s going to happen now. Maybe it’s for the best, when you see the things that people are capable of doing to them.” She wet her lips, as though her system was trying to silence her by drying out her mouth. “Andy was abducted from near the lodge. He went missing for a couple of hours one afternoon, and when he returned he was very quiet. Nobody paid too much heed. You know, Andy still wasn’t like the other kids. He had his moods, and the folks who were looking after him had learned to let them blow over. They figured that it didn’t hurt to allow him explore the woods by himself. They were good people. I think they just let their guard down where Andy was concerned.

“Anyhow, it wasn’t until the third or fourth time it happened that notice was taken. Someone, I think it was the mother, went to see how Andy was, and he just attacked her. He went wild, clawing at her hair, her face. Eventually, they had to sit on him and pin him down until the police came. He wouldn’t go back to Clay, and the child-care workers could only get him to talk about fragments of what had occurred. He was returned to the institution, and he stayed there until he was seventeen. After that, he hit the streets and was lost. He couldn’t afford the medication that he needed, so he fell into dealing, robbery, violence. He’s doing fifteen years, but he doesn’t belong in the Max. I’ve been trying to get him admitted to Riverview Psychiatric. That’s where he should really be. I’ve had no luck so far. The state has decided that he’s a criminal, and the state is never wrong.”

“Why didn’t he tell anyone about the abuse?”

Price nibbled at her muffin. I noticed that her hands moved when she was thinking, her fingers always beating out some pattern on the edge of her chair, testing her fingernails or, as in this case, pulling apart the muffin before her. It seemed to be part of her thought processes.

“It’s complicated,” she said. “In part, it was probably a product of the earlier abuse, where the adults responsible for him were not only aware of what was happening but actively colluded in it. Andy had little or no trust in authority figures, and the foster couple in Bingham had only just begun to break down his barriers when the new abuse occurred. But from what he told me later, the men who abused him threatened to hurt the couple’s eight-year-old daughter if he said anything about what was happening to him. Her name was Michelle, and Andy had grown very fond of her. He was protective of her, in his way. That was why he went back.”

“Went back?”

“The men told Andy where he should wait for them each Tuesday. Sometimes they came, sometimes they didn’t, but Andy was always there in case they did. He didn’t want anything to happen to Michelle. There was a clearing about half a mile from the house with a creek nearby, and a trail led down to it from the road, wide enough to take a single vehicle. Andy would sit there, and one of them would come for him. He was told always to sit facing the creek, and never to turn around when he heard someone arriving. He would be blindfolded, walked to the car, and driven away.”

I felt something in my throat, and my eyes stung. I looked away from Price. I had an image in my head of a boy sitting on a log, the sound of water rushing nearby, sunlight spearing through the trees and birds singing, then footsteps approaching, and darkness.

“I hear he’s been taken to the chair a couple of times.”

She glanced at me, perhaps surprised at how much I knew. “More than a couple. It’s a vicious circle. Andy’s medicated, but the medication needs to be monitored and the dosages adjusted. It isn’t monitored, though, so the meds stop working as well as they should, Andy gets distressed, he lashes out, the guards punish him, he ends up more disturbed, and the meds have even less effect on him than before. It’s not Andy’s fault, but try explaining that to a prison guard who’s just had Andy’s urine thrown all over him. And Andy’s not untypical: there’s an escalating cycle occurring at the Supermax. Everyone can see it, but nobody knows what to do about it, or nobody even wants to do something about it, depending upon how depressed I’m feeling. You take a mentally unstable prisoner who commits some infraction of the rules while part of the general population. You confine him in a brightly lit cell without distractions, surrounded by other prisoners who are even more disturbed than he is. Under the strain, he violates more rules. He’s punished by being placed in the chair, which makes him even wilder than before. He commits more serious breaches of the rules, or assaults a guard, and his sentence is increased. The end result, in the case of someone like Andy, is that he’s driven insane, even suicidal. And what does a threat of suicide get you? More time in the chair.

“Winston Churchill once said that you can judge a society by the way it treats its prisoners. You know, there was all of this stuff about Abu Ghraib and what we we’re doing to Muslims in Iraq and in Guantánamo and in Afghanistan and wherever else we’ve decided to lock up those whom we perceive to be a threat. People seemed surprised by it, but all they had to do was look around them. We do it to our own people. We try children as adults. We lock up, even execute, the mentally ill. And we tie people naked to chairs in ice-cold rooms because their medication isn’t working. If we can do that here, then how the hell can anybody be surprised when we don’t treat our enemies any better?”

Her voice had grown louder as she became more angry. Ernest knocked on the door and poked his head in.

“Everything okay, Aimee?” he asked, looking at me as if I was to blame for the disturbance, which I suppose, in a way, I was.

“It’s fine, Ernest.”

“You want more coffee?”

She shook her head. “I’m wired as it is. Mr. Parker?”

“No, I’m good.”

She waited until the door had closed before continuing.

“Sorry about that,” said Aimee.

“For what?”

“For giving you the rant. I guess you probably don’t agree with me.”

“Why would you say that?”

“Because of what I’ve read about you. You’ve killed people. You seem like a harsh judge.”

I wasn’t sure how to respond. Part of me was surprised by her words, maybe even annoyed by them, but there was no edge to them. She was simply calling it as she saw it.

“I didn’t think that I had a choice,” I replied. “Not then. Maybe now, knowing what I know, I might have acted differently in some cases, but not all.”

“You did what you thought was right.”

“I’ve started to believe that most people do what they think is right. The problems arise when what they do is right for themselves, but not what’s right for others.”

“Selfishness?”

“Perhaps. Self-interest. Self-preservation. A whole lot of concepts with ‘self ’ in them.”

“Did you make mistakes when you did what you did?”

I realized that I was being tested in some way, that Price’s questions were a way of gauging whether or not I should be allowed to see Andy Kellog. I tried to answer them as honestly as I could.

“No, not at the end.”

“So you don’t make mistakes?”

“Not like that.”

“You never shot anyone who didn’t have a gun in his hand, is that what you’re saying?”

“No, because that’s not true either.”

There was a silence then, until Aimee Price put her hands to her forehead and gave a growl of frustration.

“Some of that is none of my business,” she said. “I’m sorry. Again.”

“I’m asking you questions. I don’t see why you can’t ask some back. You frowned when I mentioned Daniel Clay’s name, though. Why?”

“Because I know what people say about him. I’ve heard the stories.”

“And you believe them?”

“Somebody betrayed Andy Kellog to those men. It wasn’t a coincidence.”

“ Merrick doesn’t think so either.”

“Frank Merrick is obsessed. Something inside him broke when his daughter disappeared. I don’t know if it makes him more dangerous or less dangerous than he was.”

“What can you tell me about him?”

“Not much. You probably know all that you need to about his conviction, the stuff in Virginia: the killing of Barton Riddick, and the bullet match that linked Merrick to the shooting. It doesn’t interest me a great deal, to be honest. My main concern was, and remains, Andy Kellog. When Merrick first began forming some kind of bond with Andy, I thought what most people would: you know, a vulnerable younger man, an older, harder prisoner, but it wasn’t like that. Merrick really seemed to be looking out for Andy as best he could.”

She had begun to doodle on the legal pad on her lap as she spoke. I don’t think she was even fully aware of what she was doing. She didn’t look down at the pad as the pencil moved across it, and she didn’t look at me, preferring instead to gaze out at the cold winter light beyond her window.

She was drawing the heads of birds.

“I heard that Merrick got transferred to the Supermax just so he could stay close to Kellog,” I said.

“I’m curious to know the source of your information, but it’s certainly right on the money. Merrick got transferred, and made it clear that anyone who messed with Andy would answer to him. Even in a place like the Max, there are ways and means. Except the only person from whom Merrick couldn’t protect Andy was Andy himself.

“In the meantime, the AG’s office in Virginia began setting in motion indictment on the Riddick killing. It rattled on and on, and as the date of Merrick ’s release from the Max approached, the papers were served and he was notified of his extradition. Then something peculiar happened: another lawyer intervened on Merrick ’s behalf.”

“Eldritch,” I said.

“That’s right. The intervention was troublesome in a number of ways. It didn’t seem like Eldritch had ever had any previous contact with Merrick, and Andy told me that the lawyer had initiated the contact. This old man just turned up and offered to take on Merrick ’s case, but from what I found out later, Eldritch didn’t seem to specialize in any kind of criminal work. He did corporate stuff, real estate, all strictly white-collar, so he was an unusual candidate for a crusading attorney. Nevertheless, he tied Merrick’s case in with a challenge to bullet matching being assembled by a group of liberal lawyers, and turned up evidence of a shooting involving the same weapon used to kill Riddick, but committed while Merrick was behind bars. The Feds began to backtrack on bullet matching, and Virginia came to the realization there wasn’t enough evidence to get a conviction on the Riddick shooting, and if there’s one thing a prosecutor hates to do, it’s to pursue a case that looks like it’s doomed from the start. Merrick spent a few months in a cell in Virginia, then was released. He’d served his full sentence in Maine, so he was free and clear.”

“Do you think he regretted leaving Andy Kellog in the Max?”

“Sure, but by then he seemed to have decided that there were things he needed to do outside.”

“Like find out what had happened to his daughter?”

“Yes.”

I closed my notebook. There would be other questions, but for now I was done.

“I’d still like to talk to Andy,” I said.

“I’ll make some inquiries.”

I thanked her and gave her my card.

“About Frank Merrick,” she said, as I was about to leave. “I think he did kill Riddick, and a whole lot of others too.”

“I know his reputation,” I said. “Do you believe Eldritch was wrong to intervene?”

“I don’t know why Eldritch intervened, but it wasn’t out of a concern for justice. He did some good though, even inadvertently. Bullet matching was flawed. The case against Merrick was equally flawed. If you let even one of those slip by, then the whole system falls apart, or crumbles a little more than it’s crumbling already. If Eldritch hadn’t taken the case, maybe I would have sought a pro hac vice order and taken it myself.” She smiled. “I stress ‘maybe.’”

“You wouldn’t want Frank Merrick as a client.”

“Even hearing that he’s back in Maine makes me nervous.”

“He hasn’t tried to contact you about Andy?”

“No. You have any idea where he’s staying while he’s up here?”

It was a good question, and it set off a train of thought. If Eldritch had provided Merrick with a car, and perhaps funds too, he might also have supplied a place for him to stay. If that was the case, there might be a way to find it, and perhaps discover more about both Merrick and Eldritch’s client.

I stood to leave. At the door of her office, Aimee Price said: “So Daniel Clay’s daughter is paying you to do all this?”

“No, not this,” I said. “She’s paying me to keep her safe from Merrick.”

“So why are you here?”

“For the same reason that you might have taken on Merrick’s case. There’s something wrong here. It bothers me. I’d like to find out what it is.”

She nodded. “I’ll be in touch about Andy,” she said.

Rebecca Clay called me, and I updated her on the situation with Merrick. Eldritch had informed his client that he would be unable to do anything for him until Monday, when he would petition a judge if Merrick continued to remain in custody without charge. O’Rourke wasn’t confident that any judge would allow the Scarborough cops to continue to hold him if he had already spent forty-eight hours behind bars, even allowing for the fact that the letter of the law entitled them to keep him for a further forty-eight.

“What then?” asked Rebecca.

“I’m pretty certain that he’s not going to bother you again. I saw what happened when they told him he was going to be locked up for the weekend. He’s not afraid of jail, but he is afraid of losing his freedom to search for his daughter. That freedom is now tied up with your continued well-being. I’ll serve him with the court order upon his release, but, if you’re agreeable, we’ll keep an eye on you for a day or two after he’s released, just in case.”

“I want to bring Jenna home,” she said.

“I wouldn’t advise that just yet.”

“I’m worried about her. This whole business, I think it’s affecting her.”

“Why?”

“I found pictures in her room. Drawings.”

“Drawings of what?”

“Of men, men with pale faces and no eyes. She said that she’d seen them or dreamed them, or something. I want her close to me.”

I didn’t tell Rebecca that others had seen those men too, myself included. It seemed better to let her believe for now that they were a product of her daughter’s troubled imagination, and nothing more.

“Soon,” I said. “Just give me a few more days.”

Reluctantly, she agreed.

That evening, Angel, Louis, and I had dinner at Fore Street. Louis had gone to the bar to examine the vodka options, leaving Angel and me to talk.

“You’ve lost weight,” said Angel, sniffing and snowing fragments of tissue on the table. I had no idea what he had been doing in Napa to contract a cold, but I was pretty certain that I didn’t want him to tell me. “You look good. Even your clothes look good.”

“It’s the new me. I eat well, still go to the gym, walk the dog.”

“Uh-huh. Nice clothes, eating well, going to the gym, owning a dog.” He thought for a moment. “You sure you’re not gay?”

“I can’t be gay,” I said. “I’m very busy as it is.”

“Maybe that’s why I like you,” he said. “You’re a gay nongay.” Angel had arrived wearing one of my cast-off brown leather bomber jackets, the material so worn in places that it had faded entirely to white. His aged Wranglers had an embroidered wave pattern on the back pockets, and he was wearing a Hall and Oates T-shirt, which meant that the time in Angel land was approximately a quarter after 1981.

“Can you be a gay homophobe?” I asked.

“Sure. It’s like being a self-hating Jew, except the food is better.” Louis returned.

“I’ve been telling him how gay he is,” said Angel, as he buttered a piece of bread. A fragment of butter fell on his T-shirt. He carefully used a finger to remove it and licked the digit clean. Louis’s face remained impassive, only the slightest narrowing of his eyes indicating the depth of the emotions he was feeling.

“Uh-huh,” he said. “I don’t think you’re the right guy to front the recruitment drive.”

While we ate, we talked about Merrick, and what I had learned from Aimee Price. Earlier that day, I had put in a call to Matt Mayberry, a Realtor I knew down in Massachusetts whose company did business all over New England, asking him if there was a way he could find out about any properties in the greater Portland area with which Eldritch and Associates had been involved in recent years. It was a long shot. I had spent most of the afternoon making calls to hotels and motels, but I had drawn a blank every time I asked for Frank Merrick’s room. Still, it would be useful to know where Merrick was likely to bolt once he was released.

“You seen Rachel lately?” asked Angel.

“A few weeks back.”

“How are things between you?”

“Not so good.”

“That’s a shame.”

“Yeah.”

“You got to keep trying, you know that?”

“Thanks for the advice.”

“Maybe you should go see her, while Merrick is safe behind bars.”

I thought about it as the check arrived. I knew then that I wanted to see them both. I wanted to hold Sam, and talk to Rachel. I was tired of hearing about men who tormented children and the troubled lives they had left in their wake.

Louis began counting out bills.

“Maybe I will go to see them,” I said.

“We’ll walk your dog,” said Angel. “If he’s secretly gay like you, he won’t object.”

Chapter XVI

It was a long ride to the property Rachel and Sam now shared with Rachel’s parents in Vermont, and I spent most of it driving in silence, going over all that I had learned about Daniel Clay and Frank Merrick, and trying to figure out where Eldritch’s client fitted into the whole affair. Eldritch had told me that his client had no interest in Daniel Clay, yet they were both facilitating Merrick, who was obsessed with Clay. And then there were the Hollow Men, whatever they were. I had seen them, or perhaps it would be more true to say that they had entered my zone of perception. The maid at Joel Harmon’s house had seen them too and, as I had learned from the brief conversation with Rebecca Clay the night before, her daughter, Jenna, had drawn pictures of them before she left the city. The connection appeared to be Merrick, but when he was asked during his interrogation if he was working alone, or if he had brought others with him, he had seemed genuinely surprised and had responded in the negative. The questions remained: who were they, and what was their purpose?

Rachel’s parents had gone away for the weekend and weren’t due back until Monday, so Rachel’s sister had come to stay in order to help with Sam. Sam had grown so much, even in the few weeks since I had last seen her, or perhaps that was just the view of a father conscious of the fact that he was separated from his daughter, and that the stages of her development would from now on be revealed to him in leaps rather than steps.

Was I simply being pessimistic? I didn’t know. Rachel and I still spoke regularly on the phone. I missed her, and I thought that she missed me, but on the recent occasions when we had met, her parents were present, or Sam was acting up, or there was something else that seemed to get in the way of talking about ourselves and how things had become so bad between us. I couldn’t figure out if we were allowing these intrusions to become obstacles in order to avoid some kind of final confrontation, or if they truly were what they seemed to be. A period apart to allow us both to figure out how we wanted to live this life had become something longer and more complicated and, it appeared, more final. Rachel and Sam had moved back to Scarborough for a time in May, but Rachel and I had fought, and there was a distance between us that had not existed before. She had been uncomfortable in the house that we had once shared more easily, and Sam had trouble sleeping in her room. Had we simply grown used to being without each another, even though I knew that I still craved her, and she me? We existed in a kind of strained limbo, where things were left unsaid for fear that to speak them aloud would cause the whole fragile edifice to collapse around us.

Rachel’s parents had converted some old stables on their property into a large guesthouse, and that was where Rachel lived with Sam. She was working again, employed on a contract basis with the Psychology Department of the University of Vermont in Burlington, taking tutorials and lecturing on criminal psychology. She told me a little about it as I sat at her kitchen table, but in the casual, passing way that one might describe one’s pursuits to a stranger at dinner. In the past, I would have been privy to every little detail, but not anymore.

Sam was squatting on the floor between us, playing with big plastic farm animals. She gripped two sheep in her chubby hands and pounded their heads together, then looked up and offered one to each of us. They were slick with baby drool.

“You think it’s a metaphor for us?” I asked Rachel. She looked tired, but still beautiful. She caught me staring and brushed a strand of hair back over her ear, blushing slightly.

“I’m not sure that knocking our heads together would solve anything,” she said. “Although admittedly I’d get a sense of satisfaction from knocking your head against something.”

“Nice.”

She reached out and touched the back of my hand with her finger.

“I didn’t mean it to sound quite as harsh as it did.”

“It’s okay. If it’s any consolation, I often feel like beating my head against a wall too.”

“What about beating mine?”

“You’re too good-looking. And I’d be afraid of ruining your hair.”

I turned my hand palm up and held her finger.

“Let’s go for a walk,” she said. “My sister will look after Sam.”

We rose, and she called her sister’s name. Pam entered the kitchen before I had a chance to release Rachel’s finger, and she gave us both a knowing look. It wasn’t disapproving, though, which was something. Had Rachel’s father seen us like this, he might well have reached for his rifle. I didn’t get on with him, and I knew that he hoped the relationship between his daughter and me was over for good.

“Why don’t I take Sam for a ride?” said Pam. “I have to go to the store anyway, and you know how she likes people-watching.” She knelt in front of Sam. “You wanna go for a ride with Aunt Pammie, huh? I’ll take you to the health section and show you all the stuff you’re gonna need when you’re a teenager and boys come calling. Maybe we can go look at guns too, huh?”

Sam let her aunt pick her up without complaint. Rachel followed them and helped her sister to get Sam ready, and to fit her into the child seat. Sam cried a little when the door closed and she realized that her mom wasn’t joining them, but we knew that it wouldn’t last long. She was fascinated by the car, and seemed to spend most of her time in it either watching the sky go by or just sleeping, lulled by the movement of the vehicle. We watched them drive off, then I followed Rachel across the garden and into the fields that bordered her parents’ house. She kept her arms folded across her chest, as though uneasy about the fact that she had held my hand earlier.

“How have you been?” she asked.

“Busy.”

“Anything interesting?”

I told her about Rebecca Clay and her father, and the arrival of Frank Merrick.

“What kind of man is he?” asked Rachel.

It was a strange question. “A dangerous one, and hard to read,” I replied. “He thinks Clay is still alive, and that he knows what happened to his daughter. Nobody else seems to be able to say different, but the general wisdom is that Clay is dead; that, or his daughter is the best actress I’ve ever met. Merrick tends toward the latter view. He used to be a freelance button man, a hired killer. He’s been in jail for a long time, but he doesn’t strike me as being rehabilitated. There’s more to him than that, though. He looked out for one of Clay’s patients while he was in the can, even getting himself sent to the Max so he could be close to him. I thought at first that it might be a jail thing-older guy-younger guy-but it doesn’t look like it was that way. Merrick ’s own daughter was one of Clay’s patients at the time that she disappeared. That may be why there was a bond between him and this kid, Kellog.”

“Maybe Merrick also hoped to learn something from Kellog that might lead him to his daughter,” said Rachel.

“Probably, but he shadowed this kid for years, and he protected him. It wouldn’t have taken him long to find out what Kellog knew, but he didn’t cut him loose. He stood by him. He took care of him, as best he could.”

“He couldn’t protect his own daughter, so he protected Kellog instead?”

“He’s a complex man.”

“You sound almost as though you respect him.”

I shook my head. “I pity him. I think I even understand him some. But I don’t respect him, not in the way that you mean.”

“There’s another way?”

I didn’t want to utter it. After all, it would lead us back to one of the reasons why Rachel and I had parted.

“Well?” she pressed, and I knew that she had already guessed what I was going to say. She wanted to hear it spoken, as though to confirm something sad but necessary.

“He has a lot of blood on his hands,” I said. “He doesn’t forgive.”

I could have been talking about myself, and once again I was aware of how much like Merrick I once was, and might still be. It was as though I had been given an opportunity to witness a version of myself decades down the line, older and more solitary, trying to right a wrong through force and the infliction of harm upon others.

“And now you’ve crossed him. You brought in the police. You got in the way of his efforts to find out the truth about his daughter’s disappearance. You respect him the way you’d respect an animal, because to do otherwise would be to underestimate him. You think you’re going to have to face him again, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

Her brow wrinkled, and there was pain in her eyes. “It never changes, does it?”

I didn’t reply. What could I say?

Rachel didn’t pursue an answer. Instead, she said: “Is Kellog still in jail?”

“Yes.”

“Are you going to talk to him?”

“I’m going to try. I’ve spoken to his lawyer. From what I hear, he’s not doing so good. Then again, he was never doing good, but if he stays in the Supermax for much longer, he’s going to be beyond rescuing. He was troubled before he got there. It sounds like he’s bordering on insane now.”

“Is it true what they say about that place?”

“Yes, it’s true.”

She didn’t speak again for a time. We walked through dead leaves. Sometimes, they made a sound like a parent hushing a child, soothing it, consoling it. At other times, the noise was empty and dry, crackling with the promise of the passing of all things.

“What about the psychiatrist, Clay? You say there were suspicions that he might have been providing information on the children to the abusers. Was there anything to implicate him directly in the abuse itself?”

“Nothing, or nothing that I’ve been able to find. His daughter’s view is that he couldn’t live with the guilt of failing to prevent it. He believed that he should have spotted what was happening. The kids were damaged before he even began treating them, just like Kellog. He was having trouble getting through to them, but his daughter remembers that he was making progress, or thought he was. Kellog’s lawyer confirmed as much about him. Whatever Clay did, it was working. I spoke to one of his peers, too, a doctor named Christian who runs a clinic for abused children. His main criticism of Clay seems to have been that he was too anxious to spot abuse. He had an agenda, and he got into some trouble over it that prevented him from making any further evaluations on cases for the state.”

Rachel stopped and knelt down. She picked a piece of rabbit-foot clover, still with one of its fuzzy, grayish pink flowers in place.

“This is supposed to stop blooming in September or October,” she said. “Yet here it is, still in flower. The world is changing.” She handed it to me. “For luck,” she said.

I held it in my palm, then carefully slipped it into the plastic pocket of my wallet.

“The question still remains: if the same people were involved in the abuse of different children, then how did they target them?” she asked. “From what you’ve told me, they picked the most vulnerable. How did they know?”

“Somebody told them,” I said. “Somebody fed children to them.”

“If not Clay, then who was it?”

“There was a committee formed to select the children who would be sent to Clay. It had mental health workers on it, and social workers. If I had to pick, I’d say it was one of them. But I’m sure the cops looked at that angle. They must have. Christian’s people did too. They came up with nothing.”

“But Clay disappeared. Why? Because of what happened to the children, or because he was involved? Because he felt responsible, or because he was responsible?”

“That’s a big leap.”

“It just feels wrong, Clay disappearing like that. There are always exceptions, but I can’t think of a doctor in that situation who would respond in a similar way. He’s a psychiatrist, a specialist, not some ordinary joe. He’s not going to buckle, not in the space of a few days.”

“So either he ran away to avoid being implicated-”

“Which doesn’t sound right either. If he was involved, he would have been smart enough to cover his tracks.”

“-or someone ‘disappeared’ him, maybe one or more of those involved in the abuse.”

“Covering their tracks.”

“But why would he do it?”

“Blackmail. Or he may have had those tendencies himself.”

“You still think he might have been a participant in the abuse? It would be risky.”

“Too risky,” she agreed. “It doesn’t rule him out as a pedophile, though. Neither does it rule out blackmail.”

“We’re still assuming he’s guilty.”

“We’re speculating, that’s all.”

It was interesting, but it still didn’t fit right. I just couldn’t figure out what was wrong with the picture. We headed back toward the house, the moon already rising above us in the late-afternoon sky. I was facing the long ride home, and suddenly I felt unbearably lonely. I didn’t want to drive away from this woman and the child we had made together. I didn’t want to leave things this way. I couldn’t.

“Rach,” I said. I stopped walking.

She paused and looked back to where I stood.

“What happened to us?”

“We’ve talked about this before.”

“Have we?”

“You know we have,” she said. “I thought I could handle you, and what you did, but perhaps I was wrong. Something in me responded to it, the part of me that was angry and hurt, but in you it’s so great that it frightens me. And-”

I waited.

“When I returned to the house, that time in May when we-I don’t want to say ‘when we got back together,’ because it didn’t last long enough for that-lived together again, I realized how much I hated being there. I didn’t notice it until I went away and came back, but there’s something wrong with that place. I find it hard to explain. I don’t think I’ve ever tried, not aloud, but I know there are things that you haven’t told me. I’ve heard you sometimes, crying out names in your dreams. I’ve seen you walking through the house half-asleep, carrying on conversations with people that I can’t see, but I know who they are. I’ve watched you, when you think you’re alone, responding to something in the shadows.” She laughed mirthlessly. “Hell, I even saw the dog do it. You have him freaked out too. I don’t believe in ghosts. Maybe that’s why I don’t see them. I think they come from within, not beyond. People create them. All that stuff about spirits with unfinished business, individuals taken before their time haunting places, I don’t believe any of it. It’s the living who have unfinished business, who can’t let the past go. Your house-and it is your house-is haunted. Its ghosts are your ghosts. You brought them into being, and you can get rid of them too. Until you do, nobody else can be part of your life, because the demons in your head and the spirits in your heart will force them away. Do you understand? I know what you’ve been going through all of these years. I waited for you to tell me, but you couldn’t. Sometimes, I think it’s because you were afraid that by telling me you’d have to let them go, and you don’t want to let them go. They fuel that rage within you. That’s why you look at this man Merrick and feel pity for him, and more than that: you feel empathy.”

Her face changed, the tone of her voice transforming with it, and her cheeks flushed red with anger.

“Well, be sure that you look closely at him, because that’s what you’ll become if all of this doesn’t stop: an empty vessel motivated by hatred and revenge and frustrated love. In the end, we’re not apart just because I’m afraid for Sam and myself, or scared for you and for what might happen to all of us as a consequence of your work. I’m frightened of you, of the fact that part of you is drawn to evil and pain and wretchedness, that the anger and hurt that you feel will always need to be fed. It will never end. You talk of Merrick as a man unable to forgive. Well, you can’t forgive either. You can’t forgive yourself for not being there to protect your wife and child, and you can’t forgive them for dying on you. And maybe I thought that that might change, that having us in your life would enable you to heal a little, to find some peace with us, but there will be no peace. You want it, but you can’t bring yourself to embrace it. You just-”

She was starting to cry now. I moved to her, but she stepped away.

“No,” she said softly. “Please don’t.”

She walked away, and I let her go.

Chapter XVII

Eldritch arrived in Maine early on Monday morning, accompanied by a younger man who had the distracted yet slightly desperate air of an alcoholic who has forgotten where the bottle is hidden. Eldritch allowed his companion to make all of the running in petitioning the judge, contributing only a few words on behalf of his client at the end of the submission, his soft, reasonable tones conveying the impression that his client was a peace-loving man whose actions, born out of a concern for the well-being of his lost child, had been cruelly misinterpreted by an uncaring world. Nevertheless, he gave a promise on Merrick’s behalf, for Merrick did not speak, to adhere to all conditions of the court order about to be served, and requested, with all due deference, that his client be released forthwith.

The judge, whose name was Nola Hight, was no fool. In her fifteen years at the bench she had heard just about every excuse known to man, and she wasn’t about to take Eldritch at face value.

“Your client spent ten years in jail for attempted murder, Mr. Eldritch,” she said.

“Aggravated assault, Your Honor,” Eldritch’s young assistant corrected. Judge Hight glared at him so hard his hair started to singe.

“With respect, Your Honor, I’m not sure that is relevant to the matter before the court,” said Eldritch, attempting to smooth the judge’s ruffled feathers through tone alone. “My client served his time for that offense. He is a changed man, chastened by his experiences.”

Judge Hight gave Eldritch a look that would have reduced a lesser man to charred flesh. Eldritch merely wavered where he stood, as though his brittle form had been briefly buffeted by a gentle breeze.

“He will be chastened for the maximum term allowable under law if he comes before this court again in connection with the matter in hand,” she said. “Am I making myself clear, counsel?”

“Indisputably,” said Eldritch. “Your Honor is as reasonable as she is wise.”

Judge Hight debated finding him in contempt of court for sarcasm, then gave up.

“Get the hell out of my courtroom,” she said.

It was still early, barely after ten. Merrick was due for release at eleven, once his paperwork had been processed. When they let him out of the Cumberland County lockup, I was waiting, and I served him with the court order forbidding further contact with Rebecca Clay on pain of imprisonment and/or a fine. He took it, read it carefully, then slipped it into the pocket of his jacket. He looked crumpled and tired, the way most people did after a couple of nights in a cell.

“That was low, what you did,” he said.

“You mean setting the cops on you? You were terrorizing a young woman. That also seems kind of low. You need to reconsider your standards. They’re all screwed up.”

He might have heard me, but he wasn’t really listening. He wasn’t even looking at me. He was staring at a spot somewhere over my right shoulder, letting me know that I wasn’t even worthy of eye contact.

“Men ought to deal with each other like men,” he continued, red rising into his face as though he were being boiled from below. “You set the hounds on me when all I wanted to do was talk. You and missy both, you got no honor.”

“Let me buy you breakfast,” I said. “Maybe we can work something out.”

Merrick waved a hand in dismissal.

“Keep your breakfast and your talk. The time for talking with you is done.”

“You may not believe this, but I have some sympathy for you,” I said. “You want to find out what happened to your daughter. I know what that feels like. If I can help you, then I will, but scaring Rebecca Clay isn’t the way to go about it. If you approach her again, you’ll be picked up and put back behind bars: the Cumberland County lockup if you’re lucky, but Warren if you’re not. That could be another year out of your life, another year spent not getting any closer to finding out the truth about your daughter’s disappearance.”

Merrick looked at me for the first time since we’d begun talking.

“I’m done with the Clay woman,” he said. “But I ain’t done with you. I’ll give you some advice, though, in return for what you just gave me. Stay out of this, and maybe I’ll be merciful the next time our paths cross.”

With that he pushed past me and began walking toward the bus station. He looked smaller than before, his shoulders slightly hunched, his jeans stained from his time behind bars. Once again, I felt pity for him. Despite all that I knew about him, and all that he was suspected of doing, he was still a father seeking his lost child. Perhaps it was all he had left, but I knew the damage that could be caused by that kind of single-minded intensity. I knew because I had once wrought it myself. Rebecca Clay might be safe from him, at least for the present, but Merrick was not going to stop. He would keep looking until he found out the truth, or until someone forced him to desist. Either way, it could only end with a death.

I called Rebecca and told her that I didn’t believe Merrick would trouble her for the time being, but there were no guarantees.

“I understand,” she said. “I don’t want men outside my house any longer, though. I can’t live that way. Will you thank them for me, and bill me?”

“One last thing, Ms. Clay,” I said. “If the choice was given to you, would you want your father found?”

She thought about the question.

“Wherever he is, he made the choice that brought him there,” she said softly. “I told you before: I think sometimes about Jim Poole. He went away, and he never came back. I like to pretend that I don’t know if it was because of me, if he vanished because I asked him to look for my father, or if something else happened to him, something equally bad. But when I can’t sleep, when I’m lying alone in my room in the darkness, I know it was my fault. In the daylight, I can convince myself that it wasn’t, but I know the truth. I don’t know you, Mr. Parker. I asked you to help me, and you did, and I’ll pay you for your time and your efforts, but we don’t know each other. If something were to happen to you because you asked questions about my father, then we’d be bound by it, and I don’t want to be bound to you, not like that. Do you understand? I’m trying to let it go. I want you to do the same.”

She hung up. Maybe she was right. Maybe Daniel Clay should be left wherever he was, either above or below ground. But it wasn’t up to her, or me, not any longer. Merrick was out there, and so was the person who had instructed Eldritch to bankroll him. Rebecca Clay’s part in this might have been over, but mine wasn’t.

When the Maine State Prison was based in Thomaston, it was hard to miss. It stood slap bang on the main road into town, a massive edifice on Route 1 that had survived two fires and, even after being rebuilt, renovated, extended, and occasionally updated, still resembled the early-nineteenth-century penitentiary that it had once been. It felt like the town itself had developed around the prison, although in truth there had been a trading post at Thomaston since the seventeenth century. Nevertheless, the prison dominated the landscape of the community, both physically and, perhaps, psychologically. If one mentioned Thomaston to anyone in Maine, the first thing that came to mind was the penitentiary. I wondered sometimes what it was like to live in a place whose principal claim to fame was the incarceration of human beings. It might have been that, after a while, you just forgot about it, or failed to notice the effect it had on the people and the town. Perhaps it was only those who visited Thomaston who immediately felt that an oppressive miasma hung over the place, as though the misery of those locked behind the prison’s walls had seeped into the atmosphere, coloring it with gray, weighing it down like particles of lead in the air. Then again, it certainly kept the crime rate low. Thomaston was the kind of place where there was a violent crime once every two or three years, and its crime index was about one-third of the national average. It might have been that the presence of a huge prison on the doorstep made those tempted by a life of crime reconsider their career options.

Warren was different, though. The town was a little larger than Thomaston, and its identity was not so bound up with the penitentiary. The new state prison had grown gradually, beginning with the opening of the Supermax, then the Mental Health Stabilization Unit, and finally the transfer of the general population from Thomaston to the new facility. Compared to the old prison, it was a little harder to find, squirreled away on Route 97, or at least as squirreled away as a place with a thousand prisoners and four hundred employees can be. I drove along Cushing Road, past the Bolduc Correctional Facility on the left, until I came to the brick and stone sign to the right of the road announcing the Maine State Prison, with the years 1824 and 2001 beneath, the first commemorating the founding of the original prison and the second the opening of the new facility.

Warren looked more like a modern industrial plant than a prison, an impression reinforced by the big maintenance area to the right that appeared to house the prison’s power plant. Bird feeders made from buoys hung on the lawn outside the main entrance, and everything looked new and freshly painted. It was the silence that gave away the true nature of the place, though; that, and the name, white on green above the door, and the razor wire on top of the double fencing, and the presence of the blue-uniformed guards with their striped trousers, and the beaten-down look of those waiting in the lobby to visit their loved ones. All told, you didn’t have to look too hard to figure out that, whatever cosmetic adjustments had been made to the façade, this was still as much a prison as Thomaston ever was.

Aimee Price had clearly pulled some strings to get me access to Andy Kellog. Visitor clearances could sometimes take up to six weeks. Then again, Price was entitled to see her client whenever she chose, and I wasn’t exactly unknown to the prison authorities. I had visited the preacher Faulkner when he was incarcerated at Thomaston, an encounter that had been memorable for all the wrong reasons, but this was my first time at the new facility.

It wasn’t a complete surprise, therefore, to see a familiar figure standing beside Price when I eventually cleared security and entered the body of the prison: Joe Long, the colonel of the guards. He hadn’t changed much since last we’d met. He was still big, still taciturn, and still radiated the kind of authority that kept a thousand criminals on the right side of respectful. His uniform was starched and pressed, and everything that was supposed to gleam did so spectacularly. There was a little more gray in his mustache than before, but I decided not to point that out. Beneath his gruff exterior, I sensed there was a sensitive child just waiting to be hugged. I didn’t want to hurt his feeling, singular.

“Back again,” he said, in a tone that suggested I was forever bothering him by knocking on the door at all hours of the day and night, demanding that I be let in to play with the other kids.

“Can’t stay away from men in jails,” I said.

“Yeah, we get a lot of that here,” he replied.

That Joe Long. What a kidder. If he was any drier, he’d have been Arizona.

“I like the new place,” I said. “It’s institutional, but homey. I can see your hand at work in the decor: the institutional grays, the stone, the wire. It all just screams you.”

He allowed his gaze to linger on me for just a moment or two longer than was strictly necessary, then turned smartly on his heel and told us to follow him. Aimee Price fell into step beside me, and a second guard named Woodbury brought up the rear.

“You just have friends everywhere, don’t you?” she said.

“If I ever end up in here as a guest, I’m hoping he’ll look out for me.”

“Yeah, good luck with that. You ever find yourself in that much trouble, make a shank.”

Our footsteps echoed along the corridor. Now there was noise: unseen men talking and shouting, steel doors opening and closing, the distant sound of radios and TVs. That was the thing about prisons: inside, they were never quiet, not even at night. It was never possible to be anything but acutely aware of the men incarcerated around you. It was worse in the dark, after lights out, when the nature of the sound changed. It was then that the loneliness and desperation of their situation would hit prisoners, and the snores and wheezes would be interspersed with the cries of men enduring nightmares and the weeping of those who had not yet learned to accommodate themselves to the prospect of years in such a place, or who would never reach that accommodation. Tween had once told me that during his longest stretch inside-two years of a three-year B amp;E sentence-he did not get a single undisturbed night’s sleep. It was that, he said, that wore him down. The irony was that, when he was released, he was unable to sleep either, unaccustomed as he was to the comparative silence of the city.

“They’re transferring Andy from the Supermax to a noncontact room for our meeting,” said Aimee. “It’s not ideal, and you won’t get any sense of the Max for yourself, but it’s the best that I could do. Andy is still considered a risk to himself and others.”

Price excused herself to use the bathroom before we sat down with Kellog. That left just me and Joe Long. Woodbury kept his distance, content to stare at the floor and the walls.

“Been a while since we’ve seen you,” said Long. “What is it, two, three years?”

“You sound almost regretful.”

“Yeah, almost.” Long straightened his tie, carefully brushing away some flecks of lint that had had the temerity to affix themselves to him. “You ever hear tell what happened to that preacher Faulkner?” he asked. “They say he just plain disappeared.”

“That’s the rumor.”

Long finished with his tie, examined me from behind his glasses, and stroked his mustache thoughtfully.

“Strange that he never showed up again,” he continued. “Hard for a man like that just to vanish, what with so many people looking for him. Kind of makes you wonder if they’re looking in the wrong direction. Up, so to speak, instead of down. Above ground instead of below.”

“I guess we’ll never know,” I said.

“Guess not. Probably for the best. The preacher would be no loss, but the law’s the law. Man could find himself behind bars for something like that, and that wouldn’t be a good place for him to be.”

If Long was expecting me to break down and confess something, he was disappointed.

“Yeah, I hear it hasn’t been good for Andy Kellog,” I said. “He seems to be having problems adjusting.”

“Andy Kellog has a lot of problems. Some of them he makes for himself.”

“Can’t help macing him in the middle of the night and tying him naked to a chair. I think someone in this place missed his vocation. There we are, spending taxpayers’ money flying bad guys to Egypt and Saudi Arabia to be softened up, when we could just put them on a Trailways bus and send them here.”

For the first time, there was a flicker of emotion on Long’s face.

“It’s used for restraint,” he said, “not torture.”

He said it very softly, almost as if he didn’t believe what he was saying enough to enunciate it loudly.

“It’s torture if it drives a man crazy,” I replied.

Long opened his mouth to say something else, but before he could speak, Aimee Price reappeared.

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s see him.”

The door across from us was opened by Woodbury, and we entered a room divided in two by a thick pane of Plexiglas. A series of booths, each with its own speaker system, allowed a degree of privacy to those visiting, although it wasn’t required that morning. Only one prisoner stood on the opposite side of the glass, two guards hovering stony-faced behind him. He wore an orange jumpsuit and a collar-and-tie arrangement of chains that kept his hands cuffed and his legs manacled. He was shorter than I was, and unlike a lot of men in prison, he didn’t seem to have put on any excess weight because of the diet and the lack of exercise. Instead, the jumpsuit seemed too big for him, the sleeves hanging down almost to the second line of knuckles on each hand. He had pale skin and fine black hair, cut unevenly so that the fringe sloped downward from left to right across his forehead. His eyes were set deep in his skull, overshadowed by a narrow but swollen brow. His nose had been broken more than once and had set crookedly. His mouth was small, the lips very thin. His lower jaw trembled, as though he were on the verge of tears. When he saw Aimee, he smiled widely. One of his front teeth was missing. The others were gray with plaque.

He sat when we sat and leaned into the speaker before him. “How you doing, Miss Price?” he said.

“Good, Andy. And you?”

He nodded repeatedly but said nothing, as though she were still speaking and he were still listening. Up close, I could see bruising beneath his eye and over his left cheekbone. His right ear was scarred, and dried blood was mixed with wax in the entrance to the canal.

“I’m doing okay,” he replied, eventually.

“You been in any trouble?”

“Uh-uh. I been taking my meds, like you asked me to, and I tell the guards if I’m not feeling good.”

“Do they listen?”

He swallowed and seemed about to look over his shoulder at the men behind him. Aimee caught the movement and addressed the two guards.

“Could you give us some space, please?” she asked.

They looked to Long for confirmation that it was permissible. He assented, and they retreated out of our line of sight.

“Some of ’em, the good ones,” continued Kellog. He pointed respectfully at Long. “Colonel Sir, he listens, when I get to see him. Others, though, they got it in for me. I try to keep out of their way, but sometimes they just rile me, you know? They make me angry, then I have problems.”

He glanced at me. It was the third or fourth time that he’d done it, never staring long enough to catch my eye, but nodding to me each time in acknowledgment of my presence. The niceties over with, Aimee introduced me.

“Andy, this is Mr. Parker. He’s a private detective. He’d like to talk to you about some things, if you don’t mind.”

“I don’t mind at all,” said Kellog. “Nice to meet you, sir.”

Now that the introductions had been made he was happy to look me in the eye. There was something childlike about him. I didn’t doubt that he could be difficult, even dangerous under the wrong circumstances, but it was hard to understand how anyone could have met Andy Kellog, could have read his history and examined the reports of experts, and not have concluded that here was a young man with severe problems that were not of his own making, an individual who would never truly belong anywhere but still did not deserve to end up in a cell or, worse, tied naked to a chair in an ice-cold room because nobody had bothered to check that his meds were in order.

I leaned closer to the glass. I wanted to ask Kellog about Daniel Clay, and about what had happened to him in the woods near Bingham, but I knew it would be difficult for him, and there was always the possibility that he might clam up entirely or lose his temper, in which case I wouldn’t get the chance to ask him anything else. I decided to start with Merrick instead and work my way back to the abuse.

“I met someone who knows you,” I said. “His name is Frank Merrick. You remember him?”

Kellog nodded eagerly. He smiled, exposing his gray teeth again. He wouldn’t have them for much longer. His gums were purple and infected.

“I liked Frank. He looked out for me. Will he come visit me?”

“I don’t know, Andy. I’m not sure he’ll want to come back here, you understand?”

Kellog’s face fell. “I guess you’re right. When I get out of here, I ain’t never coming back here neither, not ever.”

He picked at his hands, opening a sore that immediately began to bleed.

“How did Frank look out for you, Andy?”

“He was scary. I wasn’t afraid of him-well, maybe I was at first, not later-but the others were. They used to pick on me, but then Frank came along, and they stopped. He knew how to get at them, even in the Max.” He smiled widely once more. “He hurt some of them real bad.”

“Did he ever tell you why he looked out for you?”

Kellog looked confused. “Why? Because he was my friend, that’s why. He liked me. He didn’t want anything bad to happen to me.” Then, as I watched, the blood began to pump into his face, and I was reminded uncomfortably of Merrick, as though something of him had transferred itself into the younger man while they were imprisoned together. I saw his hands form fists. A peculiar clicking sound came from his mouth, and I realized he was sucking at one of his loose teeth, the socket filling with spittle then emptying again, creating a rhythmic ticking like a time bomb waiting to go off.

“He weren’t queer,” said Kellog, his voice rising slightly. “If that’s what you’re saying, I’m telling you now that it’s not true. He weren’t a fag. Me neither. ’Cause if that’s what you’re trying to say-”

From the corner of my eye, I saw Long make a gesture with his right hand, and the guards quickly swam into view behind Kellog.

“It’s all right, Andy,” said Aimee. “Nobody’s suggesting anything of the kind.”

Kellog was shaking slightly as he tried to keep his anger in check. “Well, he weren’t, that’s all. He never touched me. He was my friend.”

“I understand, Andy,” I said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to suggest anything different. What I meant to ask you was if he ever gave you any sign that you might have something in common. Did he ever mention his daughter to you?”

Kellog began to calm down, but there was a gleam of hostility and suspicion in his eyes. I knew it would take a lot to make it go away.

“Yeah, some.”

“This was after he began to look out for you, right?”

“That’s right.”

“She was a patient of Dr. Clay’s, wasn’t she, just like you were?”

“Yeah. She disappeared while Frank was in jail.”

“Did Frank ever tell you what he thought might have happened to her?”

Kellog shook his head. “He didn’t like talking about her. It made him sad.”

“Did he ask about what happened to you up north?”

Kellog swallowed hard and looked away. The clicking noise came again, but this time there was no anger with it.

“Yes,” he said softly. Not “yeah,” but “yes.” It made him sound younger, as though by raising the subject of the abuse I was propelling him physically back into his childhood. His face grew slack, and his pupils shrank. He seemed to grow even smaller, his shoulders hunching, his hands opening out in an unconscious gesture of supplication. The tormented adult faded away, leaving behind the ghost of a child. I didn’t need to ask what had been done to him. It played out on his features in a series of trembles and winces and flinches, a dumb play of remembered pain and humiliation.

“He wanted to know what I saw, what I remembered,” he said. It was almost a whisper.

“And what did you tell him?”

“I told him what they done to me,” he said simply. “He asked me if I’d seen their faces or heard a name spoke, but they wore masks, and they never spoke no names.” He looked straight at me. “They looked like birds,” he said. “All different. There was an eagle, and a crow. A pigeon. A rooster.” He shivered. “All different,” he repeated. “They always wore them, and they never took them off.”

“Did you remember anything about where it happened?”

“It was dark. They used to put me in the trunk of a car, tie my arms and my legs, put a sack over my head. They’d drive for a time, then carry me out. When the bag came off I’d be in a room. There were windows, but they were all covered up. There was a propane heater, and storm lamps. I’d try to keep my eyes closed. I knew what was going to happen. I knew, ’cause it had happened before. It was like it was always going to happen to me, and it wasn’t never going to stop.”

He blinked a couple of times, then closed his eyes as he relived it over again.

“Andy,” I whispered.

He kept his eyes closed, but he nodded to let me know that he’d heard.

“How many times did this happen?”

“I stopped counting after three.”

“Why didn’t you tell anyone about it?”

“They said they’d kill me, and then they’d take Michelle and do it to her instead. One of them said they didn’t care if they did it to a boy or a girl. He said it was just different for each, that was all. I liked Michelle. I didn’t want nothing bad to happen to her. It had been done to me before, so I knew what to expect. I learned to block some of it out. I’d think of other things while it was happening. I’d imagine that I was somewhere else, that I wasn’t in me. Sometimes, I’d be flying over the forest and I’d look down and see all of the people, and I’d find Michelle and I’d go to her and we’d play by the river together. I could do that, but Michelle, she wouldn’t have been able to do that. She’d have been there with them, all the time.”

I leaned back. He had sacrificed himself for another child. Aimee had told me as much, but to hear it from Kellog himself was another matter. There was no boastfulness about his tale of self-sacrifice. He had done it out of love for a younger child, and it had come naturally to him. Once again, I was aware that here was a boy trapped in a man’s body, a child whose development had ceased almost entirely, arrested by what had been done to him. Beside me, Aimee was silent, her lips clasped so tightly shut that the blood had drained from them. She must have heard this before, I thought, but it would never get any easier to listen to.

“But they found out, in the end,” I said. “People discovered what was happening to you.”

“I got angry. I couldn’t help it. They brought me to the doctor. He examined me. I tried to stop him. I didn’t want them to come for Michelle. Then the doctor asked me questions. I tried to lie, for Michelle, but he kept tripping me up. I couldn’t keep all the answers straight in my head. They brought me back to Dr. Clay, but I didn’t want to talk to him no more. I didn’t want to talk to anyone, so I kept quiet. They put me away again, but then I got too old and they had to let me go. I fell in with some people, did some bad things, and they put me in the Castle.”

The Castle was the name given to the old Maine Youth Center in South Portland, a correctional facility for troubled youths built in the middle of the nineteenth century. It had since closed, but it was no great loss. Before the building of the new youth facilities in South Portland and Charleston, the recidivism rate for young inmates had been 50 percent. It was down to 10 or 15 percent, largely because the institutions now focused less on incarceration and punishment than helping the kids, some as young as eleven or twelve, to overcome their problems. The changes had come too late for Andy Kellog, though. He was a walking, talking testament to everything that could go wrong in the state’s dealings with a troubled child.

Now Aimee spoke. “Can I show Mr. Parker your pictures, Andy?”

He opened his eyes. There were no tears. I don’t think he had any left to shed.

“Sure.”

Aimee opened her document case and removed a cardboard wallet. She handed it to me. Inside were eight or nine pictures, most done in crayon, a couple in watercolor paint. The first four or five were very dark, painted in shades of gray and black and red, and populated by crude naked figures with the heads of birds. These were the pictures that “Bill” had told me about.

The rest of the artwork depicted variations on the same landscape: trees, barren ground, decaying buildings. They were crude, with no great talent behind them, yet at the same time a great amount of care had been lavished on some of them, while others were angry smears of black and green, still recognizably a version of the same locale, but created in a burst of anger and grief. Each picture was dominated by the shape of a great stone steeple. I knew the place, because I had seen it depicted before. It was Gilead.

“Why did you draw this place, Andy?” I asked.

“That’s where it happened,” said Kellog. “That’s where they took me.”

“How do you know?”

“The second time, the bag slipped while they were carrying me in. I was kicking at them, and it nearly came off my head. That’s what I saw before they pulled it back down again. I saw the church. I painted it so I could show it to Frank. Then they moved me to the Max, and they wouldn’t let me paint no more. I couldn’t even take them with me. I asked Miss Price to take care of them for me.”

“So Frank saw these pictures?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And you could remember nothing of the men who took you there?”

“Not their faces. I told you: they wore masks.”

“What about other marks? Tattoos maybe, or scars?”

“No.” He frowned. “Wait. One of them had a bird, here.” He pointed to his left forearm. “It was a white eagle’s head, with a yellow beak. I think that was why he wore the eagle mask. He was the one who told the others what to do.”

“Did you tell the police this?”

“Yeah. I never heard nothing more, though. I guess it didn’t help.”

“And Frank? Did you tell him about the tattoo?”

He screwed up his face. “I think so. I don’t remember.” His face relaxed. “Can I ask a question?” he said.

Aimee looked surprised. “Sure you can, Andy.”

He turned to me. “You going to try to find these men, sir?” he asked. There was something in his voice that I didn’t like. The boy was gone now, and what had taken its place was neither child nor adult but some perverse imp straddling both. His tone was almost mocking.

“Yes,” I said.

“You’d best hurry then,” he said.

“Why is that?”

Now the smile was back, but so was that hostile light.

“Because Frank promised to kill them. He promised to kill every one of them once he got out.”

And then Andy Kellog stood and threw himself face-first at the Pleixglas barrier. His nose broke immediately, leaving a smear of blood on the surface. He rammed it again, opening a wound on his forehead just below his scalp. And then he was shouting and screaming as the guards descended on him, and Aimee Price was calling his name and begging them not to hurt him as an alarm sounded and more men appeared and Andy was submerged beneath a mass of bodies, still kicking and shouting, inviting new pain to drown the memory of the old.

Chapter XVIII

The colonel of the guards was fuming quietly as we walked back to the reception lobby. There he left us for a time. Aimee took a seat, and we waited in silence for Long to come back to us with news of Andy Kellog’s condition. There were too many people around to enable us to talk about what had occurred. I looked at them, all caught up in their own pain and the misery of those whom they were visiting. Few spoke. There were older men who might have been fathers, brothers, friends. Some women had brought children along for the visit, but even the kids were quiet and subdued. They knew what this place was, and it frightened them. If they ran around, even if they spoke too loudly, they might end up in here like their daddies. They wouldn’t be allowed to go home, and a man would take them and lock them up in the dark, because that was what happened to bad children. They got locked up, and their teeth rotted, and they beat their faces against Plexiglas screens to numb themselves into unconsciousness.

Long appeared at the lobby desk and gestured for us to join him. He told us that Andy’s nose was badly broken, he had lost another tooth, and he had sustained some bruising during the attempt to subdue him, but otherwise he was as well as could be expected. The injury to his forehead had required five stitches, and he was now in the infirmary. They hadn’t even Maced him, perhaps because his lawyer was present on the other side of the glass. There were no signs of concussion, but he would be kept under observation overnight, just in case. He had been restrained, though, to ensure that he didn’t injure himself again, or try to hurt anyone else. Aimee retreated to use her cell phone in private, leaving me alone with Long, who was still angry at himself and the men under his command for what had happened to Andy Kellog.

“He’s done that kind of thing before,” he said. “I told them to keep a close eye on him.” He risked a glance at Aimee, an indication that he blamed her in part for making his men keep their distance.

“He doesn’t belong in here,” I replied.

“Judge made that decision, not me.”

“Well, it was the wrong one. I know you heard what was said in there. I don’t think he had much hope from the start, but what those men did to him took away what little there was. The Max is just making him crazier and crazier, and the judge didn’t sentence him to gradual insanity. You can’t keep a man locked up in a place like that with no possibility of release and expect him to stay balanced, and Andy Kellog was barely holding on to start with.”

Long had the decency to look embarrassed. “We do what we can for him.”

“It’s not enough.” I was railing at him, but I knew that it wasn’t his fault. Kellog had been sentenced and imprisoned, and it wasn’t Long’s duty to question that decision.

“Maybe you think he was better off with his pal Merrick close by,” said Long.

“At least he kept the wolves at bay.”

“He wasn’t much better than an animal himself.”

“You don’t really believe that.”

He raised an eyebrow at me.

“You developing a soft spot for Frank Merrick? You better be careful, or you’re likely to find a knife in it.”

Long was both right and wrong about Merrick. I didn’t doubt that he would hurt or kill without compunction, but there was an intelligence at work there. The problem was that Merrick was also a weapon to be wielded, and someone had found a way of using him to that end. But Long’s words had struck home, just as Rachel’s had. I did feel some sympathy for Merrick. How could I not? I was a father too. I had lost a child, and I had stopped at nothing to hunt down the man responsible for her death. I knew too that I would do anything to protect Sam and her mother. How then could I judge Merrick for wanting to find out the truth behind his daughter’s disappearance?

Still, such doubts aside, I now knew more than I had an hour before. Unfortunately, Merrick shared some of the same knowledge. I wondered if he had already begun scouting around Jackman and the ruins of Gilead for traces of the men who he believed were responsible for his daughter’s disappearance, or if he had a lead on the man with the eagle tattoo. I would have to go to Gilead eventually. Each step that I took seemed to take me closer to it.

Aimee returned.

“I’ve made some calls,” she said. “I think we can find a sympathetic judge who’ll order a transfer to Riverview.” She turned her attention to Long. “I’ll be getting an independent psychiatric evaluation done on Andy Kellog over the next few days. I’d appreciate it if you could make the whole business as easy as possible.”

“It’s got to go through the usual channels, but once I get the okay from the governor, I’ll hold the shrink’s coat for him if it helps.”

Aimee seemed reasonably satisfied and indicated that we should leave. As I moved to follow her, Long gently took my arm.

“Two things,” he said. “First of all, I meant what I said about Frank Merrick. I saw what he was capable of doing. He near killed a guy who tried to take Andy Kellog’s dessert once, left him in a coma over a plastic bowl of cheap ice cream. You’re right: I heard what Andy Kellog had to say in there. Hell, I’ve heard it before. It’s not news to me. You want to know what I think? I think Frank Merrick used Kellog. He stayed close to him so he could find out what he knew. He was always pumping him for information, trying to get him to remember all that he could about what those men did to him. In a way, he was responsible for winding Kellog up. He got him all upset, all riled up, and we had to deal with the consequences.”

That wasn’t what I had been told at the hockey game, but I knew there was a tendency among ex-cons to sentimentalize some of those they had met. Also, in a place where kindnesses were at a premium, even small acts of human decency assumed monumental proportions. The truth, as in all things, probably lay in the gray area between what Bill and Long had said. I had seen how Andy Kellog had reacted to questioning about his abuse. Perhaps Merrick had managed to talk him down sometimes, but I didn’t doubt that there were other occasions on which he had failed to do so, and Andy had suffered as a result.

“Second, about that tattoo your boy mentioned. You might be looking for a military man. That sounds like someone who could have been in the service once.”

“Any idea where I might start?”

“I’m not the detective,” said Long. “But if I was, I might be looking south. Fort Campbell, maybe. Airborne.”

Then he left us, his bulk receding into the body of the prison.

“What was that about?” asked Aimee, but I didn’t answer.

Fort Campbell, situated right on the borders of Kentucky and Tennessee, home of the 101st Airborne Division.

The Screaming Eagles.

We separated in the parking lot. I thanked Aimee for her help and asked her to let me know if there was anything I could do for Andy Kellog.

“You know the answer to that,” she said. “You find those men, and you let me know when you do. I’ll recommend the worst lawyer I know.”

I tried to smile. It died somewhere between my mouth and my eyes. Aimee knew what I was thinking.

“Frank Merrick,” she said.

“Yeah, Merrick.”

“I think you’d better find them before he does.”

“I could just leave them to him.”

“You could, except it’s not just about him, or even Andy. In this case, justice has to be seen to be done. Someone has to answer publicly. Other children will have been involved. We need to find a way to help them, too, or to help the adults they’ve become. We can’t do that if these men are hunted down and killed by Frank Merrick. You still have my card?”

I checked my wallet. It was there. She tapped it with her finger.

“You get in trouble, and you call me.”

“What makes you think I’m going to get in trouble?”

“You’re a repeat offender, Mr. Parker,” she said, as she climbed into her car. “Trouble is your thing.”

Chapter XIX

Dr. Robert Christian looked distracted and ill at ease when I called unexpectedly at his office on my way back from Warren, but he still agreed to give me a few minutes of his time. There was a patrol car parked outside when I arrived, a man seated in the back, his head resting against the wire dividing the interior of the car, the position of his hands indicating that he had been restrained. A policeman was talking to a woman in her thirties whose head kept moving from one point of a triangle to the next: from the cop, to two children seated in a big Nissan 4x4 to her right, then on to the man in the back of the patrol car. Cop, kids, man. Cop, kids, man. She had clearly been crying. Her kids still were.

“It’s been a long day,” Christian said, as he closed the door of his office and collapsed into the chair behind his desk, “and I haven’t even eaten lunch yet.”

“The guy outside?”

“I can’t really comment,” said Christian, only to relent a little. “There is no easy aspect to what we do, but among the hardest, and the one that needs some of the most delicate handling, involves the moment when someone is forced to confront the accusations made against him. There was a police interview a couple of days back, and today the mother and children arrived here for a session with us only to find the father waiting for them outside. People react in different ways to allegations of abuse: disbelief, denial, rage. We don’t often have to call the police, though. That was…a particularly difficult moment for all involved.”

He began collecting papers from his desk, assembling them into piles and inserting them into folders. “So, Mr. Parker, what can I do for you? I don’t have much time, I’m afraid. I have a meeting up in Augusta in two hours with Senator Harkness to discuss the mandatory-sentencing issue, and I haven’t prepared for it as well as I might have wished.”

State Senator James Harkness was a right-wing hawk with a sledgehammer attitude to just about every issue that came his way. Recently, he had been among those whose voices were raised loudest in favor of mandatory twenty-year sentences for those found guilty of gross sexual assault of a minor, even for those who copped a plea.

“Are you for, or against?”

“In common with most prosecutors, I’m against it but, to gentlemen like the good senator, that’s a little like arguing against Christmas.”

“Can I ask why?”

“It’s pretty simple: it’s a sop to voters that will do more harm than good. Look, of every hundred allegations that get reported, about half will end up with law enforcement. Of that fifty, forty will get charged. Of that forty, thirty-five will plea bargain, five will go to trial, and from that five, there will be two convictions and three acquittals. So, out of that initial hundred we have maybe thirty to forty sex offenders that we can register and of whom we can keep track.

“In the case of mandatory sentencing, there will be no incentive for alleged offenders to cop a plea. They might as well take their chances in court and, in general, prosecutors prefer not to go to trial on abuse allegations unless they have a solid case. The problem for us, as I told you when we last met, is that it can be very difficult to provide the kind of evidence necessary to secure a conviction in criminal court. So, if you introduce mandatory sentencing, there’s a strong possibility that more offenders will slip through the net. We don’t get them on the register, and they go back to doing whatever it was they were doing until someone catches them at it again. Mandatory sentencing allows politicians to appear tough on crime, but it’s essentially counterproductive. Frankly, though, I’d have a better chance of making a chimp understand that than I will of convincing Harkness.”

“Chimps aren’t concerned with reelection,” I said.

“I’d vote for a chimp over Harkness anyday. At least the chimp might evolve further at some stage. So, Mr. Parker, have you made any progress?”

“A little. What do you know about Gilead?”

“I assume you’re not testing my knowledge of biblical trivia,” he replied, “so I take it you’re referring to the Gilead community, and the ‘children of Gilead.’”

He gave me a potted history, similar to what I already knew, although he believed that the scale of the abuse was greater than had previously been suspected. “I’ve met some of the victims, so I know what I’m talking about. I think most of the people in Gilead knew what was happening to those children, and more of the men participated than was acknowledged at first. Then the families scattered after the bodies were found, and some of them were never heard from again. Others, though, cropped up in relation to other cases. One of the victims, the girl whose evidence led to the conviction of Mason Dubus, the man believed to be the ringleader of the abusers, did her best to keep track of them. A couple are in jail in other states, and the rest are dead. Dubus is the only one left alive, or the only one that we know of; even if others of whom we’re not aware have survived, they’re old, old men and women by now.”

“What happened to the children?”

“Some were taken away by their parents or guardians when the community disintegrated. We don’t know where they went. The ones that were rescued were put in foster homes. A couple were taken in by Good Will Hinckley.”

Good Will Hinckley was an institution close to I-95 that provided a home and school environment for kids aged twelve to twenty-one who had suffered molestation, were homeless, or had been affected by substance or alcohol abuse, whether directly or as the result of the addictions of a family member. It had been in existence since the late nineteenth century, and graduated nine or ten seniors every year who might otherwise have found themselves in jail, or in the ground. It was not surprising that some of the children of Gilead had ended up there. It was probably the best thing that could have occurred, under the circumstances.

“How could it have happened?” I asked. “I mean, the scale of it seems, well, almost incredible.”

“It was an isolated, secretive community in a state filled with isolated, secretive communities,” said Christian. “From what we now know, it seems to have been the case that the principal families involved had known each other prior to their arrival at Gilead, and had worked together or maintained contact for a period of some years. In other words, there was already a structure in place that would have facilitated the kind of abuse that went on there. There was certainly a clear division between the four or five core families and those who arrived later: the women didn’t mix with one another, the children didn’t play with one another, and the men kept their distance as much as possible, apart from those occasions when work forced them together. The abusers knew exactly what they were doing, and were possibly even attuned to those who might share their tastes, so there was always new prey for them. It was a nightmare situation, but there was something about Gilead -bad luck, bad timing, bad location, or, hell, let’s call it a touch of evil and have done with it-that exacerbated it.

“You also have to take into account the fact that people weren’t as aware of child abuse issues then as we are now. It wasn’t until 1961 that a doctor named Henry Kempe wrote a paper called ‘The Battered Child Syndrome’ and started a revolution on child abuse, but that paper concentrated principally on physical abuse and, even in the early seventies, when I started my training, sexual abuse was hardly mentioned. Then came feminism, and people began talking to women and children about abuse. In 1978, Kempe published ‘Sexual Abuse: Another Hidden Pediatric Problem,’ and the realization that there was a real issue to be confronted probably stems from about then.

“Unfortunately, it could be said that the pendulum swung too far the other way. It created a climate of constant suspicion, because science hadn’t caught up with the desire to deal with the problem. There was enthusiasm, but not enough skepticism. It led to a backlash, and decreased reporting in the nineties, but now we seem to be approaching some kind of equilibrium, even if we still sometimes concentrate on sexual abuse at the expense of other kinds of abuse. It’s reckoned that twenty percent of children have been sexually abused by the time they reach adulthood, but the consequences of long-term neglect and physical abuse are actually much more severe. For example, a child who has been physically abused and neglected is much more likely to grow up to engage in criminal behavior than a child who has been sexually abused. Meanwhile, from data we know that sexual abusers of children are more likely to have been abused themselves, but most pedophiles have not been sexually abused. There,” he concluded. “You got the lecture. Now why the curiosity about Gilead?”

“Daniel Clay was interested in Gilead too. He created paintings of it. Someone told me that he even interviewed Mason Dubus, and he may have intended to write a book about what happened there. Then there’s the fact that his car was found abandoned in Jackman, and Gilead isn’t far from Jackman. It also appears that one of Clay’s former patients was abused at or near Gilead by men wearing bird masks. All of that strikes me as more than a series of coincidences.”

“Well, it’s probably not surprising that Clay was curious about Gilead,” said Christian. “Most people in our field who work in Maine have at some point examined the available material, and a number of them would have interviewed Dubus, myself included.” He thought for a moment. “I don’t recall any descriptions of Gilead in the case reports relating to Clay, although there were mentions of rural settings. Some of the children caught sight of trees, grass, dirt. There were similarities, too, in their descriptions of the place in which they were abused-bare walls, a mattress on the floor, that sort of thing-although most of the victims were blindfolded for much of the abuse, so we’re talking about snatched glimpses and nothing more.”

“Could these men have been drawn to Gilead because of what happened there in the past?” I asked.

“It’s possible,” said Christian. “I have a friend who works in the area of suicide prevention. He talks of ‘clusters of location,’ places that become sites of choice for suicide, largely because others have successfully committed suicide in those locations. One suicide facilitates another, or provides a stimulus for it. Equally, it might be that a place synonymous with the abuse of children could prove attractive to other abusers, but it would be quite a risk to take.”

“Could the risk have been part of the attraction?”

“Perhaps. I’ve been thinking a lot about this since you came to me. It’s an unusual case. It sounds like stranger abuse on a significant scale, which is itself out of the ordinary. Children, unlike adults, are rarely victimized by strangers. Intrafamilial abuse accounts for fifty percent of the acts perpetrated against girls, and ten to twenty percent of those against boys. Generally, too, nonincestuous abusers fall into one of six categories based on their degree of fixation, from those who have frequent nonsexual contact with children to sadistic offenders who rarely have nonsexual contact with them. They’re the kind who will typically view children unknown to them as victims, but the degree of violence inflicted on the children who mentioned the bird masks was minimal. In fact, only one child recalled being seriously physically injured, and she said the man who did it-he began choking her, to the point where she almost blacked out-was instantly rebuked by one of the others. That indicates a significant degree of control. These men weren’t ordinary abusers, not by any means. There was planning, cooperation, and, for want of a better word, restraint. Those elements make what happened particularly disturbing.”

“Are you sure that there have been no similar reports since Clay disappeared?”

“You mean reports of abuse that tally with those descriptions? Well, I’m as certain as I can be, given the information to hand. It was one of the reasons why suspicion fell on Clay, I suppose.”

“Could these men just have stopped abusing?”

“I don’t think so. It’s possible that some of them were jailed for other offenses, which would explain the cessation, but otherwise, no, I don’t believe that they have stopped abusing. These men are predatory pedophiles. Their pattern of abuse might have altered, but their urges will not have gone away.”

“Why would they have altered their pattern?”

“Something could have happened, something that frightened them or caused them to realize that they risked drawing more attention to themselves if they continued to abuse in this way.”

“ Merrick ’s daughter drew pictures of men with the heads of birds,” I said.

“And Merrick ’s daughter is still missing,” said Christian, finishing my thought for me.

“The date of Clay’s disappearance coincided roughly with the period when Lucy Merrick was last seen,” I said. “And you’ve just told me that there were no more reports of children being abused by men in bird masks after that time.”

“None that I know of,” said Christian. “I told you before, though: there’s no easy way to track down those who might have been victims. It could be that such abuse did continue, but we didn’t hear about it.”

But the more I considered it, the more it made sense. There was a connection between Clay’s disappearance and that of Lucy Merrick, and perhaps a connection in turn between her disappearance and the fact that no other children had reported abuse by men masked as birds after that time.

“The death of a child: would that have been enough to frighten them, enough to make them stop what they were doing?” I asked.

“If it was accidental, then yes, possibly,” said Christian.

“And if it wasn’t?”

“Then we would be looking at something else: not child abusers but child killers.”

We were both silent then. Christian made some notes on a pad. I watched the day begin to fade, the angle of the light through the blinds on the window changing as the sun began to set. The shadows looked like prison bars, and I was reminded again of Andy Kellog.

“Does Dubus still live in the state?” I asked.

“He has a place near Caratunk. It’s pretty isolated. He’s virtually a prisoner in his own home: he wears a satellite tracking device on his ankle, is medicated in an effort to subdue his sex drive, and is denied access to the Internet and cable television. Even his mail is monitored, and his telephone records are subject to examination as one of the conditions of his probation. Even though he’s old, he’s still a potential risk to children. You probably know that he served time for what happened at Gilead. He was subsequently incarcerated on three separate occasions for, off the top of my head, two counts of sexual assault, three counts of risk of injury to a minor, possession of child pornography, and a string of other offenses that all amounted to the same thing. He got twenty years the last time, suspended after ten with probation for life to ensure that he would be strictly monitored to the grave. Occasionally, graduate students or medical professionals will interview him. He makes a useful subject. He’s intelligent, and clearheaded for a man in his eighties, and he doesn’t mind talking. He doesn’t have a whole lot of other ways to pass the time, I suppose.”

“Interesting that he should have stayed so close to Gilead.” Caratunkwas only about thirty miles south of Gilead.

“I don’t think he ever left the state again once he got here,” said Christian. “When I interviewed him, he described Gilead as a kind of Eden. He had all the usual arguments at his fingertips: that children had a greater sexual awareness than we gave them credit for; that other societies and cultures looked more favorably on the union of children and adults; that the relationships at Gilead were loving, reciprocal ones. I hear variations on those themes all the time. With Dubus, though, I got the sense that he knew they were all a smoke screen. He understands what he is, and he enjoys it. There was never any hope that he might be rehabilitated. Now we just try to keep him under control and use him to discover more about the nature of men like him. In that sense, he’s been useful to us.”

“And the dead babies?”

“He blamed the women for that, although he wouldn’t name any names.”

“Did you believe him?”

“Not for a moment. He was the dominant male figure in the community. If he didn’t himself wield the weapon that killed those children, then he gave the order for their killing. But, as I’ve said, those were different times, and you don’t have to go very far back to find similar tales of the children of adulterous or incestuous relationships who conveniently die.

“Nevertheless, Dubus was still lucky to escape with his life when the people down in Jackman discovered what had been going on there. They might have had their suspicions, but when the bodies of the children were found, well, that changed everything. A lot of the buildings in the settlement were put to ruin. Only a couple were left standing, along with the shell of a half-completed church. Even those might be gone by now. I couldn’t say. I haven’t been up there in a long time, not since I was a student.”

There was a knock on his office door. The receptionist entered with a sheaf of messages and a cup of coffee for Christian.

“How would I get to talk to Mason Dubus?” I asked.

Christian took a huge draft of his coffee as he stood, his mind already moving on to other, more pressing matters, like bullish senators who valued votes over results.

“I can make a call to his probation officer,” he said, as he showed me out. “There shouldn’t be any problem with arranging a visit.”

When I got outside, the police car was gone. So too was the Nissan, but I saw it minutes later as I drove back to Scarborough. It was parked outside a doughnut shop, and through the window I thought I could see the children eating pink-and-yellow pastries from a box. The woman’s back was to me. Her shoulders were hunched, and I thought she might have been crying.

I had one more house call to make that day. I had been thinking about the tattoo that Andy Kellog had mentioned, and of Joe Long’s view that it might indicate someone who had served in the military, perhaps in an airborne division. I knew from experience that it was hard to track down that kind of information. The bulk of files pertaining to service records were kept at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, Missouri, but even if I did have a way to gain access to its database, which would be difficult to begin with, the access would be useless without some clue as to the possible identity of the man in question. If I had some suspicions, then it was possible that I could find someone to pull the 201 file, but it would mean calling in favors from outside, and I wasn’t ready to do that yet. The Veterans Administration was also tight with information, and there weren’t many people willing to risk a federal job with a pension by slipping files under the table to an investigator.

Ronald Straydeer was a Penobscot Indian from Oldtown who had served with the K-9 Corps during the Vietnam War. He lived out by Scarborough Downs, beside a bullet-shaped trailer that had once been home to a man named Billy Purdue but now served as a halfway house for the assorted drifters, ne’er-do-wells, and former comrades in arms who found their way to Ronald’s door. He had been invalided out of the service, injured in the chest and left arm by an exploding tire on the day he left ’Nam. I was never sure what had hurt him more: the injuries he received or the fact that he had been forced to leave his German Shepherd, Elsa, behind as “surplus equipment.” He was convinced that the Vietnamese had eaten Elsa. I think he hated that about them more than the fact that they kept shooting at him when he was in uniform.

I knew that Ronald had a contact, a National Service Officer named Tom Hyland who worked with the Disabled American Veterans, and who had helped Ronald to file his claim for benefits through the Veterans Administration. Hyland had handled power of attorney for Ronald when he was trying to maneuver his way through the system, and Ronald always spoke highly of him. I had met him once, when he and Ronald were catching up over chowder at the Lobster Shack by Two Lights State Park. Ronald had introduced him to me as an “honorable man,” the highest praise that I had ever heard him accord to another human being.

In his capacity as NSO, Hyland would have access to the records of any veteran who had ever filed for benefits through the VA, including those who might have served with an airborne unit and who had enlisted from an address in the state of Maine, or who were claiming benefits here. In turn, the DAV worked with other service groups like the Vietnam Veterans of America, the American Legion, and the Veterans of Foreign Wars. If I could convince Ronald to tap Hyland, and Hyland in turn was willing to do me a good turn, then I might be able to come up with a potential short list.

It was almost dark when I got to Ronald’s place, and the front door was open. Ronald was sitting in his living room in front of the TV, surrounded by cans of beer, some full but most empty. There was a DVD of Hendrix in concert playing on the TV, the sound turned down very low. On the couch across from him sat a man who looked younger than Ronald, but infinitely more worn. For his age, Ronald Straydeer was in good condition, with only a hint of gray to his short dark hair and a frame that had held off the onset of late-middle-age spread through hard physical labor. He was a big man, but his friend was bigger still, his hair hanging down in curls of yellow and brown, his face grizzled with a three-day growth. He was also fried to the gills, and the smell of pot in the air made my head swim. Ronald seemed to be a little more together, but it was only a matter of time before he succumbed to the fumes.

“Man,” said his buddy, “lucky you weren’t the cops.”

“Helps if you lock the door,” I said, “or even just close it. Makes it harder for them to enter.”

Ronald’s friend nodded sagely. “That is so right,” he said. “Soooo right.”

“This is my friend Stewart,” said Ronald. “I served with his father. Stewart here fought in the Gulf first time around. We were talking about old times.”

“Fuckin’ A,” said Stewart. He raised his beer. “Here’s to old times.”

Ronald offered me a beer, but I declined. He popped the tab on another Silver Bullet and almost drained it before letting it part from his lips.

“What can I do for you?” he asked.

“I’m looking for someone,” I said. “He might have been in the service. He’s got a tattoo of an eagle on his left arm, and a taste for children. I thought that, if it didn’t ring any bells for you, you might be able to ask around, or put in a word with your NSO friend, Hyland. This guy is bad news, Ronald. I wouldn’t be asking otherwise.”

Ronald considered the question. Stewart’s eyes narrowed as he tried to concentrate on what was being said.

“A man who likes children wouldn’t go around advertising it,” said Ronald. “I don’t recall hearing about anyone who might have those tendencies. The eagle tattoo could narrow it down some. How do you know about it?”

“One of the children saw it on his arm. The man was masked. It’s the only clue I have to his identity.”

“Did the kid get a look at the years?”

“Years?”

“Years of service. If he served, even if he just cleaned out latrines, he’d have added his years.”

I didn’t recall Andy Kellog mentioning any numbers tattooed beneath the eagle. I made a note to ask Aimee Price to check it with him.

“And if there are no years?”

“Then he probably didn’t serve,” said Ronald simply. “The tattoo’s just for show.”

“Will you ask around anyway?”

“I’ll do that. Tom might know something. He’s pretty straight but, you know, if there are kids involved…”

By now, Stewart had stood and was browsing Ronald’s shelves, bopping gently to the barely heard sound of Hendrix, a fresh joint clasped between his lips. He found a photograph and turned to address Ronald. It was a picture of Ronald in uniform squatting beside Elsa.

“Hey, Ron, man, was this your dog?” asked Stewart.

Ronald didn’t even have to turn around to know what Stewart had found.

“Yes,” he said. “That’s Elsa.”

“Nice dog. It’s a damn shame what happened to her.” He waved the photograph at me. “You know, they ate his dog, man. They ate his dog.”

“I heard,” I said.

“I mean,” he continued, “what kind of fucking people eat a man’s dog?” A tear appeared in his eye and rolled down his cheek. “It’s all just one big damned shame.”

And it was.

Chapter XX

Merrick had told the police that he was mostly sleeping in his car, but they didn’t believe him, and I didn’t either. That was why Angel had been detailed to follow him when he was released from jail. According to Angel, Merrick had picked up a cab at the rank beside the bus station, then had checked into a motel out by the Maine Mall before closing his drapes and, apparently, going to sleep. There was no sign of his red car at the motel, though, and when, after six hours, Merrick had still not made an appearance, Angel had taken it upon himself to find out what was going on. He had bought a take-out pizza, carried it into the motel, and knocked on the door of Merrick ’s room. When there was no reply, he broke into the room, only to find Merrick gone. There was a police cruiser at the motel, too, probably dispatched for the same reason Angel had been, but the cop had enjoyed no more luck than Angel.

“He knew that someone might put a tail on him,” Angel said, as he and Louis sat in my kitchen, Walter, now returned once more from the care of the Johnsons, sniffing at Angel’s feet and chewing on the ends of his laces. “There must have been three or four different ways out of the place. That was probably why he chose it.”

I wasn’t too surprised. Wherever Merrick had been holed up prior to his arrest, it wasn’t at a shoppers’ motel. I called Matt Mayberry to see if he had turned up anything useful.

“I’ve been kind of busy; otherwise, I’d have called you myself,” Matt said, when I eventually got through to him. He told me that he had concentrated his initial search on tax assessors’ offices in the city of Portland and its immediate vicinity, before expanding it to a sixty-mile radius. “I’ve found two so far. One is in Saco, but it’s still tied up in litigation after nearly four years. Apparently, the city published a pending sale notice for its tax liens on some middle-aged man’s property while he was receiving treatment for cancer, then without notice allegedly prematurely conducted a sealed-bid sale. Get this, though: when he refused to leave the property upon his release from the hospital they sent in a SWAT team to remove him forcibly. The guy didn’t even have hair! The hell is up with you people in Maine? The whole business is making its way through Superior Court at the moment, but it’s moving at the pace of an arthritic tortoise. I’ve got copies of pretrial memoranda if you want to see them.”

“How is Eldritch involved in it?”

“He’s the owner of record, as trustee. I ran a couple of additional searches on him, though, and I’ve found his name attached to various property sales as far west as California, but they’re all old references, and when I followed them up title had passed on again. The Maine sales are the most recent by a long shot and, well, they don’t follow the pattern of the others.”

“In what way?”

“Well, I couldn’t swear to this, but it looks like at least part of Eldritch’s business lies, or lay, in sourcing properties for individuals or companies who didn’t want their names attached as owners. But, like I told you, most of the references I can find are prehistoric, which leads me to guess that Eldritch has since moved on to other things, or he’s just not doing it as much, or he’s simply learned to hide his tracks better. Some of these properties have a paper trail after them like you wouldn’t believe, which could be a way of disguising the fact that, despite a blizzard of additional sales and transfers, de facto ownership of the premises in question remained the same. That’s just a suspicion, though, and it would take a whole team of experts with a lot of time on their hands to prove it.

“The Saco sale looks like an error of judgment. Maybe Eldritch was instructed to find a property for a client, this one looked like a steal, then it all went to hell in a handcart because the city mishandled the whole business. It was probably just crossed wires, but the result was that Eldritch got caught up in the kind of legal quagmire that he seems to have spent so much time and effort trying to avoid.

“Which brings us to the second property, purchased within weeks of black flags rising over the Saco sale. It’s near someplace called Welchville. You ever hear of it?”

“Vaguely. I think it’s somewhere between Mechanic Falls and Oxford.”

“Whatever. I couldn’t even find it on a regular map.”

“It’s not the kind of place that people put on regular maps. There’s not a whole lot there. Hell, there’s not a whole lot in Mechanic Falls, and Welchville makes it look like a metropolis.”

“Well, remind me to search someplace else for my retirement home. Anyhow, I found it eventually. The property is on Sevenoaks Road, close by Willow Brook. Doesn’t look like there’s much else nearby, which fits with what you just told me, so it shouldn’t be hard to find. Number Eleven-eighty. Don’t know what happened to numbers one to eleven-seventy-nine, but I guess they’re out there somewhere. Those two properties are it for Maine so far. If you want me to widen the search, it’s going to take more time than I have, so I’ll have to pass it on to someone else, and he may not work for free like I do.”

I told Matt I’d let him know, but the Welchville property sounded like a good place to start. Welchvillle was close enough to Portland to make the city and its surrounds easily accessible, and far enough away to offer privacy, even a bolt-hole if necessary. People in places like Welchville and Mechanic Falls didn’t go sticking their noses into other folk’s business, not unless someone gave them a reason to do it.

The daylight was gone, but that suited us. It seemed wiser to approach the Welchville house under cover of night. If Merrick was there, then there was some chance that he might not see us coming. But I was also interested in the timing of Eldritch’s purchase of the house. Merrick had been in jail when the house was bought, and was a long way from his eventual release, which meant either that Eldritch was planning very far ahead, or the house was purchased for another purpose entirely. According to Matt, Eldritch was still the owner of record, but I couldn’t see him spending much time in Welchville, which begged the question: who had been using the house for the last four years?

We took the Mustang, heading away from the coast, skirting Auburn and Lewiston until we left the bigger towns behind and entered rural Maine, even though it was within easy reach of the state’s largest city. Portland might have begun to sprawl, swallowing up smaller communities and threatening the identity of others, but out here the city could have been hundreds of miles away. It was another world of narrow roads and scattered houses, of small towns with empty streets, the quiet disturbed only by the rumble of passing trucks and the occasional car, and even they grew less and less frequent as we traveled farther west. Occasionally, a line of streetlights would appear, illuminating a stretch of road that was seemingly identical to all the rest yet, somehow, merited an individual touch courtesy of the county.

“Why?” asked Angel.

“Why what?” I said.

“Why would anyone live out here?”

We had barely left 495, and already he was feeling anxious for city lights. He was sitting in the backseat, his arms folded like a sulky child.

“Not everyone wants to live in a city.”

“I do.”

“Equally, not everyone wants to live close to people like you.”

Route 121 wound its lazy way through Minot and Hackett Mills, then Mechanic Falls itself, before intersecting with 26. There was less than a mile to go. Beside me, Louis removed a Glock from the folds of his coat. From behind, I heard the telltale sound of a round being chambered. If there was someone living on Sevenoaks Road, whether Merrick or an unknown other, we didn’t expect him to be pleased to see us.

The house lay some way back from the road so that it remained invisible until we had almost passed it. I caught sight of it in the rearview: a simple, single-story dwelling, with a central door and two windows at either side of it. It was neither excessively run-down nor unusually well kept. It was simply…there.

We drove on for a time, following the upward slope of the road until I was certain that the sound of the engine would have faded from the hearing of anyone in the house. We stopped and waited. No other cars passed us on the road. Finally, I made a U-turn and allowed the car to coast back down the hill, then braked while the house was still out of sight. I pulled in to the side of the road, and we covered the rest of the distance on foot.

There were no lights burning in the house. While Louis and I waited, Angel scouted the perimeter to look for night-lights that might be activated by movement. He found none. He circled the house before signaling Louis and me to join him using his Maglite, his fist wrapped tightly around it so that it was visible only to us.

“There’s no alarm,” he said, “not that I could see.”

It made sense. Whoever was using this place, whether it was Merrick or the person who was funding him, wouldn’t want to give the cops an excuse to drop by while the place was unoccupied. Anyway, you could probably have counted the number of burglaries around here on the thumbs of one hand.

We drew closer to the house. I could see that slates on the roof had been repaired at some point over the last year or two, but the exterior paintwork was cracked and damaged in places. Weeds had colonized most of the yard, but the driveway had been sown with fresh gravel, and there was a weed-free space for one or two cars. The garage to one side of the house had a new lock on its door. The building itself had not been repainted, but neither did it seem in urgent need of any repair. In other words, all that was necessary to keep the property ready for use had been done, but no more. There was nothing to draw attention to it, nothing to attract a second glance. It was nondescript in the way that only the most purposeful self-effacement could be.

We checked the house one more time, avoiding the gravel and sticking to the grass in order to muffle our footsteps, but there was no sign of anyone inside. It took Angel a few minutes’ work with a rake and a pick to open the back door, allowing us to enter a small kitchen with empty shelves and closets and a refrigerator that appeared to serve no purpose other than to add a comforting hum to the otherwise silent house. A trash can revealed the carcass of a roasted chicken and an empty plastic water bottle. The smell suggested that the chicken had been there for some time. There was also a crumpled pack of American Spirit cigarettes, Merrick ’s brand of choice.

We moved into the main hallway. Before us was the front door. To the left was a small bedroom furnished only with a worn sofa bed and a small table. The edge of an off-white sheet protruded from the innards of the sofa, the only splash of brightness visible in the gloom. Next to the bedroom was the main living area, but it had no furniture at all. Sets of fitted bookshelves occupied the alcoves at either side of the cold fireplace, but the only book that gave them purpose was a battered leather-bound Bible. I picked it up and leafed through it, but there were no markings or notes that I could see, and no name on the frontispiece to indicate the identity of its owner.

Angel and Louis had moved on to the rooms to the right: a bathroom, what might once have been a second bedroom, now also empty apart from the husks of insects trapped in the remains of last summer’s webs like Christmas tree decorations left up past their time, and a dining room that bore traces of its past in the form of the marks of a table and chairs in the dust, as though the furniture had been spirited away without the intervention of any human agency, vanishing into the air like smoke.

“Here,” said Angel. He was in the hallway, pointing his Mag at a square door in the floor close by the side wall of the house. The door was padlocked, but not for long. Angel disposed of the lock, then raised the door using a brass ring set into the wood. A set of stairs was revealed disappearing into the darkness below. Angel looked up at me as if I was to blame.

“Why is everything always underground?” he whispered.

“Why are you whispering?” I replied.

“Shit,” said Angel loudly. “I hate it when I do that.”

Louis and I knelt beside him.

“You smell that?” asked Louis.

I sniffed. The air below smelled a little like the chicken carcass in the kitchen trash, but the stink was very faint, as though something had once rotted down there and had since been removed, leaving only the memory of its decay trapped in the stillness.

I went down first, Angel behind me. Louis remained above, in case anyone approached the house. At first sight, the cellar appeared to be even emptier than the rest of the rooms. There were no tools on the walls, no benches at which to work, no boxes stored, no discarded relics of old lives resting forgotten beneath the main house. Instead, there was only a broom standing upright against a wall and a hole in the dirt floor before us, perhaps five feet in diameter and six feet deep. Its sides were lined with brick, and its base was littered with shards of broken slate.

“Looks like an old well,” said Angel.

“Who builds a house on a well?”

He sniffed the air.

“Smell’s coming from down there. Could be something buried beneath the stones.”

I got the broom and handed it to him. He leaned in and poked at the slates below, but it was clear that they were only inches deep. Beneath them was solid concrete.

“Huh,” he said. “That’s weird.”

But I was no longer listening, for I had noticed that the cellar was not as empty as it had first appeared. In a corner behind the stairs, almost invisible in the shadows, was a huge oak closet, the wood so dark and old that it looked almost black. I shined my flashlight on it and saw that it had been ornately carved, filigreed with leaves and creeping vines, less a piece of furniture carved by man than a part of nature itself that had become frozen in its present form. The doorknobs were made from cut glass, and a small brass key gleamed in the keyhole. I shined the light around the basement, trying to figure out how someone had managed to get the closet down here to begin with. The door and stairs were too narrow. At some point in the past, there might have been outer doors to the cellar from the yard, but I couldn’t see where they must have been situated. It created the unsettling impression that the cellar had somehow been constructed around this old piece of dark oak for the sole purpose of giving it a quiet place in which to rest.

I reached out and took hold of the key. It seemed to vibrate slightly between my fingers. I touched my hand to the wood. It too was trembling. The sensation appeared to come both from the closet itself and the ground beneath my feet, as though deep below the house some great machinery was grinding and throbbing to an unknown end.

“Do you feel that?” I said, but now Angel was both at once nearby and also a speck in the distance, as though space and time had momentarily warped. I could see him examining the hole in the cellar floor, still testing the slates for some clue as to the source of the smell, but when I spoke he didn’t seem to hear, and my voice sounded faint even to myself. I turned the key. It clicked loudly in the lock, too loudly for such a small mechanism. I took a handle in each hand and pulled, the doors opening silently and easily to reveal what lay within.

There was movement inside. I lurched backward in shock, almost tripping over my own feet. I raised my gun, the flashlight held high and away from the weapon, and was blinded momentarily by the reflection of the beam.

I was staring at my own image, distorted and shaded with black. A small gilded mirror hung against the back of the closet. Beneath it were spaces for shoes and underwear, all built into the body of the closet and all empty, the two sections divided by a horizontal plane of wood that was almost entirely obscured by a seemingly random assemblage of objects: a pair of silver earrings, inset with red stones; a gold wedding ring, a date engraved upon the interior: “May 18, 1969”; a battered toy car, probably dating back to the fifties, its red paint almost entirely worn away; a faded photograph of a woman set in a cheap locket; a small bowling trophy unmarked by a date or its winner’s name; a clothbound book of child’s verses opened to its title page, upon which the words “For Emily, with Love from Mom and Dad, Christmas 1955” had been written in a crude, halting script; a tie pin; an old Carl Perkins ’45, signed by the man himself across the label; a gold necklace, the chain broken as though it had been yanked from the wearer’s neck; and a wallet, empty apart from a photograph of a young woman wearing the cap and gown of the newly graduated.

But these items were merely distractions, although everything about them suggested that they had been treasured at some time by their owners. Instead, my attention was drawn to the mirror. Its reflective surface had been severely damaged, seemingly by fire or some other great heat, so that the wooden backing was visible at the heart. The glass had warped, the edges stained with brown and black, and yet it had not cracked and the wood behind was not charred. The heat that had been applied to cause such damage was so intense that the mirror had simply melted beneath it, yet the backboard had been left unmarked.

I reached out to touch it, then stopped. I had seen this mirror before, and suddenly I knew who it was that was manipulating Frank Merrick. Something twisted in my stomach, and I felt a surge of nausea. I might even have spoken, but the words would have made no sense. Images flashed through my mind, memories of a house-

“This is not a house. This is a home.”

Symbols on a wall in a dwelling long abandoned, revealed only when the paper began to come away and loll in the hallway like a series of great tongues. A man in a threadbare coat, with stains on his trousers and the sole coming away from the base of one of his shoes, demanding payment of a debt owed by another long believed dead.

“This is an old and wicked world.”

And a small, gilded mirror, held in this man’s nicotine-stained fingers, an image reflected in it of a howling figure that might have been myself or might have been another.

“He was damned, and his soul is forfeit…”

Angel appeared beside me, looking blankly at the items in the closet.

“What is it?” he asked.

“It’s a collection,” I said.

He moved closer and seemed on the verge of picking up the toy car. I raised my hand.

“Don’t touch it. Don’t touch any of it. We need to get out of here. Now.”

And then he saw the mirror. “What happened to-”

“It’s from the Grady house,” I said.

He backed away in disgust, then looked over his shoulder in expectation of seeing the man who had brought the mirror to this place suddenly emerge from his hiding place, like one of the hibernating spiders in the rooms above alerted by the coming of spring’s first insects.

“Aw, you got to be fucking kidding,” said Angel. “Why is nothing ever normal?”

I closed the closet doors, the key still vibrating in the lock as I turned it, sealing away the collection once again. We climbed up from the cellar, slid the bolt across, and restored the padlock. Then we departed from that place. We left no signs of our trespass, and as Angel locked the back door behind us the house seemed just as it did when we had arrived.

But I felt it was to no avail.

He would know we had been there.

The Collector would know, and he would come.

Chapter XXI

The journey back to Scarborough was conducted in near silence. Both Angel and Louis had been in the Grady house. They knew what had taken place there, and they knew how it had ended.

John Grady was a child killer in Maine, and his house had been unoccupied for many years after his death. Thinking about it now, perhaps “unoccupied” was the wrong word. “Dormant” might have been more appropriate, for something had remained in the Grady house, some trace of the man who had given to it his name. At least, that is how it seemed to me, although it might just as easily have been shadows and fumes, the miasma of its history, and the remembrance of the lives lost there mingling to create phantasms in my brain.

But I was not the only one who suspected that something had secured itself in the Grady house. The Collector had appeared, a raggedy man with yellow nails, asking only that he be given permission to take a souvenir from the house: a mirror, and nothing more. He did not seem willing, or able, to enter the house himself, and I believed that at least one man, a minor thug named Chris Tierney, had died at the Collector’s hands after he had dared to get in this strange, sinister man’s way. But the permission that the Collector sought had not been mine to grant, and when he saw that he would not be given what he wanted, he had taken it anyway, leaving me bleeding on the ground.

And the last thing that I saw as I lay there, my skull blazing with pain from the force of the Collector’s blow, was the image of John Grady trapped behind the glass of the mirror that the Collector had taken, screaming impotently as justice came for him at last.

Now that same mirror, charred and warped, lay beneath a deserted house, reflecting an assemblage of unrelated objects, tokens of other lives, of justice meted out by that emaciated figure. In the past, he had signed his name at least once as “Kushiel”: a black joke, the name stolen from hell’s jailer, but nevertheless a hint as to his nature, or what he believed to be his nature. I felt certain that each of the items in that old closet represented a life taken, a debt paid in some way. I recalled the stink that hung over the pit in the cellar. I should make the call, I thought. I should bring the cops down on him. But what could I say? That I smelled blood, yet there was no blood to be seen? That there was a closet of trinkets in the cellar, but with only a first name here, a date there, to connect them to their original owners?

And what were you doing down in the cellar, sir? You do know that breaking and entering is a crime, don’t you?

And there was another matter to be considered. I had encountered individuals in the past who were as dangerous as the Collector. Their natures, only some of which I could begin to explain or understand, had been corrupted, and they were capable of great evil. But the Collector was different. He was motivated by something other than a desire to inflict pain. He appeared to occupy a space beyond conventional morality, engaged in work that had no time for concepts of due process, of law or mercy. In his mind, those he sought had already been judged. He was merely executing the sentence. He was like a surgeon removing cancerous growths from the body, excising them with precision and casting the diseased parts into the fire.

Now he was manipulating Merrick, using him to draw unknown individuals from the shadows so that they might reveal themselves to him. Merrick had been in the house, if only for a time: the discarded pack and the rotting chicken told me as much. The Collector also smoked, but his tastes were a little more exotic than American Spirit. Through Eldritch, he had provided Merrick with a car, probably funds too, and also a place in which to stay, a base from which to operate but almost certainly with an injunction attached stipulating that he was not to enter any locked part of the house. And even if Merrick had disobeyed and made his way down to the cellar, would those items in the closet have meant anything to him? They would merely have appeared to be a random jumble, an eccentric amalgam of disparate items held in an old closet that vibrated to the touch, tucked into a corner of a cellar that reeked faintly of old, rotting things.

It was clear now that the Collector was looking for someone connected to Daniel Clay although, if Eldritch was to be believed, not Clay himself. There could be only one answer: he wanted those who had preyed on Clay’s patients, the men who, if I was right, were responsible for whatever had happened to Lucy Merrick. So Eldritch had been engaged to ensure that Frank Merrick was freed and pointed in the right direction, but Merrick was not the kind of man to report his every move back to an ancient lawyer in a paper-filled office. He wanted revenge, and the Collector must have known that, at some point, Merrick would move entirely beyond his control. He would have to be shadowed, his movements revealed, so that any information he gleaned would automatically be shared with the one who had freed him to conduct his search. And when the men he sought at last made their move, then the Collector would be waiting, for there was a debt to be paid.

But who was shadowing Merrick? Again, there seemed to be only one possible answer.

Hollow Men.

Angel seemed to be following some of my thoughts.

“We know where he is,” he said. “If he’s tied in with this, then we can find him if we need to.”

I shook my head.

“It’s a storehouse, nothing more. Merrick was probably allowed to use it for a while, but I’ll bet he never made it down to the cellar, and I’ll lay you another ten he never met anyone connected with the house apart from the lawyer.”

“The lock on the back door was new,” said Angel. “I could smell it. It had been changed recently, probably in the last day or two.”

“ Merrick ’s key privileges might have been taken away. I don’t think Merrick will care. It didn’t look like he’d been there in a while, and he’s the suspicious kind anyway. My guess is that he cut himself loose as soon as he could. He wouldn’t want the lawyer to be able to keep tabs on him, but he had no idea who was bankrolling his search. If he did, he’d never have gone anywhere near that house.”

“But we’re still ahead of this guy, right? We left that place just like we found it. We know he’s involved, but he doesn’t know that we know.”

“The fuck are you?” said Louis. “Nancy Drew? Let him come. He’s a freak. We had our share of freaks before. One more ain’t goin’ to cap-size our boat.”

“This one’s not like the rest,” I said.

“Why?”

“Because he doesn’t take sides. He doesn’t care. He just wants what he wants.”

“Which is?”

“To add to his collection.”

“You think he wants Daniel Clay?” asked Angel.

“I think he wants the men who abused Clay’s patients. Either way, Clay is the key. The Collector is using Merrick to try to smoke them out.”

Louis shifted in his seat. “What are the options on Clay?”

“Same as on everyone else: he’s either alive, or he’s dead. If he’s dead, then either he killed himself, like his daughter suspects, in which case the question is why did he do it, or someone helped him along to the same end. If he was murdered, then it’s possible that he had some idea of the identities of the men who were abusing those children, and they killed him to keep him quiet.

“But if he’s alive, then he’s concealed himself well. He’s been disciplined. He hasn’t contacted his daughter, or she says that he hasn’t, which isn’t the same thing at all.”

“You takin’ her word for it, though,” said Louis.

“I’m inclined to believe her. There’s also the Poole thing. She hired Poole to see if he could find her father, and Poole didn’t come back. According to O’Rourke in the Portland P.D., Poole was an amateur, and he may have made some bad friends. His disappearance might not be linked to Clay’s, but if it is, then either his questions brought him into contact with the men who killed Clay, and Poole died for his trouble, or he found Clay, and Clay killed him. In the end, there are only two possibilities: Clay is dead, and nobody wants questions asked, or he’s alive and doesn’t want to be found. But if he wants to stay hidden badly enough to kill someone in order to protect himself, then what is he protecting himself from?”

“It comes back to the children,” said Louis. “Dead or alive, he knew more than he was telling about what happened to them.”

We were at the Scarborough exit. I took it and followed Route 1, then headed for the coast through moonlit marshes, toward the dark, waiting sea beyond. I drove past my own house, and Rachel’s words came back to me. Perhaps she was right. Perhaps I was haunting myself. It wasn’t a very consoling thought, but neither was the alternative: that, as at the Grady house, something had found a way to fill those spaces that remained.

Angel saw the way I looked at my home. “You want us to come in for a while?”

“No, you’ve paid for your fancy room at the inn. You’d better enjoy it while you can. They don’t do fancy up in Jackman.”

“Where’s Jackman?” asked Angel.

“Northwest. Next stop Canada.”

“And what’s in Jackman?”

“We are, as of tomorrow, or the next day. Jackman’s the closest piece of civilization to Gilead, and Gilead, or somewhere near enough to it, was where Andy Kellog was abused, and where Clay’s car was found. Kellog wasn’t abused outdoors either, which means that someone had access to a property in the area. Either Merrick was up there already, and he didn’t have any luck, so he was forced to keep yanking Rebecca Clay’s chain back down in Portland, or he hasn’t made the connection yet. If he hasn’t, then he soon will, but we can still be one step ahead of him.”

The bulk of the Black Point Inn loomed up before us, lights twinkling in the windows. They asked me if I wanted to join them for dinner, but I wasn’t hungry. What I had seen in the cellar of that house had deprived me of my appetite. I watched them ascend the steps into the main lobby and vanish into the bar, then reversed the car and headed for home.

According to a note from Bob, Walter was over with the Johnsons. I decided to leave him there. They liked to go to bed early, even if Shirley, Bob’s wife, never slept straight through due to the pain of her arthritis, and could often be seen reading at her window, a little night-light attached to her book so that she wouldn’t wake her husband, or simply watching the darkness slowly turn into daylight. Still, I didn’t want to risk waking them just so I could have the dubious pleasure of giving my dog a bonus walk on a winter’s night. Instead, I locked the doors and put on some music: part of a Bach collection that Rachel had bought me in an effort to broaden my musical parameters. I made a pot of coffee and sat at my living room window, staring out at the woods and the waters, conscious of the movement of every tree, the swaying of every branch, the shifting of every shadow, and wondered at the ways of the honeycomb world that could have led my path and the path of the Collector to cross again. The mathematical precision of the music contrasted with the uneasy quiet of my home, and as I sat in the darkness I realized that the Collector frightened me. He was a hunter, yet there was something almost bestial about his focus and his ruthlessness. I had thought of him as a man unconcerned with morality, but that was not true: instead, it was more correct to say that he was motivated by some strange morality of his own, but it was rendered debased and unsavory by the assemblage of souvenirs that he had accumulated. I wondered if he liked to touch them in the darkness, remembering the lives that they represented, the existences ended. There was a sensuousness to their appeal for him, I thought, a manifestation of an urge that was almost sexual in nature. He took pleasure in what he did, and yet simply to call him a killer was incorrect. He was more complex than that. These people had done something to bring him upon them. If they were like John Grady, then they had committed some sin that was intolerable.

But intolerable to whom? To the Collector, yes, but I sensed that he believed himself to be merely an agent of another power. He might have been deluded in that belief, but nevertheless it was what gave him his authority and his strength, perceived or otherwise.

It was clear that Eldritch was a key, for it was Eldritch who sourced properties for him, bases from which he could move out into the world and do the work for which he believed he had been appointed. The property at Welchville had been acquired long before the possibility of Merrick ’s release became apparent. True, in the interim he had intervened in the Grady case and retrieved the mirror that now sat in the cellar closet, reflecting a distorted view of the world that might well have matched the Collector’s own, and the other items in his trove suggested that he had been busy elsewhere, too, yet none of this explained why the Collector made me so uneasy, or why he caused me to fear for my own safety.

Eventually, I left my chair and went to bed, and it was only when sleep threatened to take me that I understood my fear of the Collector. He was always looking, always searching. How he came by his awareness of the sins of others I did not know, but my fear was that I might be judged as others had been judged. I would be found wanting, and he would visit my punishment upon me.

That night, I dreamed the old dream. I was standing by a lake, and its waters were burning, but otherwise the landscape was flat and empty, the earth hard and blackened. A man stood before me, corpulent and grinning, his neck swollen by a great purple goiter, but his skin otherwise pale, as though no blood flowed through the veins beneath, for what need have the dead of blood?

Yet this foul thing was not quite dead, for he had never truly been alive, and when he spoke, the voice I heard did not match the movements of his lips, the words spilling forth in a torrent of old languages long lost from the knowledge of men.

Other figures stood behind him, and I knew their names. I knew them all.

The words poured out of him in those harsh tongues, and somehow I understood them. I looked behind me, and saw myself reflected in the burning waters of the lake, for I was one with them, and they called me “Brother.”

In a quiet township some miles away, a figure ascended a gravel drive, approaching the modest house from the road beyond even though there had been no sound of a car’s engine to signal his arrival. His hair was greasy and slicked back from his head. He wore a threadbare dark overcoat and dark trousers, and in one hand there glowed the ember of a burning cigarette.

When he was steps from his house he paused. He knelt and ran his fingers across the gravel, tracing some half-seen indentation, then rose and followed the wall of the house to the garden at the rear, the fingers of his left hand gently brushing the woodwork, the cigarette now discarded among the weeds. He reached the back door and examined the lock, then took a set of keys from his pocket and used one of them to open it.

He moved through the house, his fingers always searching, touching, exploring, his head slightly raised as he sniffed the air. He opened the empty refrigerator, fanned the pages of the old Bible, stared silently at the marks in the dust of what was once a dining room, until he came at last to the cellar door. This too he unlocked, descending into the last place, his place, yet giving no sign of anger at the trespass that had occurred. He brushed his fingertips against the handle of the broom, stopping when he found the point at which strange hands had gripped it. Again he leaned down, smelling the traces of sweat, picking out the man’s scent so that he might know it again. It was unfamiliar to him, as was the second that he had encountered at the cellar door.

One of them had waited there. One waited, while two descended.

But one of those who had descended…

At last, he moved toward the great closet in the corner. He turned the key in the lock and opened the doors. His eyes took in his collection, ensuring that nothing was missing, that no item had been displaced. The collection was safe. He would have to move it now, of course, but it would not be the first time that part of his trove had been uncovered in such a way. It was a minor inconvenience and nothing more.

The face of the ruined mirror found him, and he stared at his partial reflection for a moment, only his hair and the edges of his temples visible in what remained of the glass, his own features replaced by bare wood and fused glass. His fingers lingered on the key, caressing it, feeling the vibrations that coursed through it from deep, deep below. He drew in a final breath, as at last he recognized the third scent.

And the Collector smiled.

Chapter XXII

I awoke. It was dark and the house was silent, but it was not an empty darkness, and it was not an easy silence. Something had touched my right hand. I tried to move it, but my wrist shifted only an inch or two before it was brought up short.

I opened my eyes. My right hand was cuffed to the frame of the bed. Frank Merrick was sitting on a straight-backed chair that he had placed by my bedside, his body leaning slightly forward, his gloved hands between his knees. He was wearing a blue polyester shirt that was too tight for him, causing the buttons to strain like the fastenings on an overstuffed couch. A small leather satchel lay between his feet, its straps untied. I had left my drapes open, and the descending moonlight shone upon his eyes, turning them to mirrors in the gloom. Immediately I looked for the gun on my nightstand, but it was gone.

“I got your piece,” he said. He reached behind his back and removed the Smith 10 from his belt, weighing it in his hand as he watched me. “It’s quite a piece of weaponry. A man’s got to be serious about killing to carry a gun like this. This ain’t no lady’s gun, uh-uh.”

He shifted it in his hand, folding his fingers around the grip and raising it so that the muzzle was pointing straight at me.

“Are you a killer, is that what you are? Because if you think so, then I got bad news for you. Your killing days are almost done.”

He stood quickly and pressed the muzzle hard against my forehead. His finger lightly tapped the trigger. Instinctively, I closed my eyes.

“Don’t do this,” I said. I tried to keep my voice calm. I did not want to sound as if I was pleading for my life. There were men in Merrick ’s line of work who lived for that moment: the catch in their victim’s voice, the acknowledgment that dying was no longer an abstract future concept, that mortality had been given form and purpose. In that instant, the pressure of the finger on the trigger would increase and the hammer would fall, the blade would begin its linear work, the rope would tighten around the neck, and all things would cease to be. So I tried to keep the fear at bay, even as the words scraped like sandpaper in my throat, and my tongue caught against my teeth, one part of me trying desperately to find a way out of a situation that was now far beyond its control while another focused only on the pressure against my forehead, knowing that it presaged a greater pressure to come as the bullet tore through skin and bone and gray matter, and then all pain would be gone in the blink of an eye, and I would be transformed.

The pressure against my forehead eased as Merrick removed the muzzle from my skin. When I opened my eyes again, sweat dripped into them. Somehow, I found enough moisture in my mouth to enable me to speak once more.

“How did you get in here?” I asked.

“Through the front door, same as any normal person.”

“The house is alarmed.”

“Is it?” He sounded surprised. “Guess you might need to get that looked at.”

His left hand reached into the bag by his feet. He took out another set of cuffs and threw them at me. They landed on my chest.

“Slip one of them bracelets around your left wrist, then raise your left hand against the far bedpost. Do it slowly, now. I didn’t have time to test the pull on this beauty, not with you waking up so suddenly and all, and I don’t rightly know how much of a tap it might take to set her off. Bullet from a gun like this would make a real mess, even if I aimed it right and it killed you straight off. But if you was to panic me, well, there’s no telling where it might end up. I knew a man once who got caught by a slug from a.22 in the brainpan, right here.” He tapped the frontal lobe above his right eye. “I got to admit, I don’t know what it did in there. I figure it must have rattled around some. Them little sons-of-bitches will do that. Didn’t kill him though. Left him speechless, paralyzed. Hell, he couldn’t even blink. They had to pay someone to put drops in his eyes so they wouldn’t dry up.”

He stared at me for a moment or two, as though I had already become such a man.

“Eventually,” he continued, “I went back, and I finished the job. I took pity on him, because it wasn’t right to leave him that way. I looked into them unblinking eyes, and I swear that something of what he was had stayed alive in there. It was trapped by what I’d made him, but I released it. I set it free. I guess that would count as a mercy, right? I can’t promise that I’d do the same for you, so you be real careful putting them cuffs on.”

I did as he had told me, leaning awkwardly across the bed so that my trapped right hand could close the cuff around my left wrist. Then I placed my left hand against the far bedpost. Merrick walked around the bed, the gun never wavering from me, his finger poised over the trigger. The sheet beneath my back was now drenched with perspiration. Carefully, using only his left hand, he secured the cuff, leaving me lying in a cruciform position. He moved in closer.

“You look scared, mister,” he whispered into my ear. His left hand brushed the hair from my brow. “You’re sweating like meat on a grill.”

I jerked my head away. Gun or no gun, I didn’t want him touching me like that. He grinned, then stepped back from me.

“You can breathe easy for now. You answer me right, and you may live to see another sunrise. I don’t hurt anything, man or beast, that I don’t have to hurt.”

“I don’t believe that.”

His body tensed, as though, somewhere, an unseen puppeteer had suddenly given his strings a gentle tweak. Then he pulled the sheets away from my body, leaving me naked before him.

“I think you ought to watch what you say,” he said. “It doesn’t seem to me like it’s smart for a man with his dick hanging out to start running off at the mouth in front of someone who could do him harm if he chose.”

It seemed absurd, but without that thin covering of cotton I felt more vulnerable than before. Vulnerable, and humiliated.

“What do you want?”

“To talk.”

“You could have done that in daylight. You didn’t have to break into my house to do it.”

“You’re an excitable man. I was worried that you might overreact. Then there’s the small fact that last time we were due to meet, you screwed me over, and I ended up with a cop’s knee in my back. You could say that I owe you one for that.”

He moved the gun swiftly to his left hand, then knelt on my legs and punched me hard in the kidney. With my body held rigid there was no way that I could move to absorb the pain. It ran riot through my system, forcing bubbles of nausea into my mouth.

The weight came off my legs. Merrick picked up a glass of water from the bedside table, drank from it, then splashed the remainder on my face.

“That’s a lesson I shouldn’t ought to have been forced to teach you, but you been schooled again in it anyways. You cross a man, you can expect him to come back at you, uh-huh, yes you can.”

He returned to his chair and sat down. Then, in a gesture that was almost tender, he carefully pulled the sheet back over my body.

“All I wanted was to talk to the woman,” he said. “Then she called you in, and you started interfering in matters that were no concern of yours.”

I found my voice. It came out slowly, like a startled animal emerging from its burrow to test the air for threats.

“She was frightened. It looks like she had good cause to be.”

“I don’t hurt women. I told you that before.”

I let that go. I didn’t want to anger him again.

“She didn’t know what you were talking about. She believes her father is dead.”

“So she says.”

“You think she’s lying?”

“She knows more than she’s telling, is what I think. I have unfinished business with Mr. Daniel Clay, uh-huh. I won’t let it lie still until I see him before me, alive or dead. I want recompense. I’m entitled to it, yes sir.”

He nodded once, deeply, as though he had just shared something very profound with me. Even the way he spoke and acted had changed somewhat, the little “uh-huhs” and “yes sirs” becoming more frequent and pronounced. They were ticks, and I knew then that Merrick was drifting out of the control not only of Eldritch and the Collector, but of himself.

“You’re being used,” I said. “Your grief and anger are being exploited by others.”

“I been used before. It’s a matter of understanding that, and of receiving proper payment for it.”

“And what’s your payment here? Money?”

“Information.”

He let the barrel of the gun drop until it was pointed at the floor. A wave of tiredness seemed to wash over him, breaking against his face so that his features were altered, confused memories twisting and coiling in the aftermath. He dug his fingers deep into the corners of his eyes, then drew them across his face. For a moment, he looked old and frail.

“Information about your daughter,” I said. “What did the lawyer give you? Names?”

“Maybe. Nobody else offered me help. Nobody else gave a damn about her. You know what it was like for me, being trapped in that jail knowing that something had happened to my little girl, knowing that there was nothing I could do to find her, to help her? Social worker came to the jail, told me she’d gone missing. Bad as it was before, when I figured out what had been done to her, this was worse. She was gone, and I knew she was in trouble. Have you any idea what that will do to a man? I tell you, it near broke me, but I wouldn’t let that happen. I’d be no use to her that way, no sir, so I bided my time and waited for my opportunity. I kept it together for her, and I didn’t break.”

But he was broken. Something had fractured deep within him, and the flaw was progressing through his system. He was no longer as he once had been, but as Aimee Price had said, there was no way of knowing if he had been rendered more lethal, and more dangerous, as a result. They were two different things, though, and had I been pressed at that moment, as I lay incapacitated on my own bed, under my own gun, I would have said that he was more dangerous but less lethal. His edge had been taken from him, but what had replaced it had rendered him unpredictable. He was now a prisoner of his own anger and sadness, and that had made him vulnerable in ways he could not even suspect.

“My little girl didn’t just disappear into thin air,” he said. “She was taken from me, and I’ll find whoever was responsible for it. She may still be out there now, somewhere, waiting for me to come get her and take her home.”

“You know that’s not true. She’s gone.”

“You shut your mouth! You don’t know that.”

I didn’t care now. I was sick of Merrick, sick of them all.

“She was a young girl,” I said. “They took her. Something went wrong. She’s dead, Frank. That’s what I believe. She’s dead like Daniel Clay.”

“You don’t know that. How do you know that about my little girl?”

“Because they stopped,” I said. “After her, they stopped. They got scared.”

He shook his head forcefully. “No, I won’t believe it until I see her. Until they show me her body, then she’s alive to me. You say otherwise again, and I’ll kill you where you lie, I swear it. You mark me! Yes sir, you mark me well.”

He was standing above me now, the gun poised in his hand, ready to fire. It shook slightly, the rage at the heart of his being transferring its energy to the weapon in his hand.

“I met Andy Kellog,” I said.

The gun stopped shaking, but it did not move from me.

“You saw Andy. Well, I guess you was going to figure out where I’d been sooner or later. How is he?”

“Not good.”

“He shouldn’t ought to be in there. Those men tore something in him when they took him. They broke his heart. They’re not his fault, the things he does.”

He looked down at the floor again, once more unable to keep the memories at bay.

“Your daughter drew pictures like Andy’s, didn’t she?” I asked him. “Pictures of men with the heads of birds?”

Merrick nodded. “That’s right, just like Andy did. That was after she started seeing Clay. She sent the pictures to me at the jail. She was trying to tell me something about what was happening to her, but I didn’t understand, not until I met Andy. They were the same men. It’s not just about my little girl. That boy was like a son to me. They’ll pay for what they did to him as well. The lawyer Eldritch understood that. It wasn’t about just one child. He’s a good man. He wants those people found, just like I do.”

I heard someone laugh, and realized it was me.

“You think he’s doing this out of the goodness of his heart? You ever wonder who is paying Eldritch, who employed him to secure your release, to feed you information? Did you take a look around that house in Welchville? Did you venture down into the cellar?”

Merrick’s mouth opened slightly, and his features became clouded with doubt. Perhaps the thought had never struck him that there was someone other than Eldritch involved.

“What are you talking about?”

“Eldritch has a client. The client is manipulating you through him. He owns that house you crashed in. He’s shadowing you, waiting to see who responds to your actions. When they emerge, he’ll take them, not you. He doesn’t care whether you find your daughter or not. All he wants is-”

I paused. I understood that to say what he wanted made no sense. To add to his collection? To dispense another form of justice in the face of the law’s inability to act against these men? Those were elements of what he desired, but they were not enough to explain his existence.

“You don’t know what he wants, if he even exists, and it don’t matter anyway,” said Merrick. “When the time comes, no man will take justice out of my hands. I want recompense. I told you that. I want the men who took my little girl to pay for what they did, to pay at my hand.”

“Recompense?” I tried to hide the disgust in my voice, but I could not. “You’re talking about your daughter, not some…used car that gave out on you a mile from the lot. This isn’t about her. It’s about you. You want to lash out at someone. She’s just your excuse.”

The anger flared again, and once more I was reminded of the similarities between Frank Merrick and Andy Kellog, of the rage always bubbling away beneath their exteriors. Merrick was right: he and Kellog were like father and son, in some strange way.

“You shut the fuck up!” said Merrick. “You got no idea what you’re saying.”

The gun shifted hands again, and his right fist was suddenly poised above me, the knuckles ready to smash down upon me. And then he seemed to become aware of something, for he paused and looked over his shoulder, and as he did so, I sensed it too.

The room had grown colder, and there was a noise from the hallway outside my door. It was soft, like the footsteps of a child.

“You alone here?” said Merrick.

“Yes,” I replied, and I couldn’t tell if I was lying.

He turned around and walked slowly to the open door, then stepped swiftly into the hallway, the gun held close to him in case someone tried to knock it from his grasp. He disappeared from view, and I could hear doors opening, and closets being searched. His shape passed by the doorway again, then he was downstairs, checking that all of the rooms were quiet and unoccupied. When he returned, he looked troubled, and the bedroom was colder still. He shivered.

“The hell is wrong with this place?”

But I was no longer listening to him, because I smelled her now. Blood and perfume. She was close. I thought Merrick might have smelled her too, because his nose wrinkled slightly. He spoke, but he sounded distant, almost distracted. There was an edge of madness to his voice, and I thought then that he was going to kill me for sure. I tried to move my lips to pray, but I could remember no words, and no prayers would come.

“I don’t want you meddling in my affairs no more, you understand?” he said. His spittle landed on my face. “I thought you was a man I could reason with, but I was wrong. You’ve caused me enough trouble already, and I need to make sure you don’t trouble me again.”

He returned to the satchel on the floor and withdrew a roll of duct tape. He laid the gun down, then used the tape to cover my mouth before binding my legs tightly together above the ankles. He took a burlap sack and draped it over my head, securing it with more tape wrapped around my neck. Using a blade, he ripped a hole in the sacking just beneath my nostrils, so that I could breathe more easily.

“You listen to me, now,” he said. “I got to put some harm your way, just to be sure that you got your days filled without worrying about me. After that, you mind your business, and I’ll see that justice is done.”

Then he left me, and with him some of the chill departed from the room, as though something was following him through the house, marking his progress to ensure that he went. But another remained: a smaller presence, less angry than the first, yet more afraid.

And I closed my eyes as I felt her hand brush against the sackcloth.

daddy

Go away.

daddy, i’m here.

A moment later there was another in the room. I felt her approach. I couldn’t breathe properly. More sweat fell into my eyes. I tried to blink it away. I was panicking, suffocating, yet I could almost see her through the perforations in the sack, darkness against darkness, and smell her as she came.

daddy, it’s all right, i’m here.

But it wasn’t all right, because she was approaching: the other, the first wife, or something like her.

hush

No. Get away from me. Please, please, leave me alone.

hush

No.

And then my daughter went silent, and the voice of the other spoke.

hush, for we are here.

Chapter XXIII

Ricky Demarcian was, from all outward appearances, a loser. He lived in a double-wide trailer that, for the early years of his occupancy, had left him freezing in winter and gently roasted him alive in summer, basting him in his own juices and filling every space with the stench of mold and filth and unwashed clothes. The trailer had been green once, but the elements had combined with Ricky’s inept painting skills to take their toll upon it, fading it so that it was now a filthy, washed-out blue, like some dying creature at the bottom of a polluted sea.

The trailer stood at the northern perimeter of a park called Tranquility Pines, which was false advertising right there because there wasn’t a pine in sight-no mean feat in the grand old state of Maine-and the place was about as tranquil as a nest of ants drowning in caffeine. It lay in a hollow surrounded by scrub-covered slopes, as though the park itself were slowly sinking into the earth, borne down by the weight of disappointment, frustration, and envy that was the burden carried by its residents.

Tranquility Pines was filled with screwups, many of whom, curiously, were women: vicious, foul-mouthed harridans who still looked and dressed the same way they did in the eighties, all stone-washed denim and bubble perms, simultaneously hunters and hunted trawling the bars of South Portland and Old Orchard and Scarborough for ratlike men with money to spend, or muscle-bound freaks in wife-beater shirts whose hatred of women gave their temporary partners a respite of sorts from their own self-loathing. Some had kids, and the males among them were well on their way to becoming like the men who shared their mothers’ beds, and whom they themselves despised without understanding how close they were to following in their footsteps. The girls, meanwhile, tried to escape their family circumstances by creating families of their own, thereby dooming themselves to become the very women they least desired to emulate.

There were male residents at the Pines too, but they were mostly like Ricky had once been: wasted men regretting wasted lives, some on welfare and some with jobs, although what work they had seemed mostly to involve gutting or cutting, and the smell of rotting fish and chicken skins acted as a kind of universal identifier for the park’s residents.

Ricky used to have one of those jobs. His left arm was shriveled and useless, the fingers unable to grip or move, the result of some mishap in the womb, but Ricky had learned how to cope with the damaged limb, mainly by hiding it and forgetting about it for a time, until that moment in each day that life threw a curveball at him and reminded him of how much easier things would be if he had two hands to make the catch. It didn’t help Ricky’s employment prospects much either, although, even if he had boasted two functioning arms, his lack of, in no particular order, education, ambition, energy, resourcefulness, sociability, honesty, reliability, and general humanity would probably have ruled him out of any labor that didn’t involve, well, gutting or cutting. So Ricky started on the bottom rung at a chicken-processing plant that supplied meat for fast-food joints, using a hose to spray blood, feathers, and chicken crap from the floors, his days filled with the sound of panicked clucking; with the casual cruelty of the men operating the line who took pleasure in tormenting the birds, adding extra agony to their final moments by breaking wings and legs; with the fizz of the current as the chickens, dangling upside down on a conveyor belt, were briefly immersed in electrified water, the action sometimes successfully stunning them but often failing, since the birds were so busy squawking and squirming that their heads frequently missed the water entirely, and they were still conscious when the multibladed slaughtering machines slit their throats, their bodies jerking as superheated water defeathered them, leaving their steaming carcasses ready to be chopped into bitesized pieces of flesh that, raw or cooked, tasted of next to nothing.

The funny thing was, Ricky still ate chicken, even chicken from the plant in which he had once worked. The whole affair hadn’t bothered him unduly: not the cruelty, not the casual attitude to safety, not even the foul stink as, truth be told, Ricky’s own personal hygiene was unlikely to win him any prizes, and it was only a matter of getting used to a whole new array of odors. Still, Ricky recognized that being a chicken mopper was somewhat less than the mark of a successful, fulfilled life, and so he went looking for a less ignominious way to make a living. He discovered it in computers, for Ricky had a natural aptitude for the machines, a talent that, had it been recognized and cultivated at an earlier age, might well have made him a very wealthy man indeed, or so he liked to tell himself, disregarding the many personal failings that had led to his current, modest status amid the pine-free and untranquil surroundings of his trailer park. It began with Ricky’s acquisition of an old Macintosh, then progressed through night school and computer books stolen from chain stores, until eventually he was downloading technical manuals and devouring them in single sittings, the disorder surrounding him in his daily life standing in stark contrast to the clean lines and ordered diagrams taking form in his mind.

Unbeknownst to most of his neighbors, Ricky Demarcian was probably the wealthiest resident in the park, to the extent that he could easily have afforded to move to a more pleasant home. Ricky’s relative wealth was due in no small part to his facility with promoting the kinds of services that the Internet seemed ready-made to handle, namely those involving the exchange of various sexual services, and, as Tranquility Pines had inadvertently given him his start in the business, gratitude had imbued in him an attachment to the place that prevented him from leaving.

There was a woman, Lila Mae, who entertained men for money in her trailer. She advertised in one of the local pick ’n’ throws, but despite her cunning efforts to throw the vice cops off the scent by not using her own name and not giving out her location until the john had made his way to her general vicinity, she got busted and fined repeatedly. Her name ended up in the newspapers, and it was all kind of embarrassing for her, because in places like Tranquility Pines, perhaps more so than in considerably more exalted surroundings, everyone needed someone else on whom to look down, and a whore in a trailer happily filled the bill for most of Lila Mae’s neighbors.

She was a good-looking woman, at least by the standards of the park, and she had no desire to give up her reasonably lucrative profession to join Ricky Demarcian in hosing down a chicken slaughterhouse. So Ricky, who was familiar with Lila Mae’s situation, and who enjoyed surfing the Net for sexual material of various stripes, and who had, in addition, an enviable grasp of the mysteries of Web sites and their design, suggested to her over a beer one night that maybe she might like to look at an alternative means of advertising her services. They went back to Ricky’s trailer, where Ricky showed her precisely what he meant, once Lila Mae had opened all of the windows and soaked a handkerchief in perfume so that she could hold it discreetly under her nose. She was so impressed with what she saw that she instantly agreed to allow Ricky to design something similar for her, and promised vaguely that, should he ever decide to take a proper bath, she might see fit to service him at a discount on his next birthday.

So Lila Mae was the first, but pretty soon other women began contacting Ricky through her, and he placed them all on one Web site, with details of services offered, cost, and even portfolios of the women in question in the case of those who were agreeable and, more important, who were presentable enough not to frighten away the customers if the mysteries of their female forms were revealed. Unfortunately, Ricky became so successful at this that his endeavors attracted the attention of a number of very unhappy men who discovered that their status as minor pimps was being undermined by Ricky, since women who might otherwise have availed themselves of the protection offered by such individuals were instead operating as free agents.

For a time, it looked like Ricky might begin losing the use of other limbs, but then some gentlemen of Eastern European origin with connections in Boston contacted him and suggested a compromise. These gentlemen were mildly curious about the entrepreneurial nature of Ricky, and the women whose interests he looked after. Two of them traveled to Maine to talk to him, and an agreement was quickly reached that led to a change in Ricky’s business practices in exchange for leaving him with the continued use of his single, unwithered arm, and guaranteed protection from those who might otherwise have taken issue with him in a physical way. Subsequently, the gentlemen returned, this time with a request that Ricky design a similar site for the women in their charge, as well as some more, um, “specialized” options that they were in a position to offer. Suddenly Ricky found himself very busy indeed, and he was dealing with material upon which the law enforcement community was unlikely to look kindly, since some of it clearly involved children.

Finally, Ricky became a go-between, and crossed the line from dealing with pictures of women and, in some cases, children, to facilitating those who were interested in a more active engagement with the objects of their fascination. Ricky never saw the women or children involved. He was merely the first point of contact. What happened after that was none of his business. A lesser man might have been worried, might even have suffered qualms of conscience, but Ricky Demarcian only had to think of dying chickens in order to banish any such doubts from his mind.

And so, while Ricky might have seemed a loser, living in a mis-named trailer park whose denizens were frequently on nodding terms with poverty, he was, in fact, quite comfortable in his squalor. He spent his money on constantly upgrading his hardware and software, on DVDs and computer games, on sci-fi novels and comic books, and on the occasional hooker whose details caught his fancy. He kept his trailer the way it was in order not to attract unwanted attention from the owners of the park, the IRS, or the law. He even showered more often, after one of the gentlemen from Boston complained that his new suit had smelled all the way back down I-95 after a visit to Ricky, and if that situation arose again, then Ricky would have to learn to peck at his keyboard using a chopstick attached to his forehead, because the gentleman from Boston would make good on his original threat to break Ricky’s other arm and stick it up his ass.

And so it was that Ricky Demarcian, the Not-

Such-A-Loser-Now, could be found in his trailer that night, tapping away at his keyboard, the long fingers of his right hand extended across the keys as he entered the information that would take a user with the right password and the right combination of point-and-clicks straight to some very dubious material. The system involved the use of certain trigger words familiar to those whose tastes extended to children, the most common being “Lolly,” which most pedophiles recognized as an indication that their interest was being piqued. Typically, Ricky would give the name “Lolly” to an ordinary, unremarkable prostitute who, in fact, did not exist, her details and even her appearance a fiction cobbled together from the histories and bodies of other women. Once a potential customer had expressed an interest in Lolly, a further questionnaire would appear on-screen, asking for “preferred ages,” with options ranging from “sixty plus” to “barely legal.” If the latter category was ticked, an apparently innocuous email would be sent back to the customer, this time with another trigger word-Ricky favored “hobby” at this point, another term familiar to pedophiles-and so on until eventually a customer’s credit card details would be requested and the flow of images and information would begin in earnest.

Ricky enjoyed working late at night. Tranquility Pines was almost, well, tranquil at that time, since even the bickering couples and shouty drunks had usually quieted down some by three in the morning. Seated in the darkness of his home, lit only by the glow of his screen, and with the stars sometimes visible in the night sky through the skylight above his head, he might almost have been floating in space, and that was Ricky’s great dream: to glide through the heavens in a huge ship, weightless and unencumbered, drifting through beauty and total silence.

Ricky didn’t know how old the kids on the screen before him were-he judged twelve or thirteen at most; he was always bad with ages, except when it came to the really little ones, and even Ricky tried not to spend too much time looking at those pictures, because there were some things that didn’t bear thinking about for too long-but it wasn’t for him to police another man’s tastes. Tap, tap, tap, and image after image found its rightful place in Ricky’s great scheme, slotting into position in the virtual universe of sex and desire he had created. He was so lost in the sound and rhythm of what he was doing that the knocking at his trailer door was simply absorbed into the general cacophony, and it was only when the visitor increased the force of the impacts that Ricky started to discern the new noise. He paused in his labors.

“Who’s there?” he said.

There was no reply.

He went to the window and pulled the drapes aside at one corner. It was raining slightly, and the glass was streaked, but still he could see that there was no one at the door.

Ricky didn’t own a gun. He didn’t like guns much. He wasn’t a violent person. In fact, Ricky’s views tended toward the cautious where guns were concerned. In his opinion, there were a lot of people out there who had no right to be carrying even a sharpened pencil, never mind a loaded weapon. Through a process of flawed logic, Ricky had formed an equation whereby guns equaled criminals, and criminals equaled guns. Ricky did not see himself as a criminal, and therefore he did not possess a gun. Alternatively, he did not possess a gun, and therefore he could not possibly be a criminal.

Ricky stepped away from the window and looked at the locked door. He could open it, he supposed, but there now appeared to be no reason for doing so. Whoever had been at the door was gone. He tugged at his lip, then went back to his computer. He had just commenced checking some of the code when the tapping came again, this time at the window he had recently left. Ricky swore and looked out once again into the night. There was now a shape at his door. It was a man, squat and powerful-looking, with a quiff of black hair that glistened with oil.

“What do you want?” said Ricky.

The man indicated with a nod of his head that Ricky should come to the door.

“Hell,” said Ricky. The man didn’t look like any cop Ricky had ever seen. In fact, he looked more like one of the gentlemen from Boston, who had a habit of turning up unexpectedly at odd times. Still, you couldn’t be too careful where such things were concerned. Ricky went back to his computer and entered a series of instructions. Instantly, windows began to close, firewalls were erected, images were encrypted, and a baffling series of false trails was put in place so that anyone attempting to access the material on his computer would quickly find himself in a maze of useless code and buffer files. If they persisted, the computer would go into virtual meltdown. Ricky knew too much about computers to believe that the material his machine contained would be inaccessible forever, but he reckoned it would take a team of experts many months before they even started retrieving anything worth further investigation.

He stepped away from his desk and walked to the door. He was not frightened. He was protected by Boston. The word had gone out on that a long time ago. He had nothing to fear.

The man on the step wore dark blue jeans, a blue polyester shirt that strained against his body, and a worn black leather jacket. His head was a little too large for his frame, although it also gave the disturbing impression that it had been compressed at one point, as if it had been placed in a vise from chin to crown. Ricky thought he looked like a thug, which, strangely, made him even more inclined to lower his guard. The only thugs with whom he dealt came from Boston. If the man on his step looked like a thug, then he must be from Boston.

“I like your place,” said the man.

Ricky’s face furrowed in confusion.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” he said.

The man leveled a huge gun at Ricky. He wore gloves. Ricky wasn’t to know it, but the gun was a Smith 10 designed for use by the FBI. It was an unusual gun for a private individual to own. While Ricky did not know that, the man holding the gun did. In fact, that was why he had chosen to borrow it earlier that night.

“Who are you?” asked Ricky.

“I’m the finger on the scales,” said the man. “Back up.”

Ricky did as he was told.

“You don’t want to do anything you’ll regret,” said Ricky, as the man entered the trailer and pulled the door closed behind him. “There are men in Boston who won’t like it.”

“ Boston, huh?” said the man.

“That’s right.”

“Well, you think these men in Boston can get to you faster than a bullet?”

Ricky thought about the question.

“I guess not.”

“Well, then,” said the man, “I reckon they ain’t much use to you right now, no sir.” He took in the computer and the array of hardware that surrounded it. “Very impressive,” he said.

“You know about computers?” asked Ricky.

“Not much,” said the man. “That kind of thing passed me by. You got pictures on there?”

Ricky swallowed.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Oh, I think you do. You don’t want to be lying to me, now. You do that and, well, I’m likely to lose my temper with you, yes sir, and seeing as how I have a gun and you don’t, I don’t think that would be in your best interests. So I’ll ask you again: you got pictures on there?”

Ricky, realizing that a man who asked a question like that already knew the answer, decided to be honest.

“Maybe. Depends what kind of pictures you want.”

“Oh, you know the kind. Girlie pictures, like in the magazines.”

Ricky tried to breathe a sigh of relief without actually appearing to do so.

“Sure, I got girlie pictures. You want me to show you?”

The man nodded, and Ricky was relieved to see him tuck the gun into the waistband of his trousers. He sat down at his keyboard and brought the equipment back to life. Just before the screen began to glow he saw the man approach him from behind, his figure reflected in the dark. Then images began to appear: women in various stages of undress, in various positions, performing various acts.

“I got all kinds,” said Ricky, stating the obvious.

“You got ones of children?” said the man.

“No,” Ricky lied. “I don’t do kids.”

The man let out a warm breath of disappointment. It smelled of cinnamon gum, but it couldn’t hide the mixed scents that the man exuded: cheap cologne and a stink that was uncomfortably reminiscent of parts of the chicken factory.

“What’s wrong with your arm?” he asked.

“Came out of my mother this way. It don’t work.”

“You still got feeling in it?”

“Oh yeah, it just ain’t no good for-”

Ricky didn’t get to finish the sentence. There was a searing red-hot pain in his upper arm. He opened his mouth to scream, but the man’s right hand clamped tightly across his face, smothering the sound while his left worked a long, thin blade into Ricky’s flesh, twisting as he went. Ricky bucked in the chair, his screams filling his own head but emerging into the night air as only the faintest of moans.

“Don’t play me for a fool,” said the man. “I warned you once. I won’t warn you again.”

And then the blade was plucked from Ricky’s arm, and the hand released its grip upon his face. Ricky arched back in his chair, his right hand moving instinctively to the wound, then immediately distancing itself from it again as the pain intensified at the touch. He was crying, and he felt ashamed for doing so.

“I’ll ask you one more time: you got pictures of children on there?”

“Yes,” said Ricky. “Yes. I’ll show you. Just tell me what you want: boys, girls, younger, older. I’ll show you anything, but please don’t hurt me again.”

The man produced a photograph from a black leather wallet.

“You recognize her?”

The girl was pretty, with dark hair. She was wearing a pink dress, and had a matching ribbon in her hair. She was smiling. There was a tooth missing from her upper jaw.

“No,” said Ricky.

The blade moved toward his arm again, and Ricky almost screamed his denial this time. “No! I’m telling you I don’t know her! She’s not on there. I’d remember. I swear to God, I’d remember. I got a good memory for these things.”

“Where do you get these pictures from?”

“From Boston, mostly. They send them to me. Sometimes I have to scan them in, but usually they’re already on disk. There are films too. They come on computer disks or DVDs. I just put them on the sites. I’ve never hurt a child in my life. I don’t even like that stuff. All I do is what I’m told to do.”

“You said ‘mostly.’”

“Huh?”

“You said ‘mostly’ you get them from Boston. Where else?”

Ricky tried to find a way to lie, but his brain wasn’t working right. The pain in his arm was dulling slightly, but so was his mind. He felt sick and wondered if he was going to faint.

“Sometimes, other people used to bring me stuff,” he said. “Not so much anymore.”

“Who?”

“Men. A man, I mean. There was a guy, he brought me some good material. Videos. That was a long time ago. Years.”

Ricky was lying by omission. Strangely, the pain in his arm was helping him to keep his head clear by forcing him to recognize the possibility that more pain might be to come if he did not play this the right way. True, the man had brought him material, clearly home-filmed but of unusually high quality, even if it was a little static in its camera movements, but it was as a goodwill gesture. He was one of the first who had approached Ricky directly in the hope of renting a child for a few hours, referred to him by a mutual acquaintance in that part of the state, a man well known to those with such proclivities. The gentlemen in Boston had told him that it would happen, and they had been right.

“What was his name?”

“He never told me his name, and I didn’t ask. I just paid him. It was good stuff.”

More half-truths, more lies, but Ricky was confident in his abilities. He was far from stupid, and he knew it.

“You weren’t afraid that he was a cop?”

“He wasn’t no cop. You only had to take one look at him to know that.”

Snot dribbled from his nose, mingling with his tears.

“Where did he come from?”

“I don’t know. Up north, somewhere.”

The man was watching Ricky carefully and caught the way his eyes shifted again as he lied. Dave “The Guesser” Glovsky might almost have been proud of him at that moment.

“You ever hear tell of a place called Gilead?”

There was the “tell” again, the body betraying the difficulty the brain felt in disguising the lie.

“No, I never did, unless it was at Sunday school when I was a kid.”

The man was silent for a time. Ricky wondered if that had been a lie too far.

“You got a list of people who pay for all this?”

Ricky shook his head.

“It’s done through credit cards. The men in Boston take care of it. All I have is email addresses.”

“And who are these men in Boston?”

“They’re Eastern Europeans, Russians. I only know first names. I have some numbers to call if there’s trouble.”

Ricky swore. He thought he had made a mistake by telling his assailant once again that there would be repercussions for hurting him, that of course he would have someone to call if the operation was threatened. Ricky didn’t want the man to be reminded that it might be better not to leave him alive. The man seemed to understand Ricky’s concerns.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I know you’ll be expected to call them about this. I figured they’d hear about it one way or the other, uh-huh. It don’t bother me none. Let ’ em come. You can get rid of that stuff on your screen now.” As he spoke, he picked up a cushion.

Ricky swallowed. He closed his eyes briefly in gratitude. He turned back to his computer and began clearing it of the images. His lips parted.

“Thank-”

The bullet blew a big hole in the back of Ricky’s head, and tore a bigger one in his face as it exited. It shattered the screen, and something in the monitor exploded with a dull pop and began to burn acridly. Blood hissed and bubbled in the exposed workings. The ejected shell casing had bounced off a filing cabinet and lay close to Ricky’s chair. Its position was almost too good, so the visitor tapped it with the side of his foot, sending it sliding over toward the trash basket. There were prints on the linoleum from his boots, so he found a rag in a closet, placed it on the floor, and used his right foot to erase the marks. When he was satisfied that all was clean, he opened the door slightly and listened. The sound of the gunshot had been loud, despite the cushion, but the trailers on either side of Ricky Demarcian’s were both still dark, and elsewhere he could see the glow of TVs, could even hear what they were showing. He left the trailer, closing the door behind him, then disappeared into the night, pausing only at a gas station along the way to report a shot fired at Tranquility Pines, and a glimpse of what looked like an old Mustang speeding away from the scene.

Frank Merrick didn’t like people getting in his way, but he had a certain amount of respect for the private detective. In addition, killing him would create more problems than it would solve, but killing someone else with the detective’s gun would create just enough problems to keep him occupied, and only a few for Merrick.

Because Merrick knew that he was now entirely alone. He didn’t care. He had tired of the old lawyer and his careful questions sometime before, and Eldritch had made it clear when he came up to Portland after Merrick’s arrest that their professional relationship was now at an end. The private detective’s comments about Eldritch’s motives and, more to the point, about whoever had instructed the lawyer to aid Merrick, had only exacerbated his own doubts. It was time to finish this thing. There was still some business to be concluded down here, but then he would go northwest. He should have gone there long before now, but he had felt certain that some of the answers that he sought were in this small, coastal city. But he was no longer so sure, and Gilead beckoned.

Merrick took the duct tape and stuck the detective’s gun to the underside of the driver’s seat. He had liked the feel of it in his hands. It had been a long time since he had fired a gun, longer still since he had done so in anger. Now he had the taste for it again. He had been careful not to carry a weapon, just in case the cops came for him. He did not want to be incarcerated again. But the time had come to act, and the detective’s gun would be more than suitable for the work he had to do.

“It’s all right, honey,” Merrick whispered, as he left the light of the gas station and headed east once more. “Won’t be long now. Daddy’s coming.”

Chapter XXIV

I lost track of time. Hours became minutes, and minutes became hours. My skin itched constantly from the touch of the sacking, and the sense of impending suffocation was never far away. Occasional whispers emerged from the shadows, sometimes close by, and sometimes farther away. Once or twice I began to doze, but the tape across my mouth hindered my breathing and almost as soon as I fell asleep I would wake again, breathing heavily through my nose like a thoroughbred after a long race, my heart rate increasing, my head straining away from the pillow as I struggled to draw in more oxygen. Twice, I thought that something touched my neck before I awoke, and the contact was so cold that my skin burned. When that happened, I tried to work the burlap off, but Merrick had secured it well. By the time I heard the front door open and close, followed by the heavy, deliberate tread of footsteps upon the stairs, I was completely disoriented, but even with my senses confused I was aware of presences receding, moving away from me as the stranger approached.

Someone entered the bedroom. I felt body heat close to me and smelled Merrick. His fingers worked at the tape around my neck, and then the sack was removed and at last I was able to see again. Small white suns exploded in my field of vision, so that for a moment Merrick ’s features were indistinguishable to me. His face was a blank visage upon which I could paste whatever demon I chose, constructing an image of all that I feared. Then the spots before my eyes began to fade, and he was once again clear to see. He looked troubled and uncomfortable, no longer as assured as he had appeared when I had first awoken to find him by my bed, and his gaze drifted to the darker corners of the room. I noticed that he no longer stood with his back to the door. Instead, he seemed to be trying to keep it in sight, as though he were afraid to leave himself vulnerable to an approach from behind.

Merrick stared down at me, but he did not speak. He tugged at his lower lip with his left hand while he thought. There was no sign of my gun. Finally, he said: “I done something tonight that maybe I ought not to have done. It’s what it is, though, for good or ill. I got tired of waiting. Time has come to draw them out. It’s going to cause you some trouble, mark me, but you’ll get out of it. You’ll tell them what happened here, and they’ll believe you, in the end. In the meantime, word will spread, and they’ll come.”

Then Merrick did something strange. He walked slowly to one of the bedroom closets, my gun now visible where it was tucked into his belt, and rested his left hand against its slatted door, his right drawing the Smith 10. He seemed almost to be peering through the slats, as though convinced that someone was hidden inside. When at last he opened it, he did so warily, slowly easing it open with his left hand and using the barrel of the gun to explore the spaces between the jackets, shirts, and coats hanging within.

“You sure you live here alone?” he asked.

I nodded.

“It don’t feel like you’re alone,” he said. There was no hint of a threat, no sense that he felt I had lied to him, only a deeper unease at something he did not understand. He closed the closet door softly and walked back to the bed.

“I got nothing against you personally,” he said. “We’re even now. I believe you do what you think is right, but you got in my way, and I couldn’t have that. Worse, I think you’re a man who lets his conscience bother him, and conscience is just a fly buzzing in your head. It’s a nuisance, a distraction. I got no time for it. Never did.”

He slowly raised the gun. The muzzle regarded me blackly, like an empty, unblinking eye.

“I could kill you now. You know that. Wouldn’t cost me much more than a drop of sorrow. But I’m going to let you live.”

I breathed out hard, unable to suppress a feeling that bordered on gratitude. I was not going to die, not at this man’s hands, not today. Merrick knew the sound for what it was.

“That’s right, you’ll live, but you remember this, and don’t you forget it, now. I had you in a mortal grip, and I set you free. I know the kind of man you are, conscience or no conscience. You’ll be all fired up about how I came into your house, how I hurt you, humiliated you in your own bed. You’ll want to strike back, but I’m warning you that the next time I have you under the gun, I won’t waste a breath before I pull the trigger. All of this will be over soon enough, and then I’ll be gone. I’ve left you with enough to be thinking about. You save your anger. You’ll have cause enough to use it again.”

He put away the gun and reached, once more, for his little satchel. He removed a small glass bottle and a yellow rag, then unscrewed the cap from the bottle and doused the rag with its contents. I knew the smell. It wasn’t bad, and I could almost taste the sweetness of the liquid. I shook my head, my eyes growing wider as Merrick leaned over me, the rag in his right hand, the stink of the chloroform already making my head swim. I tried to buck my body, to lash out at him with my legs, but it was no use. He gripped my hair, holding my head still, and pressed the rag against my nose.

And the last words I heard were:

“It’s a mercy, Mr. Parker.”

I opened my eyes. Light streamed through the drapes. There were needles piercing my skull. I attempted to sit up, but my head felt too heavy. My hands were free, and the tape was gone from my mouth. I could taste blood upon my lips where its removal had torn the skin. I leaned over and reached for the water glass on the night table. My vision was blurred, and I almost knocked it to the floor. I waited for the room to stop spinning, and for the twin images before me to come together before I tried again. My hand closed on it and I raised it to my lips. It was full. Merrick must have refilled it, then left it within easy reach. I drank deeply, spilling water on the pillow, then lay there for a time. I closed my eyes and tried to quell the sickness that was rising. Eventually, I felt strong enough to roll across the bed until I fell on the floor. The boards were cool against my face. I crawled to the bathroom and rested my head on the toilet bowl. After a minute or two I vomited, then fell once more into a poisoned sleep on the tiles.

The sound of the doorbell woke me. The texture of the light had changed. It must have been past noon. I stood, supporting myself against the bathroom wall until I was sure that my legs would not buckle beneath me, then staggered to the chair where I had left my clothes the night before. I pulled on jeans and a T-shirt, threw a hooded top on to ward off the cold, then tentatively walked barefoot down the stairs to the door. Through the glass, I could see three figures standing outside, and there were two unfamiliar cars in my drive. One was a Scarborough P.D. cruiser. I could tell by the colors.

I opened the door. Conlough and Frederickson, the two detectives from Scarborough who had interviewed Merrick, were on my doorstep, along with a third man whose name I did not know, but whose face I remembered from Merrick’s interrogation. It was the man who had been talking to the FBI man, Pender. Behind them, Ben Ronson, one of the Scarborough cops, leaned against his cruiser. Usually, Ben and I would exchange a few words if we passed each other on the road, but now his face was still and without expression.

“Mr. Parker,” said Conlough. “Mind if we come in? You remember Detective Frederickson? We have a few questions we’d like to ask you.” He indicated the third man. “This here is Detective Hansen from the state police over in Gray. I guess you could say he’s in charge.”

Hansen was a fit-looking man with very black hair and a dark shadow across his cheeks and chin that spoke of too many years of using an electric razor. His eyes were more green than blue, and his posture, relaxed yet poised, suggested a wildcat about to spring on easy prey. He was wearing a nicely cut dark blue jacket. His shirt was very white, and his dark blue tie was striped with gold.

I stepped back and allowed them to enter. I noticed that none of them turned their backs on me. Outside, Ronson’s hand had drifted casually toward his gun.

“Kitchen okay?” I said.

“Sure,” said Conlough. “After you.”

They followed me to the kitchen. I sat down at the breakfast table. Ordinarily, I would have remained standing so as not to give them any advantage, but I still felt weak and uncertain on my legs.

“You don’t look so good,” said Frederickson.

“I had a bad night.”

“Want to tell us about it?”

“You want to tell me why you’re here first?”

But I knew. Merrick.

Conlough took a seat across from me while the others stayed standing. “Look,” he said, “we can clear all of this up here and now if you’ll just be straight with us. Otherwise”-he glanced meaningfully in Hansen’s direction-“it could get awkward.”

I should have asked for a lawyer, but a lawyer would have meant a trip there and then to the Scarborough P.D., or maybe to Gray, or even Augusta. A lawyer would have meant hours in a cell or an interrogation room, and I wasn’t sure that I was well enough to face that yet. I was going to need a lawyer eventually, but for now I was in my own home, at my own kitchen table, and I wasn’t about to leave unless I absolutely had to.

“Frank Merrick broke into my home last night,” I said. “He cuffed me to my bed”-I showed them the marks on my wrists-“then he gagged me, blindfolded me, and took my gun. I don’t know how long he left me like that. When he came back, he told me that he’d done something that he shouldn’t have, then chloroformed me. When I came to, the cuffs and tape were gone. So was Merrick. I think he still has my gun.”

Hansen leaned back against the kitchen counter. His arms were folded across his body.

“That’s quite a story,” he said.

“What gun did he take?” asked Conlough.

“Smith amp;Wesson, ten millimeter.”

“What load?”

“Cor-Bon. One-eighty grams.”

“Kinda tame for a ten,” said Hansen. “You worried about the frame cracking?”

I shook my head in disbelief.

“You’re kidding, right? The hell does that matter now?”

Hansen shrugged.

“Just asking.”

“It’s a myth. You happy?”

He didn’t reply.

“You got the ammo box for the Cor-Bons?” asked Conlough.

I knew where this was headed. I suppose I knew from the moment I saw the three detectives on my doorstep and, had I not felt so sick, I might almost have admired the circularity of what I suspected Merrick had done. He had used the gun on someone, but he had kept the weapon. If the bullet could be retrieved, then it could be compared with the box of rounds in my possession. It mirrored exactly the manner in which he had been linked to the killing of Barton Riddick in Virginia. Bullet matching might have been discredited but, as he had promised, he had still managed to do enough to land me in a lot of trouble. It was Merrick ’s little joke at my expense. I did not know how they had traced it back to me so quickly, but I suspected that had been Merrick ’s doing as well.

“I’m going to have to call a lawyer,” I said. “I’m not answering any more questions.”

“You got something to hide?” asked Hansen. He tried to smile, but it was an unpleasant thing, like a crack in old marble. “Why you getting all lawyered up now? Relax. We’re just talking here.”

“Really, is that what we’re doing? If it’s all the same to you, I don’t care much for your conversation.”

I looked at Conlough. He shrugged.

“Lawyer it is, then,” he said.

“Am I under arrest?” I asked.

“Not yet,” said Hansen. “But we can take that road, if you want to. So: arrest, or conversation?”

He gave me a cop stare, filled with false amusement and the certainty that he was in control.

“I don’t think we’ve met before,” I said. “I’m sure I would have remembered, just to make sure that I didn’t have the pleasure again.”

Conlough coughed into his hand, and turned his face to the wall. Hansen’s expression didn’t change.

“I’m a new arrival,” said Hansen. “I’ve been around some, though, done my time in the big cities-just like you, I guess, so your reputation doesn’t mean shit to me. Maybe up here, with your war stories and the blood on your hands, you seem like a big shot, but I don’t care much for men who take the law into their own hands. They represent a failure in the system, a flaw in the works. In your case, I intend to repair that flaw. This is the first step.”

“It’s not polite to disrespect a man in his own home,” I said.

“That’s why we’re all going to leave now, so that I can continue disrespecting you someplace else.”

He waved his fingers, indicating that I should stand. Everything about his attitude toward me spoke of utter contempt, and there was nothing that I could do but take it, for the present. If I reacted further, I would lose my temper, and I didn’t want to give Hansen the satisfaction of putting the cuffs on me.

I shook my head and stood, then put on an old pair of sneakers that I always kept by the kitchen door.

“Let’s go, then,” I said.

“You want to lean against the wall there first?” said Hansen.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” I replied.

“Yeah, I’m a regular joker,” said Hansen. “You and me both. You know what to do.”

I stood with my legs spread and my hands flat against the wall while Hansen patted me down. When he was happy that I wasn’t concealing assorted weaponry, he stepped back, and I followed him from the house, Conlough and Frederickson behind me. Outside, Ben Ronson already had the back door of the cruiser open for me. I heard a dog barking. Walter was racing across the field dividing my property from the Johnsons’. Bob Johnson was some ways behind Walter, but I could see the expression of concern on his face. As the dog drew nearer, I felt the cops tense around me. Ronson’s hand went to his gun again.

“It’s okay,” I said. “He’s friendly.”

Walter sensed that the men in the yard had no love for him. He paused at a gap in the trees overlooking the front yard and barked uncertainly, then slowly walked toward me, his tail wagging gently but his ears flat against his head. I looked at Conlough, and he nodded his okay. I went to Walter and rubbed his head.

“You have to stay with Bob and Shirley for a while, puppy,” I said. He pressed his head against my chest and closed his eyes. Bob was now standing where Walter had been minutes before. He knew better than to ask if everything was okay. I grabbed Walter by the collar and took him over to Bob, Hansen watching me all the way.

“Will you take care of him for a few hours?” I asked.

“It’s no trouble,” he replied. He was a small, spry man, his eyes alert behind his spectacles. I looked down at the dog, and while I patted him one more time I quietly asked Bob to call the Black Point Inn. I gave him the number of the room in which Angel and Louis were staying, and told him to inform them that a man named Merrick had paid me a visit.

“Sure. Anything else I can do for you?”

I looked around at the four cops.

“You know, Bob, I really don’t think so.”

With that, I got in the back of the black-and-white, and Ronson drove me to the Scarborough P.D.

Chapter XXV

They kept me in the interrogation room at Scarborough P.D. headquarters while we waited for Aimee Price to arrive, and once again I felt myself following in Merrick’s footsteps. Hansen had wanted to take me to Gray, but Wallace MacArthur, who had come in when he heard that I was being questioned, lobbied on my behalf. I could hear him through the door vouching for me, urging Hansen to hold off the big dogs for a while. I was inexpressibly grateful to him, not so much for saving me an unpleasant trip to Gray with Hansen, but for being willing to step up to the plate when he must have had his own doubts.

Nothing had changed in the room since Merrick had occupied this seat. Even the childish doodles on the whiteboard were the same. I wasn’t cuffed, and Conlough had given me a cup of coffee and a stale doughnut. My head still hurt, but I was gradually waking up to the fact that I had probably said too much back in the house. I still didn’t know what Merrick had done, but I was pretty certain that someone was dead because of it. In the meantime, I realized that I had effectively admitted my gun had been used in the commission of a crime. If Hansen decided to play hardball and charge me, I could find myself behind bars with little hope of making bail. At the very least, he could hold me for days, leaving Merrick to wreak havoc with the Smith 10.

After an hour alone with my thoughts, the door of the interrogation room opened, and Aimee Price was admitted. She was wearing a black skirt and jacket, and a white blouse. Her briefcase was shiny and made of expensive leather. She looked all business. I, by contrast, looked terrible, and she told me so.

“Do you have any idea what’s happening?” I asked.

“All I know is that they’re investigating a shooting. One fatality. Male. Clearly, they think you may be able to help them with some details.”

“Like how I shot him.”

“Bet you’re glad you held on to my card now,” she said.

“I think it brought me bad luck.”

“You want to tell me how much?”

I went through everything with her, from Merrick ’s arrival at the house to Ronson putting me in the back of the cruiser. I left nothing out, apart from the voices. Aimee didn’t need to hear about that.

“How dumb are you?” she said when I was done. “Children know better than to answer a cop’s questions without a lawyer being present.”

“I was tired. My head was hurting.” I realized how pathetic I sounded.

“Dummy. Don’t say another word, not unless you get the nod from me.”

She went back to the door and knocked to indicate that the cops could enter. Conlough came in, followed by Hansen. They took seats across from us. I wondered how many people were crowded around the computer monitor outside, listening to the questions and answers being relayed from the room, watching four figures dance around one another without moving.

Aimee held up a hand.

“You need to tell us what this is about first,” she said.

Conlough looked to Hansen.

“A man named Ricky Demarcian died last night. He was shot in the head over at a trailer park named Tranquility Pines. We have a witness who says that a Mustang matching the one owned by your client was seen driving away from the scene. He even gave us the tag number.”

I could imagine what was happening at Tranquility Pines as we spoke. The state CID’s crime scene unit would be there, along with the white truck of Scarborough ’s own evidence technician, its rear doors personalized with blowups of his thumbprints. He was regarded as one of the best evidence techs in the state, a painfully meticulous man, and it was unlikely that the state guys would discourage him from working alongside their own people. The red-and-white mobile command center, used in conjunction with the fire department, would also be present. There would be bystanders, rubberneckers, potential witnesses being interviewed, trucks from the various local network affiliates, a whole circus converging on one little trailer in one sorry trailer park. They would take casts at the scene, hoping to match the treads to the tires on my Mustang. They wouldn’t find any matches, but it wouldn’t matter. They could argue that the car might have been parked on the road, away from the dirt. Absence of a link to my car wouldn’t prove my innocence. Meanwhile, Hansen had probably set in motion the processes necessary to secure a warrant to search my home, including my garage, if he didn’t already have one. He would want the car, and the gun. In the absence of the latter, he would settle for the box of Cor-Bon ammunition.

“A witness?” said Aimee. “Really?” She gave the word just enough spin to suggest that she found this possibility about as believable as a rumor that the Tooth Fairy had been nabbed with a bag of teeth. “Who’s the witness?”

Hansen didn’t move, but Conlough shifted almost imperceptibly in his chair. No witness. The tip-off was anonymous, in which case it came from Merrick. It didn’t help my situation, though. I knew from their questions about the ammunition that Merrick had used my gun to kill Demarcian and had probably left evidence at the scene. Was it just a bullet or a shell casing, or had he left the gun as well? If he had, then my prints, not his, would be all over it.

“I got to put some harm your way, just to be sure that you got your days filled without worrying about me.”

“We can’t say right now,” said Hansen. “And I hate to sound like a bad movie, but we’re supposed to be asking the questions.”

Aimee shrugged. “Ask away. First of all, though, I’d like you to get a doctor in here. I want the bruises on my client’s side photographed. You’ll see that they contain marks that look like the impact of a fist. A doctor will be able to say how recent they are. He has also recently lost skin from his lips due to the removal of the tape from his mouth. We’ll want those injuries photographed too. I’d also like to get blood and urine samples taken to confirm the presence of above-average levels of trichloromethane in my client’s bloodstream.”

She fired these demands out like bullets. Conlough seemed to take the full force of them.

“Trichlo-what?” he asked, looking to Hansen for help.

“Chloroform,” explained Hansen. He didn’t appear ruffled. “You could just have said chloroform,” he added to Aimee.

“I could, but it wouldn’t have sounded half as impressive. We’ll wait for the doctor to arrive, then you can start asking your questions.”

The two detectives left without saying anything further. After an hour had passed, during which Aimee and I sat in silence, a doctor arrived from the Maine Medical Center in Scarborough. He escorted me to the men’s room, and there I gave a urine sample, and he took some blood from my arm. When he was done, he examined the bruising on my side. Aimee entered with a digital camera and took photographs of the bruises and the cuts to my lips. When she was done, we were escorted back to the interrogation room, where Conlough and Hansen were already waiting for us.

We went through most of the earlier questions again. Each time, I waited for Aimee to indicate that it was safe to answer before I opened my mouth. When it got to the subject of the ammunition, though, she raised her pen.

“My client has already told you that Mr. Merrick stole his weapon.”

“We want to be certain that the ammunition matches,” said Hansen.

“Really?” asked Aimee, and there it was again, that sweetened skepticism, like a lemon coated in castor sugar. “Why?”

Hansen didn’t answer. Neither did Conlough.

“You don’t have the gun, do you, detectives?” said Aimee. “You don’t have a witness either. All you have, at a guess, are a discarded shell casing, and probably the bullet itself. Am I right?”

Hansen tried to stare her down, but eventually gave up. Conlough was staring at his fingernails.

“Am I right?” Aimee said again.

Hansen nodded. He looked like a chastened schoolchild.

As I had guessed, it was a nice touch. Merrick had left the same kind of evidence at the scene that at one point might have been used to convict him. No court would now convict on that basis alone, but Merrick had still succeeded in muddying the waters.

“We can get a warrant,” said Hansen.

“Do that,” said Aimee.

“No.”

Aimee glared at me. Hansen and Conlough both looked up.

“You won’t need a warrant.”

“What are you-” began Aimee, but I stopped her by placing my hand on her arm.

“I’ll hand over the ammunition. Match away. He took my gun and used it to kill Demarcian, then left the casing and made the call so you’d come knocking on my door. It’s his idea of a joke. Merrick was facing a murder trial in Virginia on the basis of a bullet match and nothing more, but the case fell apart when the FBI started making panicked noises about the reliability of the tests. Even without that, the case probably wouldn’t have held up. Merrick did it to cause me trouble, and that’s all.”

“And why would be do that?” asked Conlough.

“You know the answer. You interviewed him in this room. His daughter disappeared while he was in jail. He wants to find out what happened to her. He felt I was getting in his way.”

“Why didn’t he just kill you?” asked Hansen. He sounded like he could have forgiven Merrick the impulse.

“It wouldn’t have been right, not in his eyes. He has a code, of sorts.”

“Not enough of a code to stop him from putting a bullet through Ricky Demarcian’s head, assuming you’re telling the truth,” said Hansen.

“Why would I want to kill Demarcian?” I asked. “I never even heard of him until this morning.”

Again, Conlough and Hansen exchanged glances. After a few seconds, Hansen let out a deep breath and made a “go ahead” gesture with his right hand. He already seemed on the verge of giving up. His earlier confidence was dissipating. The bruising, the tests to confirm the traces of chloroform, all had rattled him. Secretly, too, I think he knew I was telling the truth. He just didn’t want to believe it. It would have given him some pleasure to lock me up. I offended his sense of order. Still, however much he disliked me, he was enough of a by-the-book cop not to want to rig the evidence only to have the case explode in his face the first time it went before a judge.

“Demarcian’s trailer was packed to the gills with computer equipment,” said Conlough. “We think he had ties to organized crime in Boston. Seems like he took care of some escort Web sites.”

“For the Italians?”

Conlough shook his head. “Russians.”

“Not good people.”

“Nope. We heard talk that it wasn’t just older escorts either.”

“Kids?”

Conlough looked to Hansen again, but Hansen had retreated into a studied silence.

“Like I said, it was talk, but there was no evidence. Without evidence, we couldn’t get a warrant. We were working on it, trying to find a way onto Demarcian’s list, but it was slow.”

“Looks like your problem is solved,” I said.

“You sure you never heard of Demarcian?” asked Hansen. “He sounds like the kind of guy you’d have no problem shooting in the head.”

“What do you mean by that?” I asked.

“Wouldn’t be the first time that gun of yours made a hole in someone. You might just have felt that Demarcian was a deserving cause.”

I felt Aimee’s hand touch my leg gently under the table, warning me not to be drawn out by Hansen.

“You want to charge me with something, go ahead,” I said. “Otherwise, you’re just using up good air.” I turned my attention back to Conlough. “Was the gunshot the only injury to Demarcian?”

Conlough didn’t answer. He couldn’t, I supposed, without giving away what little evidence they still had against me. I kept going.

“If Merrick tortured him first, then it could be that Demarcian told him something he could use before he died.”

“What would Demarcian know?” asked Conlough. The tone of the interview had altered. Perhaps Conlough hadn’t been convinced of my involvement right from the start, but now we had moved from an interrogation situation to two men thinking aloud. Unfortunately, Hansen didn’t care much for the new direction. He muttered something that sounded like “bullshit.” Even though Hansen was ostensibly in charge, Conlough glanced at him in warning, but the remains of the fire that had been lit in Hansen still glowed, and he wasn’t about to extinguish it unless he had no other choice. He gave it one last try.

“It’s bullshit,” he repeated. “It’s your gun. It’s your car the witness saw leaving the scene. It’s your finger-”

“Hey!” Conlough interrupted him. He stood and walked to the door, indicating that Hansen should follow him. Hansen threw back his chair and went. The door closed behind them.

“Not a fan of yours?” said Aimee.

“I’ve never met him properly before today. The state cops don’t care much for me as a rule, but he has a terminal beef.”

“I may have to juice up my rates. Nobody seems to like you.”

“Occupational hazard. How are we doing?”

“Okay, I think, apart from your inability to keep your mouth shut. Let’s assume Merrick used your gun to kill Demarcian. Let’s assume also that he made the call about your car. All they have is ballistic evidence, and no direct connection to you apart from the box of shells. It’s not enough to charge you with anything, not until they get a ballistics match, or a print from the casing. Even then, I can’t see the AG’s Office going ahead unless the cops come up with more evidence linking you to the scene. They won’t have trouble getting a warrant to search your home for the box of ammunition, so you may be right just to hand it over. If things turn bad, it might help us with a judge if you’ve cooperated from the start. If they have the gun, though, then we could find ourselves with real difficulties.”

“Why would I leave my gun at the scene?”

“You know they won’t think that way. If it’s enough to hold you, then they’ll use it. We’ll wait and see. If they have the gun, they’ll spring it on us soon enough. My guess, though, from watching you and Detective Conlough bond over the table, is that the gun went with Merrick.”

She tapped her pen on the table.

“Conlough doesn’t seem to like Hansen much either.”

“Conlough’s okay, but I don’t think he’d put it past me to kill someone like Demarcian either. He just figures I’d do a better job of covering my tracks if I did kill him.”

“And you’d have waited until he had a gun in his hand,” added Aimee. “Jesus, it’s like the Wild West.”

The minutes ticked by. Fifteen. Twenty. Thirty.

Aimee checked her watch. “What the hell are they doing out there?”

She was about to get up and find out what was going on when I heard a peculiar, yet familiar, sound. It was a dog barking. It sounded a lot like Walter.

“I think that’s my dog,” I said.

“They brought your dog in? As what, a witness?”

The door of the interrogation room opened and Conlough entered. He looked almost relieved.

“You’re off the hook,” he said. “We’ll need you to sign a statement, but otherwise you’re free to go.”

Aimee tried to hide her surprise, but failed. We followed Conlough outside. Bob and Shirley Johnson were in the reception area, Bob standing and holding Walter on the end of a leash, Shirley sitting on a hard plastic chair, her wheeled walker beside her.

“Seems the old lady doesn’t sleep so good,” said Conlough. “She likes to sit at her window when her joints hurt. She saw your guy leave the house at three a.m., then return at five. She swore a statement to say your car never left its garage, and you didn’t leave the house. The three-five window matches Demarcian’s time of death.” He smiled grimly. “Hansen’s pretty pissed. He liked you for the shooting.”

Then the smile faded.

“You don’t need me to remind you, but I will anyway. Merrick has your gun. He used it to kill Demarcian. I was you, I’d be looking to get it back before he uses it again. In the meantime, you ought to learn to take better care of your property.”

He turned on his heel. I went over to the Johnsons to thank them. Predictably, Walter went nuts. Another hour later, my statement duly signed, I was allowed to leave. Aimee Price drove me home. The Johnsons had gone ahead with Walter, mainly because Aimee refused to have him in her car.

“Any word on Andy Kellog’s transfer?” I asked.

“I’m trying to get a hearing over the next day or two.”

“You ask him about that tattoo?”

“He said there were no dates, no numbers. It was just an eagle’s head.”

I swore silently. It meant that Ronald Straydeer’s contact would be of no help. Another line of inquiry had ended in nothing.

“How is Andy?”

“Recovering. His nose is still a mess.”

“And mentally?”

“He’s been talking about you, and about Merrick.”

“Anything interesting?”

“He thinks Merrick is going to kill you.”

“Well, he wasn’t far off the mark, but Merrick had his chance. He didn’t take it.”

“It doesn’t mean he won’t try again. I don’t understand why he wants you out of the way so badly.”

“He’s a revenger. He doesn’t want anyone to deprive him of his chance of retribution.”

“He thinks his daughter’s dead?”

“Yes. He doesn’t want to admit it, but he knows it’s the truth.”

“Do you think she’s dead?”

“Yes.”

“So what are you going to do now?”

“I have another lawyer to visit, then I’m going to head up to Jackman.”

“Two lawyers in one day. You must be mellowing.”

“I’ve had my shots. I should be okay.”

She snorted but didn’t reply.

“Thanks for coming out here,” I said. “I appreciate it.”

“I’m billing you. It wasn’t charity.”

We pulled up in front of my house. I got out of the car and thanked Aimee again.

“Just remember,” she said. “I’m a lawyer, not a doctor. You tangle with Merrick again, and my services won’t be much use to you.”

“I tangle with Merrick again, and one of us won’t need a doctor or a lawyer. He’ll be beyond the help of either.”

She shook her head. “There you go with the Wild West stuff again. You take care of yourself. I can’t see anyone else willing to do it.”

She drove away. I walked over to the Johnsons and had a cup of coffee with them. Walter would have to stay with them for a few more days. They didn’t mind. I don’t think Walter minded either. They fed him better than I did. They even fed him better than I fed myself. Then I went home, showered to remove the smell and feel of the interrogation room, and put on a jacket and shirt. Conlough was right. I had to find Merrick before he used the Smith 10 again. I knew where to start too. There was a lawyer down in the Commonwealth with some questions to answer. I had avoided confronting him again until now, but I no longer had a choice. As I dressed, I thought about why I had delayed talking to Eldritch again. It was partly because I believed that he wouldn’t be of much help unless the stakes were raised, and Merrick ’s killing of Demarcian had certainly done that. But I also knew that there was another reason for my reluctance: his client. Against my better judgment, and against all of my strongest instincts, I was being drawn inexorably into the world of the Collector.