The Whisperers

23

The Rangeley Lakes region of the state, north-west of Portland, east of the New Hampshire state line and just south of the Canadian border, was not one with which I was very familiar. It was best known as a sportsman’s paradise, and had been since the nineteenth century. I had never had much cause to go there, although I had a vague recollection of passing through it as a boy, my parents in the front seats of my father’s beloved LeSabre, on our way to somewhere else: Canada, perhaps, because I can’t imagine my father going all that way to visit eastern New Hampshire. He always regarded New Hampshire as suspect, for some reason that I never fully grasped, but it is so long ago now, and my parents are no longer around to ask.

I did have one other memory of Rangeley, and that came from a man named Phineas Arbogast, who was a friend of my grandfather and sometimes hunted in the woods around Rangeley, where his family had a cabin and, it seems, had always had a cabin, for Phineas Arbogast was ‘Old Maine’ and could probably have traced his ancestry back to the nomads who crossed from Asia into North America eleven thousand years before over the spit of land that is now the Bering Islands, or at least to some pigheaded pilgrim who had headed north to escape the worst rigors of Puritanism. As a boy, I had found his speech almost unintelligible, for Phineas could have drawled for his country. He could even find ways to lengthen a word that didn’t have any vowels to lengthen. He could have drawled in Polish.

My grandfather was fond of Phineas who, if he could be pinned down, and understood, was a mine of historical and geographical knowledge. As he grew older, some of that knowledge inevitably began to leach from his brain, and he tried to put it down in a book before it all trickled away, but he didn’t have the patience for the task. He was part of an older, oral tradition: he told his stories aloud so that others might remember them and pass them on in turn, but eventually the only ones who would listen to him were people nearly as old as he was. Young people didn’t want to hear Phineas’s stories, not then, and by the time some people from one of the universities came looking for people like him to record their tales, Phineas was telling his stories late at night to his neighbors in the churchyard.

So the memory I have is of Phineas and my grandfather sitting by the fire, Phineas talking, my grandfather listening. My father was dead by then, my mother elsewhere that night, so it was we three only, warming ourselves by the winter logs. My grandfather had asked Phineas why he didn’t go to his cabin so much anymore, and Phineas had paused before answering. It wasn’t his usual pause, a moment to draw breath and compose his thoughts before starting out along a rambling anecdotal path. No, there was uncertainty and – could it be? – an unwillingness to proceed. So my grandfather waited, curious, and so did I, and eventually Phineas Arbogast told us why he no longer went to his cabin in the woods near Rangeley.

He had been hunting squirrel with his dog, Misty, a mutt whose ancestry was as complex as that of some royal families, and who duly carried herself like a bastard princess. Phineas had no use for the squirrels that he shot: he just didn’t care much for squirrels. Misty, as usual, had gone racing ahead, and after a time Phineas could no longer see or hear her. He whistled for her, but she didn’t return, and Misty, despite her airs, was an obedient dog. So Phineas went searching for her, moving deeper and deeper into the woods, and farther and farther from his cabin. It began to grow dark, and still he searched, for he was not going to leave her alone in the forest. He called her name, over and over, to no reply. He began to fear that a bear might have taken her, or a lynx or bobcat, until at last he thought that he heard Misty whining, and he followed the sound, grateful that he still had most of his hearing and more of his eyesight, even at seventy-three.

He came to a clearing, and there was Misty, now barely visible as the moon appeared in the sky. Briars had wound themselves around her legs and her muzzle, and as she had struggled against them the briars had tightened on her, so that all she could do was whimper softly. Phineas drew his knife, preparing to free her, when there was movement to his right, and he turned his flashlight in that direction.

A little girl of perhaps six or seven stood at the edge of the clearing. Her hair was dark, and she was very pale. She wore a black dress of coarse cloth, and simple black shoes on her feet. She didn’t blink in the strong beam of the flashlight, nor did she raise her hands to shield her eyes. In fact, Phineas thought, the light seemed to make no difference to her whatsoever; it was as if she merely absorbed it into her skin, for she appeared to glow whitely from within.

‘Honey,’ said Phineas, ‘what are you doing way out here?’

‘I’m lost,’ said the girl. ‘Help me.’

Her voice sounded strange, as though it were coming from inside a cave, or the hollowed-out trunk of a tree. It echoed when it should not have done so.

Phineas moved toward her, already shrugging his coat off to put it over her shoulders, when he saw Misty tugging at the briars again, her tail now wedged between her back legs. The effort clearly caused her pain, but still she was determined to break free. When her attempt continued to prove fruitless, she faced the girl and growled. Phineas could see the dog trembling in the moonlight, and the hackles on her neck were raised. When he looked back, the girl had retreated a couple of feet, moving a little deeper into the woods.

‘Help me,’ she repeated. ‘I’m lost, and I’m lonely.’

Phineas was wary now, although he could not have said why, beyond the girl’s pallor and the effect her presence was having on his dog, yet still he walked toward her, and as he did so she moved a little farther away, until at last the clearing was at his back, and there was only forest before him: forest, and the dim form of the girl among the trees. Phineas lowered his torch, but the girl did not fade into the shadows of the forest. Instead, she continued to luminesce faintly, and although Phineas could see his own breath pluming thickly before him, no such cloud emerged from the girl’s mouth, not even as she spoke again.

‘Please, I’m lonely and I’m scared,’ she said. ‘Come with me.’

Now she raised her hand, beckoning to him, and he saw the dirt beneath her fingernails, as though she had clawed her way out of some dark spot, a hiding place of earth, and worms, and scuttling bugs.

‘No, honey,’ said Phineas. ‘I don’t think I’ll be going anywhere with you.’

Without taking his eyes from her, he backed away until he was beside Misty, and then he squatted and began to hack at the briars. They came away reluctantly, and they were sticky to the touch. Even as he cut at them, he thought that he felt others begin to curl around his boots, but later he told himself that it was probably just his mind playing tricks on him, as if that one small detail might make up for the far greater trick of a girl glowing in the forest depths, asking an old man to join her in her forest bower. He felt her anger, and her frustration and, yes, her sadness, for she was lonely, and she was scared, but she didn’t want to be saved. She wanted to visit her loneliness and fear on another, and Phineas didn’t know what would be worse: to die in the woods with the girl for company, until eventually the world faded to black; or to die and then wake up to find himself like her, wandering the woods looking for others to share his misery.

At last, Misty was freed. The dog shot away, then paused to make sure that her master was following her, for even in her relief to be free she would not abandon him in this place, just as he had not abandoned her. Slowly, Phineas went after her, his eyes fixed on the little girl, keeping her in sight for as long as he could, until she was visible no longer and he found himself once again on familiar ground.

And that was why Phineas Arbogast stopped going to his cabin in the Rangeley woods, where the ruins of it may still be visible somewhere between Rangeley and Langdon, bound with sticky briars as nature claims it as her own.

Nature, and a little girl with pale, glowing skin, seeking in vain for a playmate to join her in her games.

I still had an old edition of a brochure called Maine Invites You given to me by Phineas. It was published by the Maine Publicity Bureau sometime in the late 1930s or early 1940s, as the letter of greeting inside the front cover was written by Governor Lewis O. Barrows, who was in office from 1937 until 1941. Barrows was an old-school Republican of the stripe that some of his more rabid descendants would cross the street to avoid: he balanced the budget, improved state school funding, and reinstated old-age benefits payments, all while reducing the state deficit. Rush Limbaugh would have called him a socialist.

The brochure was a touching tribute to a bygone era, when you could rent a high-end cabin for thirty dollars per week, and eat a chicken dinner for a dollar. Most of the places mentioned in it are long gone – the Lafayette Hotel in Portland, the Willows and the Checkley out at Prouts Neck – and the writers managed to find something kind to say about almost everywhere, even those towns whose own residents had trouble figuring out why they’d stayed in them, never mind why anyone else might want to travel there on vacation.

The town of Langdon, midway between Rangeley and Stratton, had a page all to itself, and it was interesting to note how many times the name Proctor appeared on the advertisements: among others, there was a Proctor’s Camp, and the Bald Mountain Diner, run by E. and A. Proctor, and R. H. Proctor’s Lakeview Fine Dining Restaurant. Clearly, the Proctors had Langdon pretty much all sewn up back in the day, and the town was enough of a draw for tourists – or the Proctors felt that it might be – to justify taking out a series of top-end ads, each one adorned with a photograph of the establishment in question.

Whatever appeal Langdon might once have had for visitors was no longer apparent, if it had ever been anything more than a figment of the Proctors’ own ambitions to begin with. It was now merely a strip of decrepit houses and struggling businesses, closer to the New Hampshire border than the Canadian, but easily accessible from either. The Bald Mountain Diner was still there, but it looked like it hadn’t served a meal for at least a decade. The town’s only store bore a sign announcing that it was closed due to a bereavement and would reopen in a week’s time. The notice was dated October 10th, 2005, which suggested the kind of mourning period usually associated with the deaths of kings. Apart from that, there was a hairdresser’s, a taxidermist’s, and a bar named the Belle Dam, which might have been a clever pun on Rangeley’s own dams or, as seemed more likely on closer inspection, the result of the loss of a letter ‘e’ from the sign. There was nobody on the streets, although a couple of cars were parked along it. Ironically, only the taxidermy showed any signs of life. The front door was open, and a man in overalls came out to watch me as I took in the bright lights of Langdon. I figured him for sixty or more, but he might just as easily have been older and holding off the predations of the years. Maybe it had something to do with all of the preservatives with which he worked.

‘Quiet,’ I said.

‘I guess,’ he replied, in the manner of one who wasn’t entirely convinced that this was the case and, even if it was, he sort of liked it that way.

I looked around again. It didn’t seem like there was much room for argument, but maybe he knew something that I didn’t about what was going on behind all of those closed doors.

‘Hotter than a Methodist hell, and all,’ he added. He was right. I hadn’t noticed while I was in the car, but I had begun to perspire as soon as I stepped from it. The taxidermist, meanwhile, wasn’t so much sweating as self-basting. No-see-ums hovered around us both.

‘Your name wouldn’t be Proctor, by any chance?’ I asked him.

‘No, I’m Stunden.’

‘You mind if I ask you some questions, Mr. Stunden?’

‘You already are, far as I can tell.’

He was grinning crookedly, but there was no malice in it. He was just breaking the monotony of daily life in Langdon. He detached himself from the frame of his door and indicated with a nod of his head that I should follow him inside. The interior was dark. Antlers, tagged and numbered, lay on the floor or hung from the old rafters. A recently stuffed and mounted large-mouth bass was propped on top of a freezer to my left, and to the right were shelves lined with jars of chemicals, paint, and assorted glass eyes. Blood had dripped down the side of the freezer, hardening and then corroding the metal. The room was dominated by a steel workbench upon which currently lay a deer hide and a round-bladed shaver. Piles of discarded meat lay on the floor beneath the bench. I could see that he knew his business: he was being careful to scrape the hide down to the dermis, leaving no trace of fat that might turn to acid and cause the hide to smell, or the hair to fall out. Nearby was a foam mannequin of a deer head, waiting for the skin to be applied to it. The whole place stank of dead flesh. I couldn’t help but wrinkle my nose.

‘Sorry about the smell,’ he said. ‘I don’t notice it anymore. I’d talk to you outside, but I got this deer hide to finish, and I’m working on a couple of ducks for the same guy.’

He pointed at two clear containers of ground corncob, in which he was degreasing the duck carcasses. ‘Can’t shave a duck,’ he said. ‘The skin won’t take it.’

Since shaving a duck had never struck me as something I’d feel the inclination to do, I contented myself with observing that it wasn’t yet hunting season.

‘This deer died of natural causes,’ said Stunden. ‘Tripped and fell on a bullet.’

‘And the ducks?’

‘They drowned.’

As he worked the shaver, he began to sweat even more.

‘Looks like hard grind,’ I said.

Stunden shrugged. ‘Deer are hard. Waterfowl, not so much. I can take care of a duck in a couple of hours, and I get to indulge my artistic side. You have to be careful with the colors, else it won’t look right. I’ll get five hundred dollars for those ones. I know the guy will pay, too, and that’s not always the case. Times are hard. I take deposits now, and I never had to do that before.’

He continued shaving the deer. The sound was faintly unpleasant. ‘So, what brings you to Langdon?’

‘I’m looking for a man named Harold Proctor.’

‘He in trouble?’

‘Why do you ask?’

‘No disrespect, but al’st I know is that you look like the kind of man calls about trouble.’

‘My name’s Charlie Parker. I’m a private investigator.’

‘Doesn’t answer my question. Is Harold in trouble?’

‘He might be, but not from me.’

‘He coming into money?’

‘Again, he might be, but not from me.’

Stunden glanced up from his work. ‘He lives out by the family motel, about a mile west of here. Hard as a snowsnake to find, though, if you don’t know the road.’

‘The motel still in business?’

‘The only thing still in business here is me, and I don’t know how long more I’ll be able to say that. The motel’s been closed for a decade or so now. Before that, it was a camp, but motels seemed to be the way to go, or so the Proctors thought. Harold’s momma and poppa used to run it, but they died, and the motel closed. Never made much money anyway. Poor location out in the williwigs for a motel. Harold’s the last of the Proctors. Hard to believe. They used to run half this town, and the other half paid them rent, but they weren’t big breeders, the Proctors; or lookers, come to think of it, which might have something to do with it. The Proctor creatures were kind of homely, I seem to recall.’

‘And the men?’

‘Well, I wasn’t looking at the men, so I can’t rightly say.’ His eyes twinkled in the gloom, and I guessed that Mr. Stunden might have been quite the heartbreaker in his time, had there been anyone apart from homely Proctor women on whom to test his charms. ‘When they started dying out, the town died with them. Now we get by on what we can make from Rangeley’s overflow, which ain’t much.’

I waited as he completed his work on the hide. He switched off the shaver, and used dish soap to clean the grease from his hands.

‘I ought to tell you that Harold’s not too sociable,’ he said. ‘He was never what you might call outgoing, but he came back from Iraq – the first war, not this one – with a troubled disposition. He keeps himself to himself out there, mostly. I pass him on the road from time to time, and I see him at Our Lady of the Lakes in Oquossoc on Sundays, but that’s it. Best I can get out of him now is a nod. Like I said, he’s never been exactly friendly, but until recently he’d always give you the time of day, and a word or two on the weather. He used to come into the Belle Dam, and if he was in the mood we’d talk.’ He pronounced it ‘Belle Dayme.’ ‘In case you’re wondering, I own that too. During hunting season, I make a few bucks on it. The rest of the year, it’s just something to do in the evenings.’

‘Did he talk to you about his time in Iraq?’

‘Generally he preferred to drink alone. He’d buy his liquor in New Hampshire, or over the border in Canada, and bring it back to his place, but once a week he’d come out of the woods and relax some. He hated it over there. Said he spent most of his time either bored or scared shitless. But, you know-’

He stopped speaking, but continued drying his hands as he sized me up. ‘Why don’t you tell me your interest in Harold before I go any further?’

‘You seem protective of him.’

‘This is a small town, and barely that. If we don’t look out for one another, who will?’

‘And yet you’re worried enough about Harold to talk with a stranger.’

‘Who says I’m worried?’

‘You wouldn’t be talking to me otherwise, and I can see it in your eyes. I told you, I don’t mean him any harm. For what it’s worth, I’m working for the father of a former soldier who served in Iraq this time round. His son committed suicide after he returned home. It seems that the boy’s behavior had changed in the weeks before his death, and his father wants to know what might have brought that on. Harold knew the boy some, I think, because he attended the funeral. I just want to ask him some questions.’

Stunden shook his head in sadness. ‘That’s a hard burden to bear. You got kids?’

That question always gave me pause. Yes, I have a daughter. And, once, I had another.

‘One,’ I said. ‘A girl.’

‘I got two boys, fourteen and seventeen.’ He must have seen something in my face, because he said: ‘I married late in life. Too late, I think. I was set in my ways, and I never could get my head around girlin’. My boys live with their mother down in Skowhegan now. I wouldn’t want them to join the military. If one of my sons wanted to join up, then I’d let them know how I felt about it but I wouldn’t try to stop him. Still, if I had a boy over in Iraq or Afghanistan, I’d spend every hour just praying for him to be safe. I think it would cost me some of the years left to me.’

He leaned back against his workbench.

‘Like I said, Harold’s changed,’ he said. ‘I don’t mean just because of the war, and his injury. I think he’s sick, inside.’ He tapped the side of his head, just in case I was under any illusions about the nature of Proctor’s troubles. ‘The last time he came into the bar, which was, oh, must be two weeks ago, he looked different, like he wasn’t sleeping right. I’d have said that he was frightened. I had to ask him what was wrong, it was so obvious to me.’

‘What did he say?’

‘Well, he’d had a skinful by then, and that was before he even got as far as the Dame, but he told me that he was being haunted.’ He let the word hang in the air for a moment, waiting for the dead flesh and old hides to cover it and give it form. ‘He said that he was hearing voices, that they were keeping him from his sleep. I told him he should go see a military doctor, that maybe he was suffering from that stress thing. Post-traumatic whatever.’

‘What were these voices saying?’

‘He couldn’t understand them. They didn’t speak English. That was when I became sure that it was something to do with what happened to him over there. We talked about it some more, and he said that he might give someone a call.’

‘And did he?’

‘I don’t know. That was the last time he came into the bar. But I was concerned about him, so a week after that I took a ride out to his place to see how he was. There was a car parked outside his cabin, so I figured that he had visitors and decided not to disturb him. As I was reversing back down the hill, the cabin door opened, and four men came out. Harold was one of them. I didn’t recognize the other three. They just watched me go. But later, the three visitors came here, and stood where you’re standing now. They asked me what I was doing out at Harold’s place. The colored one who did most of the talking was real polite about it, but I could tell that he didn’t like the fact I’d driven out there. I told them the truth: that I was a friend of Harold’s, and I was worried about him, that he hadn’t seemed himself of late. That seemed to satisfy him. He told me they were old army buddies of Harold’s, and that Harold was doing just fine.’

‘You had no cause to disbelieve them?’

‘They were military men for sure. They had that bearing about them. The other one limped some, and was missing fingers from here.’ Stunden held up his left hand. ‘I took it for a war wound.’

Joel Tobias.

‘And the third?’

‘He didn’t say much. Big guy, bald head. I didn’t care for him.’

That was Bacci, I thought, remembering Ronald Straydeer’s annotated photograph. Karen Emory didn’t like him either. I wondered if he was the one who had first suggested raping me at the Blue Moon.

‘Anyway, the bald guy asked if I’d be able to preserve a person, and made some joke about trophies for his wall,’ said Stunden. ‘“Haji,” that’s the word that he used: haji trophies for his wall. I guess he meant terrorists. The other guy, his friend with the damaged hand, told him to shut his mouth.’

‘And you haven’t spoken to Harold since that night at the bar?’

‘No. Seen him once or twice in passing, but he hasn’t been back at the Dame.’

Stunden had nothing more to add. I thanked him for his time. He asked me not to tell Harold Proctor that we’d spoken, and I gave him that promise. As we walked to the door, Stunden said: ‘This boy, the one who killed himself, you say his father thought that he’d changed before he died?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Changed how, you mind me asking?’

‘Cut himself off from his friends. Became paranoid. Had trouble sleeping.’

‘Like Harold.’

‘Yes, like Harold.’

‘Maybe, after you’ve talked to him, I’ll go out there and see how he’s doing. Could be I can convince him to see someone before-’

He trailed off. I shook his hand.

‘I think that would be a good thing to do, Mr. Stunden. I’ll try to call by before I leave, let you know how it all went.’

‘I’d appreciate that,’ he said.

He gave me directions to Proctor’s place, then raised a hand in farewell as I drove away. I did the same, and the fragrance from the soap that Stunden had used to clean himself, and which had passed to me from his hand, wafted through the car. It was strong, but not strong enough, for underlying it was an animal smell of flesh and burnt hair. I opened the window, despite the heat and the bugs, but it would not disperse. It was on my skin, and it stayed with me all the way to the Proctor motel.

24

Despite Stunden’s directions, I still managed to miss the turn for the motel on my first pass. He had told me that the remains of a big sign were just about visible across from the entrance road, but the forest had grown thickly around it and it was only by chance on the return run that I caught a glimpse of it through the foliage. Some faded red letters were barely discernible on the rotting wood, along with what might have been deer antlers, but a green arrow that would once have stood out against the white of the sign was now merely another shade in summer’s paintbox.

Its origins as a camp were clear, as it lay at the top of a curving trail that ran west through thick woods. The trail was pitted, and the undergrowth had not been cut back for so long that it scraped at the side of my car, but I spotted broken branches and crushed vegetation in places, and the tracks of a heavy vehicle were clear in the dirt like the slowly fossilizing footprints of a dinosaur.

Eventually, I emerged into a clearing. To my right was a small cabin, its doors and windows firmly closed despite the heat. It was probably a relic of the original camp. It certainly looked old enough. I could see part of what appeared to be a more modern extension at the back, where the cabin’s living area had been expanded for long-term habitation. Between the cabin and where I was parked stood a red Dodge truck.

Another dirt track led from the cabin to the motel. It was a standard L-shaped structure, with the office at the angle where the two arms met and a vertical neon ‘MOTEL’ sign, long out of use, pointing up at the sky. I wondered if it had even been visible from the road, since the motel was located in a kind of natural hollow. Maybe the cabins had proved too difficult to maintain, and the Proctors believed that their customers would remain loyal to them even after they went with the times and changed to a motel, but it was clear that Stunden had been right: nothing about the Proctor motel suggested that it had ever been a good idea to build it. Now the doors and windows of every unit were boarded up, the grass had grown through the cracked stone of the parking lot, and ivy was creeping up the walls and along the flat roof. If it stayed standing for long enough, it would join the ranks of the other phantom towns and abandoned dwellings that were so much a part of this state.

I sounded the horn and waited. Nobody emerged from the cabin or the surrounding woods. I recalled what Stunden had said about Proctor. A veteran living out here in the wild was likely to have a gun, and if Proctor was as disturbed as Stunden had intimated then I didn’t want him taking me for a threat. His truck was still there, so he couldn’t have gone far. I hit the horn again, then left the car and began to walk to the cabin. As I did so, I glanced into the cab of the truck. An open pack of doughnuts lay on the passenger seat. It was crawling with ants.

I knocked on the cabin door and called Proctor’s name, but there was no reply. I peered through a window. The television lay busted on the floor, and I could see pieces of a phone scattered beside it. The bed was unmade, a yellowed sheet coiled upon the floor like melted ice cream.

I returned to the door, half-expecting to see an irate Proctor emerge from the woods, waving a gun and muttering about ghosts, then tried the handle. It opened easily. Flies buzzed, and there were more ants moving in columns across the linoleum floor. The whole place stank of cigarette smoke. I checked the refrigerator. The milk was still in date, but it was as close as Proctor was likely to come to a healthy diet, because otherwise the refrigerator was filled with the kind of food that would sap a dietician’s will to live: cheap ready meals, microwaveable burgers, processed meats. There was no sign of fruit or vegetables, and at least half of the storage space was devoted to bottles of regular cola. The trash bag in the corner was packed with discarded French fry cartons, chicken buckets, burger wrappers from fast food joints, crushed Red Bull cans, and empty bottles of Vicks Nyquil. Apart from canned soups and beans, Proctor’s kitchen shelves showed mainly candy and cookies. I also found a couple of big jars of coffee, and half a dozen bottles of cheap gin and vodka. The sleeping area contained more bottles of Nyquil, a bunch of antihistamines, and some Sominex. Proctor was living on stimulants – sugar, energy drinks, caffeine, nicotine – and then using mostly over-the-counter medicines to help him sleep. There was also an empty package of clozapine, recently prescribed by a local physician, which meant that Proctor had been desperate enough to seek professional help. Clozapine was an anti-psychotic used as a sedative, and also as a means of treating schizophrenia. I thought back to my conversation with Bernie Kramer’s sister, and the fact that Kramer had been hearing voices before he took his own life. I wondered what voices Harold Proctor was hearing.

On the bed lay the keys to the truck, and an empty holster.

I continued searching the place, which was how I found the envelope of cash. It had been placed beneath the mattress, unsealed, and contained 2,500 dollars in twenties and fifties, all neatly arranged face-up. Even out here, it didn’t make much sense for a man to leave money like that under his mattress, but then none of this made any sense. Proctor clearly hadn’t been in his trailer, or his truck, for some time. If he’d intended to leave, he’d have taken the money, and the truck. If there was a problem with his truck, he’d still have taken the money. I looked at the envelope again. It was clean and new. It hadn’t been under the mattress for very long.

I put the money back where I found it and walked down to the motel. Only the office was not boarded up. The door was unlocked, so I took a look inside. Proctor had clearly been using it for storage: there were cans of food stacked in one corner – beans, chili, and stews, mostly – along with big packs of toilet paper and some old window screens. A faint whirring sound was coming from somewhere. Behind the reception desk was a closed door, presumably leading into an office. I lifted the hatch on the counter and stepped inside. The sound was louder now. I pushed the door open with my foot.

Before me was a wooden console, with sixteen small bulbs arrayed in lines of four, each marked with a number. The sound was coming from a speaker beside the console. I guessed that it was an old intercom system, enabling guests to communicate with the front desk without using a phone. I’d never seen anything like it before, but it might be that the Proctors hadn’t bothered with phones in all the rooms when the motel opened, or they had first opted for a quainter system and then retained it as a conversation piece. The console didn’t have a maker’s name on it, and I thought that it might have been hand built by the Proctors. Clearly, though, there was still power running in the motel.

The sound was making me uneasy. It might simply have been a malfunction, but why now? Anyway, power or no power, the system shouldn’t even have been working after all these years. Then again, they used to build things to last, and it was depressing how easily we were surprised by good workmanship these days. I checked the console, tapping the bulbs as I went.

When I tapped the bulb for room fifteen, it began to blink redly.

I drew my gun and went back outside, following the doors along the right. When I came to fourteen, I saw that the screws had been removed from the board on its door, and the board itself now simply lay against the frame. When I reached room fifteen, though, its board was still firmly in place. Nevertheless, I could hear an echo of the intercom buzzer from inside.

I leaned against the wall between the two rooms and called out.

‘Mr. Proctor? You in there?’

There was no reply. Quickly, I pushed away the board from in front of room fourteen. The door behind it was closed. I tried the handle, and it opened easily. Daylight shone on the frame of a bare bed that had been pushed upright against the wall, leaving the floor space largely clear. Two bedside lockers had been stacked in a corner. Otherwise, the room was unfurnished. There were white strands on the carpet, which smelled of mold. I picked up one of the strands and held it to the light: it was a wood shaving. Beside the lockers lay a couple of foam chips. I ran my hand across the carpet, and felt the marks left by boxes of some kind. Carefully, I approached the small bathroom at the back, but it was empty. There was no connecting door between rooms fourteen and fifteen.

I was about to leave when I noticed marks on the wall. I had to use my flashlight to see them properly. They looked like handprints, but they seemed to have been burnt into the paint work. Ash and blistered paint fell away when I touched my fingers to them. I had an uncomfortable sense of contamination, and although the bed was bare, and the room was damp, I felt that it had been occupied recently, so recently that I could almost hear the fading echo of a conversation.

I went outside again, and examined the boarded-up entrance to room fifteen. It should have been held in place by screws, just like the other doors that I had passed, but no heads were visible. With no great expectation of success, I managed to slip my fingers into the gap between the board and the door frame, and tugged.

The board came away easily, almost knocking me backward as it did. I saw that it had been held loosely in place by a single long screw drilled through the frame into the board. The screw had been driven in from inside, not out. This time, when I tried the door handle, it did not open. I kicked at it, but it was sealed tight. I went back to my car and retrieved a crowbar from the trunk, but even with it I had no luck. The door had been firmly secured from within. Instead, I began to work on the board covering the window. That was easier, as it had been nailed, not screwed, into the frame. When it came away it revealed filthy, thick glass, cracked, but not shattered, by a pair of bullet holes. The drapes were drawn inside the room.

It took a little effort, but I managed to smash the thick glass with the crowbar, shielding myself with the wall just in case whoever was in there was still together enough to take a shot at me, but no sound came. As soon as I smelled the odor coming from inside, I knew why. I pushed the drapes aside and climbed into the room.

The bed had been broken up, and its boards nailed to the door frame, sealing it shut. More long nails had been driven through the door and into the frame at an angle, although some of them had come away, either partially or entirely, as though whoever had put them in place had then reconsidered and begun removing them again; that, or they were so long that they’d penetrated right through, and someone from outside had started hammering them back, although I could see no damage to the ends.

There was more furniture in this room than in its neighbor: a long chest and a TV stand in addition to twin beds and two bedside lockers. It had all been stacked in one corner, the way a child might have constructed a fortress at home. I moved closer. A man lay slumped in the corner behind the furniture, his head resting against the intercom button on the wall. There was a cloud of blood and bone behind his head, and a Browning hung loosely from his right hand. The man’s body was swollen, and so colonized by maggots and insects that they gave it the impression of movement and life. They had quarried in his eyes, leaving them hollow. I covered my mouth with my hand, but the smell was too strong. I leaned out of the window, gasping, and tried not to throw up. Once I’d recovered, I took off my jacket and pressed it against my face, then made a cursory examination of the room. There was a tool kit beside the body, along with a nail gun. There was no sign of food or water. I ran my fingers over the metal backing of the door and felt the marks of more bullet holes. I turned the flashlight on them and picked out more in the walls. I counted twelve in all. The Browning’s magazine held thirteen. He had saved the last one for himself.

There was a bottle of water in the Lexus. I used it to wash the taste of decay from my mouth, but I could still smell it on my clothes. I now stank of soap, and dead deer, and dead men.

I called 911 and waited for the police to come.

The names still haunted him. There was Gazaliya, just about the most dangerous neighborhood in Baghdad, where it had all come to an end, and Dora, and Sadiya, places where they killed the trash collectors so that the streets piled up with filth and it became impossible to live there. There was the Um al-Qura mosque in western Baghdad, headquarters of the Sunni insurgency, which, in an ideal world, they would simply have wiped off the face of the earth. There was the Amiriya racetrack, where kidnap victims were bought and sold. From the racetrack, a road led straight to Garma, controlled by the insurgents. Once you were taken to Garma, you were gone.

In Al-Adhamiya, the Sunni stronghold in Baghdad, close to the Tigris river, the Shia death squads dressed as policemen and set up false checkpoints to catch their Sunni neighbors. The Shias were supposed to be on our side, but nobody was really on our side. As far as he could tell, the only difference between the Sunnis and the Shias lay in the way that they killed. The Sunnis beheaded: one evening, he and a couple of the others had watched a beheading on a DVD given to them by their interpreter. They’d all wanted to see it, but he’d regretted asking as soon as it started. There was the man, cowering: not an American, because they didn’t want to watch one of their own die, but some poor bastard Shia who’d chosen the wrong turn, or stopped when he should have put the foot down and taken his chances with the bullets. What struck him was how matter-of-fact the executioner had been, how seemingly removed from the task at hand: the cutting had been methodical, grim, practical, like the ritualistic killing of an animal; an appalling death, but one without sadism beyond the actual act of killing itself. Afterward, they had all said the same thing: don’t let them take me. If there’s a chance of it, and you see it happening, kill me. Kill us all.

The Shias, meanwhile, tortured. They had a particular fondness for the electric drill: knees, elbows, groin, eyes. That was it: Sunnis behead, Shias torment, and they all worship the same god, except there was some dispute about who should have taken over the religion after the prophet Mohammed died, and that was why they were now hacking heads and drilling bones. It was all about qisas: revenge. It didn’t surprise him the first time the interpreter told him that, according to the Islamic calendar, it was still only the fifteenth century: 1424, or something like it, when he arrived in Iraq. That made a kind of sense to him, because these people were still behaving like it was the Middle Ages.

But now they were part of a modern war, a war fought with night-vision lenses and heavy weapons. They responded with RPGs, and mortars, and bombs hidden inside dead dogs. When they didn’t have those, they used stones and blades. They answered the new with the old; old weapons and old names: Nergal, and Ninazu, and the one whose name was lost. They set the trap, and waited for them to come.

25

The first to arrive at the Proctor place were two state troopers out of Skowhegan. I’d never met them before, but one of them knew my name. After some cursory questioning, they let me sit in the Lexus while we waited for the detectives to arrive. The cops made small talk among themselves but left me alone until, after about an hour, the detectives showed up. By then, the sun was setting, and they broke out the flashlights for the examination.

As it turned out, I’d met one of them before. His name was Gordon Walsh, and he looked like a real bruiser as he stepped from his car, his big sunglasses giving the impression that a large bug had evolved to the point that it could wear a suit. He was a former college football player, and he’d kept in shape. He had four or five inches on me, and a good forty pounds. A scar ran across his chin where someone had had the temerity to slash him with a bottle when he was still a trooper. I hated to think of what might have happened to the assailant. They were probably still trying to extract the bottle surgically from wherever Walsh had stuck it.

Beside him was a smaller, younger detective whom I didn’t recognize. He had that rookie look to him, a veneer of severity that couldn’t quite disguise his uncertainty, like a young colt trying to keep up with the stallion that had sired it. Walsh glanced up at me but said nothing, then followed one of the troopers down to the room in which Proctor’s body lay. Before he entered, he smeared some Vicks VapoRub under his nose, but he still didn’t stay in there for long, and he took some deep breaths when he emerged. Then he and his partner went up to the cabin and spent some time poking around inside. After that, they examined the truck, all the while studiously ignoring me. Walsh had obviously found the keys, and reached in to turn on the ignition. The truck started first time. He killed the engine, then said something to his partner before both of them at last decided to pass the time of day with me.

Walsh sucked on one arm of his shades and tut-tutted as he approached me.

‘Charlie Parker,’ he said. ‘As soon as I heard your name, I knew my day was about to get more entertaining.’

‘Detective Walsh,’ I replied. ‘I heard evildoers tremble, and knew that you were near. I see you’re still subsisting on raw meat.’

‘Mens sana, in corpore sano. And vice versa. That’s Latin. Benefits of a Catholic education. This is my partner, Detective Soames.’

Soames nodded, but didn’t say anything. His mouth was rigid, and his jaw jutted in a Dudley Do-Right manner. I bet he ground his teeth at night.

‘Did you kill him?’ asked Walsh.

‘No, I didn’t kill him.’

‘Damn, I was hoping we could get this thing all tied up by midnight if you confessed. I’d probably be given a medal for putting you behind bars at last.’

‘And I thought you liked me, detective.’

‘I do like you. Imagine what the ones who don’t like you say about you. So, if you’re not prepared to break down and confess, you want to tell me something useful?’ said Walsh.

‘His name is Harold Proctor, or I assume that’s who he is, or was,’ I said. ‘I’ve never met him, so I can’t say for sure.’

‘What brings you to his neck of the woods?’

‘I’m looking into the suicide of a young man down in Portland, a former soldier.’

‘Who for?’

‘The boy’s father.’

‘What’s his name?’

‘The father’s name is Bennett Patchett. He owns the Downs Diner in Scarborough.’

‘Where did Proctor fit in?’

‘Damien Patchett, the son, might have met him at some point. Proctor attended Patchett’s funeral. I thought he might have some insights into Damien’s frame of mind before he took his own life.’

‘Insights, huh? You do talk nice, I’ll give you that. Any doubts about how this Patchett boy died?’

‘None that I can tell. He shot himself out in the woods near Cape Elizabeth.’

‘So how come his father is paying you good money to investigate his death?’

‘He wants to know what made his son kill himself. Is that so difficult to understand?’

Behind us, the forensics unit appeared, picking its way up the trail. Walsh tapped his partner on the arm.

‘Elliot, go give them a heads-up, point them in the right direction.’

Soames did as he was told, but not before a slight crease of unhappiness furrowed his otherwise unlined brow at being shooed away while the grown-ups talked. Maybe he wasn’t as wet as he appeared.

‘New boy?’ I said.

‘He’s good. Ambitious. Wants to solve crimes.’

‘You remember when you were young like that?’

‘I was never good, and if I was ambitious I’d be somewhere else by now. Still like to solve crimes, though. Gives me a sense of purpose. Otherwise, I don’t feel like I’m earning my wage, and a man should earn his wage. Kind of brings us back to this Patchett thing.’ He took a look over his shoulder to where Soames was talking to a man who was pulling on a white protective suit. ‘My partner likes things to be official,’ he said. ‘He types reports as he goes along. Neatly.’ He turned back to me. ‘I, on the other hand, type like one of Bob Newhart’s monkeys, and I prefer to write my report at the end, not the beginning. So it seems to me, unofficially, that you’re looking into the suicide of a veteran, and it brings you out here where you find another veteran who also appears to be the victim of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, except before he killed himself he managed to loose off most of a mag at someone outside before popping one more into his own skull. Am I reading this right?’

Outside. That word gave me pause. If the threat was outside, why had Proctor been firing at the walls of the room? He was ex-military, so poor shooting couldn’t have been the excuse. But the room was sealed up from the inside, so the threat couldn’t have been in there with him.

Could it?

I kept those thoughts to myself, and contented myself with: ‘So far.’

‘How old was the Patchett boy?’

‘Twenty-seven.’

‘And Proctor?’

‘Fifties, I’d say. Early fifties. He served in the first Iraq war.’

‘He a sociable man, would you have said?’

‘I never had the pleasure.’

‘But he lived up here, and Patchett lived in Portland?’

‘Scarborough.’

‘Lot of miles between here and there.’

‘I suppose. Is this an interrogation, detective?’

‘Interrogations involve bright lights, and sweaty men in shirtsleeves, and people trying to lawyer up. This is a conversation. My point is: how did Proctor and Patchett come to be acquainted?’

‘Does it matter so much?’

‘It matters because you’re here, and because they’re both dead. Come on, Parker, give a guy a break.’

There wasn’t much point in holding back all that I knew, but I decided to keep some of it, for luck.

‘At first, I thought Proctor might have been one of the veterans assigned to meet soldiers when they return from active duty, and he and Patchett might have met up that way, but now I think Patchett and Proctor may have been involved in a business venture together.’

‘Patchett and Proctor. Sounds like a firm of lawyers. What kind of business venture?’

‘I don’t know for sure, but this place is near the border, and it’s been used for storage recently. There are wood shavings and foam pellets in the room next to the body, and marks on the floor that look like they could have been left by packing cases. Might be worth getting a sniffer dog in there.’

‘You figure drugs?’

‘It’s possible.’

‘You take a look inside his cabin?’

‘Just to see if he was there.’

‘You search it?’

‘That would be illegal.’

‘That’s not answering the question, but I’ll assume that you did. I would have, and you’re at least as unscrupulous as I am. And since you’re good at what you do, you’d have found an envelope filled with cash under the mattress.’

‘Would I? How interesting.’

Walsh leaned against my car and looked from the trailer to the truck, then to the motel and back again. His face grew serious.

‘So he’s got cash, food in the refrigerator, enough booze and candy to stock a convenience store, and his truck appears to be running fine. Yet somehow he ends up barricading himself inside a motel room, firing shots off at the door and window, before sticking the gun in his own mouth and pulling the trigger.’

‘His phone, TV, and radio were all broken up,’ I said.

‘I saw that. By him, or by someone else?’

‘The trailer wasn’t trashed. All of the books were on the shelves, his clothes were still in his closet, and the mattress was still on the bed. If someone was serious about taking the place apart, then they’d have found the money.’

‘Assuming they wanted it to begin with.’

‘I spoke to a man named Stunden down in Langdon. He’s the taxidermist, but he also runs the local bar.’

‘You gotta love small towns,’ said Walsh. ‘If he could add undertaker to his list of accomplishments, he’d be indispensable.’

‘Stunden told me that Proctor was troubled. He felt that he was being haunted.’

‘Haunted?’

‘That was the word he used to Stunden, but Stunden seemed to think that it might be a symptom of post-traumatic stress as a consequence of his time in Iraq. He wouldn’t be the first soldier to come back with mental as well as physical scars.’

‘Like your client’s son? Two suicides, each known to the other. That strike you as odd?’

I didn’t reply. I wondered how long it would take Walsh to connect the deaths of Proctor and Damien with the earlier suicide of Bernie Kramer up in Quebec, and the murder-suicide involving Brett Harlan. Once he did so, he’d probably come up with Joel Tobias as well. I made a mental note to ask Bennett Patchett to keep Tobias’s name out of any conversations he might have with the state police, at least for now.

Four soldiers, three from the same squad and one peripherally connected to the others, all dead from what appeared to be self-inflicted wounds, along with a wife who had been unfortunate enough to encounter her husband with a bayonet in his hand. I’d gone back to the newspaper reports on the killings, and it wasn’t hard to read between the lines and figure that both Brett and Margaret Harlan had met terrible ends.

Increasingly, I was starting to believe that something very bad had occurred over in Iraq, an experience that the men of Stryker C had shared and brought back with them, even if Carrie Saunders had nixed that idea. I still couldn’t grasp how it might tie in with what Jimmy Jewel suspected of Joel Tobias: that he was running a smuggling operation via his trucking business. But there were the marks on the floor of room fourteen to consider, and the traces of packing materials alongside them, and the fact that, if Stunden was right, then Proctor had apparently been visited by some of the men from Stryker C before he died. Then there was the cash under the mattress, which suggested that Proctor had recently been paid for something: storage facilities, I guessed, which raised the question of what was being stored. Drugs still seemed the likeliest option, but Jimmy Jewel hadn’t been convinced, and it would have taken a lot of very heavy drugs to leave those marks on the carpet. Anyway, from what I knew of the international drug trade, Afghanistan was more likely to provide a source of wholesale drugs than Iraq, and Tobias’s squad hadn’t served in Afghanistan.

Soames called to Walsh, and he left me to my thoughts. I wondered what was happening over in Bangor. If Bobby Jandreau didn’t see the wisdom of talking soon, it would be time at last to put significant pressure on Joel Tobias.

Darkness closed in, but the air did not cool. Insects bit, and I heard movements in the undergrowth of the forest as the night creatures came out to feed, and to hunt. The medical examiner arrived, and Klieg lights illuminated the motel as Harold Proctor’s body was removed, ready to be taken to the Maine Medical Examiner’s office down in Augusta. His would be the sole body down there, but not for long. Soon, he would have plenty of company.

26

They came at nightfall. A soft breeze brought movement to the woods, hiding their approach, but Angel and Louis had been waiting for them, knowing that they would come. They had exchanged positions every hour to keep each other alert, and it was Angel who was watching the Mustang when the figures appeared, his sharp eyes picking up the slight change in the shadows cast by the swaying trees. He touched his partner’s sleeve, and Louis turned his attention from the house to the car. Silently, they watched the two men descend, their arms unnaturally extended by the guns in their hands, the suppressors like swollen tissue about to burst.

They were good: that was Louis’s first thought. There must be a vehicle nearby, but he hadn’t heard it, and Angel hadn’t picked them up until they were almost on top of the car. Anyone in the Mustang would have been dead before he realized what was happening. The two men melted back into the shadows again as they realized the Mustang was unoccupied, and even Louis had to strain to follow their progress. They wore no masks, which meant that they weren’t concerned about witnesses, because they would only be seen by whomever was in the house, and then for only as long as it took their victims to die.

Victims: that was the other matter. The situation at Bobby Jandreau’s house had been complicated by the arrival of Mel Nelson, his estranged girlfriend, two hours earlier. Incredible as it seemed, the spontaneous relationship advice offered that afternoon seemed to have made an impression. Louis had regarded the couple impassively as they talked in the living room for a time before Mel walked slowly over to Bobby, then knelt before him and embraced him. After that, they had retired to what Louis presumed was the bedroom, and they had not been seen since.

More distorted shadows. The gunmen were at the rear of the house now, where there was no chance of being seen by a neighbor at a window, or by someone taking a dog for a bedtime walk. One at either side of the door. A nod. Breaking glass. A figure poised to provide cover, the gun raised, as the other reached in through the hole to open the lock. Movement inside the house in response to the intrusion. A scream. The slamming closed of a bedroom door.

Louis took the first man with two shots to the back and a third, the killing shot, to the base of the skull. There was no warning, no invitation to turn with his hands held high, no chance to surrender. Such gestures were for the good guys in westerns, the ones who wore white hats and got the girl at the end. In real life, good guys who give chances to killers end up dead, and Louis, who had no idea if he was truly good or not, and could not have cared less, had no intention of dying for a romantic ideal. As the slain man fell, Louis’s gun was already swinging right. The second of the would-be killers was struggling to drag his hand back through the broken pane, his sleeve snagged on a jagged edge, his own body preventing him from responding to the approaching threat. But now there were two guns on him, and he froze for an instant as he acknowledged the impossibility of his own survival. There was sudden pain and then, fast upon it, sound, and he slumped against the wood, his left arm still hanging above his head, the glass erupting through the material of his jacket. He had just enough strength left to raise his gun, but it was pointing at nothing, and then nothing was all that there was.

The bedroom door remained closed. Angel called out to Jandreau as Louis began to detach the impaled man from the door.

‘Bobby Jandreau, can you hear me?’ he said. ‘My name is Angel. My partner and I were here earlier with Charlie Parker.’

‘I hear you,’ said Jandreau. ‘I have a gun.’

‘Well, that’s great,’ said Angel. ‘Go you. In the meantime, we got two bodies out here, and you and your girlfriend are only alive because of us. So do whatever you have to do, because we’re moving you out.’

There was the sound of whispered conversation from inside. Moments later, the door opened and Bobby Jandreau appeared in the gap, seated in his wheelchair and wearing only a pair of boxer shorts, his Beretta held uncertainly before him. He looked at Louis, who was dragging in the first of the bodies while Angel kept watch. It left a bloody trail along the pine floor.

‘We need trash bags and duct tape,’ said Louis. ‘A mop and water too, unless you think red goes well with the walls.’

Mel peered around the door. She seemed to be naked, apart from a strategically placed towel.

‘Ma’am,’ said Angel, nodding his head in acknowledgment of her. ‘You might want to put some clothes on. Playtime’s over…’

By the time Jandreau and his girlfriend were dressed, and had packed some clothes and toiletries into a bag, the two bodies were trussed in black garbage sacks and wrapped with tape. Jandreau stared at them from his chair. He had identified them instantly, even as death wrought its changes on them: Twizell and Greenham, both ex-Marines.

‘They were STA,’ he said. ‘Surveillance and Target Acquisition, eighty-four fifty-one military occupational specialty.’

Angel stared at him blankly.

‘Scout snipers,’ explained Louis. ‘They were slumming it tonight.’

‘They were one of two Marine sniper teams that we inserted into Al-Adhamiya,’ continued Jandreau. ‘It was just before-’

Well, that was it. That was the story. Bobby Jandreau wanted to talk now. He wanted to tell it all because his buddies had turned on him at last, but Angel told him to save it for later. Mel Nelson drove a big old truck with a cabin back, so they had her bring it around behind the house and they threw the bodies inside. Then they put Jandreau and Mel into the Mustang, first taking care to remove and disable the GPS, and Angel drove them to a motel just outside Bucksport while Louis, following Jandreau’s directions, took the truck to a disused granite quarry near Frankfort. There, using rope and chains from Jandreau’s garage, he weighted the bodies and dropped them into dark water. He was about to dump the GPS tracker in the Penobscot when he reconsidered. It really was a neat piece of gear, better than he could have constructed himself. He tossed it in the back of Mel’s truck and joined the others back at the motel.

And there, for want of anything better to do, they let Bobby Jandreau begin to tell his tale.

27

Walsh kept me sitting around until Proctor’s body had been taken away. I think he was punishing me for not being more forthcoming, but at least he was talking to me and hadn’t come up with some obscure legal reason to put me in a cell for the night. Since it would take me almost three hours to get to Portland, and I was tired and wanted to shower, I decided to find a place nearby to stay. The decision wasn’t entirely mine to make. Forensics wanted to wait until morning to make a full sweep of the property, and the sniffer dogs would arrive soon after. Walsh had suggested that, in a spirit of goodwill and co operation, I might like to remain in the vicinity, just in case a question occurred to him the next day, or even during the night.

‘I keep a notepad beside my bed expressly for that purpose,’ he said, as he leaned his considerable bulk against the car.

‘Really?’ I said. ‘Just in case you can come up with awkward questions to ask me?’

‘That’s right. You’d be surprised at how many cops might say the same thing.’

‘You know, I wouldn’t be.’

He shook his head in a despairing way, like a dog trainer faced with a recalcitrant animal that refuses to give up its ball. Some distance away, Soames was watching us unhappily. Once again, he clearly very much wanted to be part of the conversation, but Walsh was deliberately excluding him. It was interesting. I predicted tensions in their relationship. Had they been a couple, Walsh would have been sleeping in the spare room that night.

‘Some might say that we underpaid state cops have a legitimate beef against you, given what happened to Hansen,’ he continued, and I instantly recalled Hansen, a detective with the Maine State Police, standing in the deserted house in Brooklyn in which my wife and child had been killed. He had followed me there out of some misguided missionary zeal, and he had been punished for it: not by me, but by another, a killer to whom Hansen was inconsequential and for whom I was the true prize.

‘It doesn’t look like he’s ever going to work again,’ said Walsh, ‘and it’s never been clear just what he was doing in your house on the night that he was hurt.’

‘Are you asking me to tell you about that night?’

‘No, because I know that you won’t, and anyway, I read the official version. It had more holes in it than a hobo’s drawers. If you did tell me anything, it would be a lie, or a partial truth, like all that you’ve told me so far this evening.’

‘And yet here we are, taking in the night air and being civil to each other.’

‘Indeed. I bet you’re curious as to why that might be.’

‘Go on, I’ll bite.’

Walsh hoisted himself from my car, found his cigarettes, and lit up.

‘Because even though you’re a jerk, and believe you know better than everyone else, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, I think you’re fighting the good fight. We’ll talk tomorrow, just in case I’ve scribbled something brilliant and incisive in my notebook overnight, or in case forensics has a question about some part of the crime scene that you’ve contaminated, but after that you can go about your business. What I expect in return is that, at some point in the near future, I’ll receive a call from you, and you’ll feel compelled to unburden yourself of what you know, or what you’ve learned. After that, if it’s not too late to do anything other than view a body, given your previous form, I’ll have an answer to what happened here, and I may even get a promotion by wrapping it all up. How does that sound?’

‘That sounds reasonable.’

‘I’d like to think so. Now you can get in your fancy Lexus and drive out of here. Some of us have overtime to earn. Incidentally, I never took you for a Lexus guy. Last I heard, you were driving a Mustang, like you’re Steve McQueen.’

‘The Mustang’s in the shop,’ I lied. ‘This is a loaner.’

‘A loaner from New York? Don’t give me a reason to run those plates. Well, if you can’t find a room in Rangeley, you can just sleep in that car. It’s big enough. Drive safely now.’

I headed back to Rangeley and sought out a room at the Rangeley Inn. The main building, its lobby decorated with deer heads and a stuffed bear, wasn’t yet open for the season, so I was given a motel room in the lodge at the rear. There were a couple of other cars parked nearby, one of them with a map of the area on its passenger seat, and a decal for a TV station out of Bangor on the dashboard, to which had been appended a handwritten sign pleading ‘Do Not Tow!’ I showered, and changed my shirt for a t-shirt I had picked up at a gas station. The smell of Proctor’s decay was still with me afterward, but it was mostly remembered, not actual. More troubling to me was the sense of unease that I had experienced in the room adjoining Proctor’s body. It felt as though I had wandered in at the tail end of an argument in time to hear only the echo of the final words, all venom and malice. I wondered if they were the same words that Harold Proctor heard before he died.

I walked over to Sarge’s pub to get something to eat. It wasn’t a hard choice, since it was the only place nearby that seemed to be open. Sarge’s had a long, curving bar with five TVs showing four different sports and, in the case of the final screen behind the bar, a local news show. The volume on the sports screens had been turned down, and a group of men was watching the news in silence. Proctor’s death had made the lead, as much for the oddness of his passing as for the fact that it was a slow news night. Suicides didn’t usually merit that kind of coverage, and the local news stations generally tended to be pretty sensitive to the feelings of the relatives of the deceased, but some of the details of Proctor’s death had clearly caught their attention: a man sealed up from the inside in a room of a disused motel, his life ended by an apparently self-inflicted wound. The report didn’t mention the shots that he had fired at someone outside the room before he killed himself.

I heard muttered words as I took a seat away from the bar, and a couple of heads turned in my direction. One of them belonged to Stunden, the taxidermist. I ordered a burger and a glass of wine from the waitress. The wine arrived quickly, closely followed by Stunden. I cursed myself quietly. I had forgotten all about my earlier promise to him. The least I had owed him, both for the information he had provided and because of his concern for Harold Proctor, was a personal visit, and some clarification of what had occurred.

Those who had stayed in their seats were all looking in my direction. Stunden smiled apologetically, and shot a quick look at the men behind him, as if to say, well, you know how small towns are. To their credit, those at the bar were clearly trying to balance embarrassment with curiosity, but curiosity was ahead by a neck.

‘Sorry to bother you, Mr. Parker, but we hear that it was you who found Harold.’

I gestured to the seat across from me, and he sat. ‘There’s no apology necessary, Mr. Stunden. I should have paid a courtesy call to you after the police let me go, but it had been a long day, and I forgot. I’m sorry for that.’

Stunden’s eyes looked red. He’d been drinking some, but I thought that he might also have been crying.

‘I understand. It was a shock for all of us. I couldn’t open the bar, not after what happened. That’s why I’m here. I thought somebody might know more than I did, and then you came in, and, well…’

‘I can’t tell you much,’ I said, and he was smart enough to pick up on the dual meaning of the words.

‘If you’d just tell me what you can, that would be enough. Is what they’re saying about him true?’

‘Is what who’s saying true?’

Stunden shrugged. ‘The TV people. Nobody here has heard anything official from the detectives. Closest thing we have is the border patrol. The story is that Harold committed suicide.’

‘It looks that way.’

If there had been a cap in Stunden’s hand, he would have twisted it awkwardly.

‘One of the border cops told Ben here-’ He jerked a thumb at an overweight man in a camo shirt, his belt so weighted with keys, knives, phones, and flashlights that his pants were almost around his thighs. ‘-that there was something hinky about Harold’s death, but he wouldn’t say what it was.’

There was that word again: hinky. Joel Tobias was hinky. Harold Proctor’s death was hinky. It was all hinky.

Ben, and two other men from the bar, drawn by the prospect of some enlightenment, had gravitated toward us. I weighed up my options before I spoke, and saw that there was no benefit to me in holding anything back from them. Everything would emerge eventually, if not later tonight when some off-duty border cop came in for a drink, then tomorrow at the latest when the town’s own information-gathering resources began to kick into gear. But I also knew that while there might be aspects of Harold Proctor’s death about which they did not know, then equally there would be parts of his life about which I had no knowledge, and they did. Stunden had been helpful. Some of these men might be helpful too.

‘He fired all the bullets in his gun before he died,’ I said. ‘He saved the last one for himself.’

Everyone probably came up with the same question at the same time, but it was Stunden who asked it first.

‘What was he firing at?’

‘Something outside,’ I said, again pushing to the back of my mind the spread of the bullet holes in the room.

‘You think he was chased in there?’ asked Proctor.

‘Hard to see how a man being chased would have time to nail himself up in a room,’ I replied.

‘Hell, Harold was crazy,’ said Ben. ‘He never was the same after he came back from Iraq.’

There were general nods of agreement. If they had their way, it would be carved on his headstone. ‘Harold Proctor. Somewhat Missed. Was Crazy.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘you now know as much as I do.’

They began to drift away. Only Stunden remained. He was the only one of the men who appeared genuinely distressed at the circumstances of Harold’s death.

‘You OK?’ I asked him.

‘No, not really. I guess I wasn’t as close to Harold in recent times as I once was, but I was still his friend. It troubles me to think of him being so…’

He couldn’t find the word.

‘Frightened?’ I said.

‘Yeah, frightened, and alone. To die that way, I mean, it just doesn’t seem right.’

The waitress came by with my burger, and I ordered myself another glass of wine, even though I’d barely touched the glass before me. I pointed at Stunden’s glass.

‘Bushmills,’ he said. ‘No water. Thanks.’

I waited until the drinks appeared, and the waitress was gone. Stunden took a long sip of his drink as I ate my food.

‘And I suppose I feel guilty,’ he said. ‘Does that make sense? I feel like, had I done more to stay in touch with him, to bring him out of his shell, to ask him about his problems, then none of this would have happened.’

I could have lied to him. I could have said that Proctor’s death had nothing to do with him, that Proctor had been set on a different path, a path that led ultimately to a lonely, terrified death in a sealed room, but I didn’t. It would have belittled the man before me, a man who was decent and honorable.

‘I can’t say if that’s true or not,’ I told him. ‘But Harold got himself involved in something odd, and that wasn’t your fault. In the end, that’s probably what got him killed.’

‘Odd?’ he said. ‘What do you mean by odd?’

‘Did you ever see trucks go in and out of Harold’s place?’ I asked. ‘Big rigs, possibly on the way down from Canada.’

‘Jeez, I wouldn’t know. If the truck came up from Portland or Augusta, maybe, but if they came through Coburn Gore then they’d get to Harold’s place before they reached Langdon.’

‘Is there someone who would know?’

‘I can ask around.’

‘I don’t have that kind of time, Mr. Stunden. Look, I’m not the police, and you have no obligation to provide me with information, but do you remember what I told you earlier today?’

Stunden nodded. ‘About the boy who killed himself.’

‘That’s right. And now Harold Proctor is dead, and it looks like another suicide.’

I could have mentioned Kramer in Quebec, and Brett Harlan and his wife, to clinch the deal, but if I did then it would become part of the bar conversation, and that, in turn, would get back to the cops eventually. There were any number of reasons why I didn’t want that to happen. I’d only just got my license back, and despite vague assurances that it was in no danger of immediate revocation again, I didn’t need to give the state police any excuse to go after me. At the very least, I’d incur the displeasure of Walsh, and I kind of liked him, although if we were ever jailed together I wouldn’t want to share a cell with him.

But, more than all of that, I recognized the old hunger. I wanted to explore what was happening, to uncover the deeper connections between the deaths of Harold Proctor, Damien Patchett, and the others. I knew now that I was a private investigator in name only, that the mundane stuff of false insurance claims, cheating spouses, and thieving employees might be enough to pay my bills, but it was no more than that. I had come to realize that my desire to join the police and my short, less than illustrious career in the NYPD were not solely about making recompense for my father’s perceived failings. He had killed two young people before taking his own life, and his actions had tainted the memory of him and marked me. I was a bad cop – not corrupt, not violent, not inept, but still bad – for I lacked the discipline and patience, and maybe the absence of ego, that the job required. The acquisition of a private investigator’s license had seemed like a compromise that I could live with, a means of fulfilling some vague sense of purpose by acquiring the trappings of legality. I knew that I could never be a cop again, but I still had the instincts required, and the sense of purpose, of vocation, that marked out the ones who didn’t do it solely for the benefits, or the camaraderie, or the promise of cashing out in twenty and opening a bar in Boca Raton.

So I could have handed over everything that I knew or suspected to Walsh and walked away. After all, his resources were greater than mine, and I had no reason to believe that his sense of purpose was inferior to my own. But I wanted this. Without it, what was I? So I would take my chances; I would trade when I had to trade, and hoard what I could. At some point, you have to trust your instincts, and yourself. I had learned something in the years since my wife and child were taken from me, and I hunted down the one responsible: I was good at what I did.

Why?

Because I had nothing else.

Now I watched Stunden as he considered the two suicides. I didn’t speak for a while. I just let the possibility of a connection dangle itself before him like a brightly colored fly while I waited for him to bite.

‘There’s a guy name of Geagan, Edward Geagan,’ said Stunden. ‘He lives up behind Harold’s place. You wouldn’t know it, not unless you were looking for him, but he’s up there all right. Like a lot of people around here, like Harold did, he keeps himself to himself, but he’s not weird or nothing. He’s just quiet. If anyone would know, Edward would.’

‘I want to talk to him before the cops do. He have a phone?’

‘Edward? I said he was quiet, I didn’t say he was a primitive. He does something with the Internet. Marketing, I think. I don’t even know what “marketing” means, but he’s got more computers up there than NASA. And a phone,’ he added.

‘Call him.’

‘Can I promise that you’ll buy him a drink?’

‘You know those old Westerns, where the hero tells the bartender to leave the bottle?’

Stunden blinked.

‘I’ll call Edward.’

Edward Geagan turned out to be from geek central casting. He was in his mid-thirties, tall and pale and thin, with long, sandy hair and rimless glasses, dressed in brown polyester pants, cheap brown shoes, and a light tan shirt. He looked like someone had put a wig on a giraffe and run it through the local Target.

‘This is Mr. Parker, the man I told you about,’ said Stunden. ‘He has some questions he’d like to ask you.’ He spoke as though he were talking to a child. Geagan cocked an eyebrow at him.

‘Stunds, why do you insist on talking to me like I’m a moron?’ he said, but there was no hint of unfriendliness to his voice, only vague amusement tinged with a little impatience.

‘Because you look like you belong in MIT, not a wood in Franklin County,’ said Stunden. ‘I feel like I should look out for you.’

Geagan grinned at him, and Stunden, for the first time that evening, grinned back.

‘Asshole.’

‘Rube.’

As it turned out, the bartender declined to leave us with the bottle, but he was prepared to keep refilling the glasses as long as Stunden and Geagan could keep ordering without slurring their words. Unfortunately for me, their tolerance for alcohol was at least as great as their tolerance for each other. The bar began to empty at about the same pace as the bottle behind the bar, until pretty soon we were the only people left. We spent some time making small talk, and Geagan told me how he’d ended up in Franklin County, having tired of city life down in Boston.

‘The first winter was hard,’ he said. ‘I thought Boston sucked when it snowed, but up here, well, you might as well be at the bottom of an avalanche.’ He grimaced. ‘I miss women too. You know, female company. These small towns, man. The ones who aren’t married have left. It’s like being in the Foreign Legion.’

‘It gets better when the tourists come,’ said Stunden. ‘Not much, but some.’

‘Damn, I might be dead of frustration by then.’

They both stared into the bottom of their glasses, as though hoping a mermaid might pop her head out of the booze and flick her tail invitingly at them.

‘About Harold Proctor,’ I said, trying to move the conversation along.

‘I was surprised when I heard,’ said Geagan. ‘He wasn’t the kind.’

That phrase was starting to recur a little too often. Bennett Patchett had used it about his son, and Carrie Saunders had said much the same thing about both Damien Patchett and Brett Harlan. If they were all correct, there were a lot of dead people who had no business being dead.

‘Why do you say that?’

‘He was hard. He had no regrets about anything that he’d done over there, and he’d done some pretty hardcore stuff, or so he said. Well, I thought it was hardcore, but then I’ve never killed anyone. Never will, I hope.’

‘You got along with him?’

‘I drank with him a couple of times during the winter, and he helped me when my generator gave out. We were neighborly without being close. That’s the way of things up here. Then Harold grew different. I talked to Stunds here about it, and he said the same. Harold started keeping his own counsel more than before, and he was never what you might call a chatterbox. I’d hear his truck starting up at odd times: after dark, sometimes well after midnight. Then the rig started arriving. A big truck – red, I think – hauling a trailer.’

A red truck, just like Joel Tobias’s.

‘Did you get a plate number?’

Geagan recited it from memory. It was Tobias all right. ‘I’ve got a photographic memory,’ he said. ‘Helps with what I do.’

‘When did this happen?’

‘Four or five times that I can recall: twice last month, once this month, the last time just yesterday.’

I leaned forward. ‘The truck came through yesterday?’

Geagan looked flustered, as though fearful that he’d made a mistake. I could see him counting back the days. ‘Yep, yesterday morning. I saw it coming out as I was heading back to my place from town, so I don’t know what time it went in.’

I knew from the little that Walsh had told me that Proctor had probably been dead for two or three days. It was hard to tell given the heat in the room, and the consequent speed of putrefaction. Now it seemed that Tobias had been at the motel since Proctor had died, but hadn’t taken the trouble to look for him; that, or he knew Proctor was dead, but said nothing, which sounded unlikely. Whoever Proctor had been firing at, it wasn’t Joel Tobias.

‘And it was definitely the same truck as before?’

‘Yeah, I told you: I’ve seen it a few times. Harold and the other guy, the driver – no, wait, there was one time when I thought there might have been three of them – would unload stuff from the back, and the truck would drive away again.’

‘Did you ever mention this to Harold?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘It wasn’t bothering me, and I didn’t think Harold would appreciate me asking. He must have known that I might hear or see them, but up here it doesn’t pay to question other people about their business.’

‘Didn’t you wonder what he was doing?’

Geagan looked uneasy. ‘I thought he might be considering reopening the motel. He talked about it sometimes, but he didn’t have the money he needed to restore it.’

Geagan’s eyes wouldn’t meet my face.

‘And?’ I said.

‘Harold liked to smoke a little pot. So do I. He knew where to get it, and I’d pay him for it. Not much, just enough to keep me going through the long winter months.’

‘Was Harold dealing?’

‘No, I don’t believe so. He just had a supplier.’

‘But you thought he might have been storing drugs in the motel, right?’

‘It would make sense, especially if he was looking to make some money to reopen the place.’

‘Were you tempted to take a look?’

Geagan looked uneasy. ‘I might have been, once, when Harold wasn’t around.’

‘What did you see?’

‘The rooms were all blocked up, but I could tell that some had been opened recently. There were wood chips on the ground, and the dirt was all torn up. There were grooves in the earth, like they’d wheeled something heavy inside.’

‘You never saw what they were bringing in when you looked out of your window?’

‘The front of the truck was always facing me. If they were unloading anything, then it was easiest to keep the back of the truck to the motel. I could never quite see what they were moving.’

Never ‘quite’ see. ‘But you think that you might have spotted something, right?’

‘It’s going to sound strange.’

‘Believe me, you don’t know from strange.’

‘Well, it was a statue, I guess. Like one of those Greek ones, y’know, white, and from a museum. I thought it was a body at first, but it had no arms: like the Venus de Milo, but male.’

‘Damn,’ I said softly. Not drugs: antiquities. Joel Tobias was just full of surprises. ‘Have you talked to the police yet?’

‘No. I don’t think they even know I’m up there.’

‘Talk to them in the morning, but leave it till late. Tell them what you told me. Last thing: the police think Harold killed himself three days ago, give or take. Did you hear any shots during that time?

‘No, I was down in Boston visiting my folks until the day before yesterday. I guess Harold killed himself while I was away. He did kill himself, didn’t he?’

‘I believe he did.’

‘Then why did he lock himself up in that room to do it? What was he shooting at before he died?’

‘I don’t know.’

I waved at the bartender for the tab. I heard the door open behind me, but I didn’t look around. Stunden and Geagan looked up, and their faces changed, brightening after the darkness of our conversation.

‘Looks like somebody’s luck may be about to turn,’ said Geagan, straightening his hair, ‘and I sure hope it’s mine.’

As casually as I could, I tried to glance over my shoulder, but the woman was already by my right hand.

‘Buy you a drink, Mr. Parker?’ asked Carrie Saunders.

28

Geagan and Stunden rose to their feet and prepared to leave.

‘Looks like I’m shit out of luck. Again,’ said Geagan. ‘Beg pardon, miss,’ he added.

‘No apology necessary,’ said Saunders. ‘And this is professional, not personal.’

‘Does that mean I still have a chance?’ asked Geagan.

‘No.’

Geagan gave an exaggerated sigh. Stunden patted him on the back.

‘Come on, let’s leave them to it. I’m sure I got a bottle somewhere at home that could help you with your troubles.’

‘Whiskey?’ said Geagan.

‘No,’ said Stunden. ‘Ethyl alcohol. You might need to cut it with something, though…’

They made their excuses and left, although not before Geagan cast a final lingering glance in Saunders’s direction. The guy had clearly spent too long in the woods: if he didn’t get some action soon, even moose would be in danger from him.

‘Your fan club?’ asked Saunders, once the waitress had brought her a Mich Ultra.

‘Some of it.’

‘It’s bigger than I expected.’

‘I like to think of it as small but stable, unlike your patient base, which seems to be dwindling by the day. Maybe you should consider an alternative profession, or cut a deal with a mortuary.’

She scowled. Score one for the guy with the chip on his shoulder.

‘Harold Proctor wasn’t one of my patients. It looks like a local physician was prescribing his meds. I contacted him in an effort to have him participate in my study, but he didn’t want to cooperate, and he didn’t ask for my professional help. And I don’t appreciate your flippant attitude toward what I do, or toward the former servicemen who’ve died.’

‘Get off your soapbox, Dr. Saunders. You were in no hurry to offer me help the last time we met, when I was under the misguided impression that we wanted the same thing.’

‘Which was?’

‘To find out why a small group of men, all of whom knew one another, were dying by their own hands. Instead, I got the party line and some cheap analysis.’

‘That wasn’t what you wanted to find out.’

‘No? They teach you telepathy at head school too, or is that something you’ve been working on when you get tired of being supercilious?’

She gave me the hard stare. ‘Anything else?’

‘Yeah, why don’t you order a real drink? You’re embarrassing me.’

She broke. She had a nice smile, but she’d fallen out of the habit of using it.

‘A real drink: like a glass of red wine?’ she said. ‘This isn’t a church social. I’m surprised the bartender didn’t take you outside and beat you with a stick.’

I sat back and raised a hand in surrender. She put the Mich aside and signaled the waitress. ‘I’ll have what he’s having.’

‘It’ll look like we’re on a date,’ I said.

‘Only to a blind man, and then he’d probably have to be deaf as well.’

Saunders was certainly a looker, but anyone seriously considering engaging with her on an intimate level would need to wear body armor to counter the spikes. Her wine arrived. She sipped it, didn’t appear to actively disapprove, and sipped again.

‘How did you find me?’ I asked.

‘The cops told me that you were in Rangeley. One of them, Detective Walsh, even described your car for me. He told me that I should slash your tires when I found it, just to make sure you stayed put. Oh, and for the sake of it.’

‘The decision to stay was kind of forced upon me.’

‘By the cops? They must really love you.’

‘It’s tentative, but mutual. How did you find out about Harold Proctor?’ I asked.

‘The cops found my card in his cabin, and it seems that his physician is on vacation in the Bahamas.’

‘It’s a long way to drive for a man that you didn’t know well.’

‘He was a soldier, and another suicide. This is my work. The cops thought I might be able to shed some light on the circumstances of his death.’

‘And could you?’

‘Only what I could tell from my sole visit to his home before tonight. He lived alone, drank too much, smoked some pot, judging by the smell in his cabin, and he had little or no support structure.’

‘So he was a prime candidate for suicide?’

‘He was vulnerable, that’s all.’

‘Why now, though? He’d been out of the military for fifteen years or more. You told me that post-traumatic stress could take as long as a decade to undo, but fifteen years seems like a long time for it to begin in the first place.’

‘That I can’t explain.’

‘How did you come to find him?’

‘As I interviewed former soldiers, I asked them to suggest others who might be willing to participate, or those whom they felt were vulnerable and could use an informal approach. Someone suggested Harold.’

‘Do you remember who it was?’

‘No. I’d have to check my notes. It might have been Damien Patchett, but I couldn’t say for sure.’

‘It wouldn’t have been Joel Tobias, would it?’

She scowled. ‘Joel Tobias doesn’t hold with psychiatrists.’

‘So you tried?’

‘He conducted the last of his physical therapy at Togus, but there was a psychological component as well. He was assigned to me, but our progress was limited.’ She examined me steadily over the lip of her glass. ‘You don’t like him, do you?’

‘I’ve barely met him, but I don’t like what I’ve found out about him so far. Joel Tobias drives a big rig with a bigger trailer. There’s a lot of space to hide something in a box that size.’

Her eyes didn’t even flicker.

‘You seem very convinced that there is something to hide.’

‘The day after I began looking into Joel Tobias, I was worked over very professionally: no bones broken, no visible marks.’

‘It might not have been connected to Tobias,’ she interrupted.

‘Listen, I appreciate that there may be people out there who don’t like me, but most of them aren’t very smart, and if they arranged a beating for me they’d be sure to claim a little credit. They’re not the anonymous donor type. These guys used water, and a sack. It was made clear that I should stay out of Joel Tobias’s business and, by extension, theirs.’

‘From what I hear, most of the people who might have had real difficulties with you are no longer in a position to arrange beatings, not unless they can contract out from the grave.’

I looked away. ‘You’d be surprised,’ I said, but she didn’t seem to hear. She was lost in her own thoughts.

‘The reason why I declined to help you when we first met was because I didn’t believe that you wanted what I wanted. My role is to help these men and women where I can. Some of them, like Harold Proctor and Joel Tobias, don’t want my help. They may need it, but they consider it a sign of weakness to confess their fears to a shrink, even an ex-army shrink who spent time in the same dustbowl that they did. There’s been a lot written in the newspapers about suicide rates among military personnel, about how physically and psychologically damaged men and women have been abandoned by their government, about how they may even be a threat to national security. They’ve been fighting an unpopular war, and, okay, it’s not quite Vietnam, either in terms of casualties over there or in the animosity toward veterans back home, but you can’t blame the military for being defensive. When you came along, I thought you might just be another jackass trying to prove a point.’

‘And now?’

‘I still think you’re a jackass, and that detective out at the Proctor place clearly concurs, but maybe our ultimate aims aren’t so different. We both want to find out why these men are dying at their own hands.’

She took another sip of wine. It stained her teeth, tipping them with red, like an animal that had fed recently on raw meat. ‘Look, I take this seriously. That’s why I’m engaged in this research. My study is part of a joint initiative with the National Institute of Mental Health to try to come up with some answers, and some solutions. We’re looking at the role that combat, and multiple deployments, play in suicide. We know that two thirds of suicides take place during or after a deployment: that’s fifteen months in a war zone, with barely enough time to decompress afterward before exhausted men and women are sent back into the field again.

‘It’s clear that our soldiers need help, but they’re afraid to ask for it in case it’s recorded and the jacket follows them. But the military also needs to change its attitude toward its troops: mental health screening is poor, and commanders are reluctant to allow military personnel to gain access to civilian therapists. They’re hiring more general practitioners, which is a start, and more mental health care providers, but the focus is on troops in combat. What happens when they come home? Of the sixty soldiers who killed themselves between January and August 2008, thirty-nine of them did so after they returned to this country. We’re letting these men and women down. They’re wounded, but the wounds don’t show in some cases until it’s too late. Something has to be done for them. Someone has to take responsibility.’

She sat back. Some of the hardness fell away from her, and she just looked tired. Tired, and somehow younger than she was, as though her distress at the deaths was both professional yet also almost childlike in its purity.

‘Do you understand now why I was wary when a private investigator, and one, with respect, whose reputation for violence precedes him, began asking about the deaths of veterans by their own hands?’

It was a rhetorical question or, if it wasn’t, then I chose to consider it as such. I signaled for another round. We didn’t speak again until it arrived, and she had poured the remainder of her first glass into her second.

‘And you?’ I asked. ‘How does it affect you?’

‘I don’t understand the question,’ she said.

‘I mean that it must be hard, listening to all of those stories of pain and injury and death, seeing those damaged men and women week after week. It must take its toll.’

She pushed her glass around the table, watching the patterns that it formed: circles upon circles, like Venn diagrams.

‘That’s why I left the military and became a civilian consultant,’ she said. ‘I still experience guilt about it, but over there I sometimes felt like King Canute, trying to hold back the tide alone. In Iraq, I could still be overruled by a commander who needed soldiers in the field. The needs of the many outweighed the needs of the few, and for the most part all I could do was offer tips on how to cope, as if that could help soldiers who had already gone far beyond the possibility of coping. In Togus, I feel like I’m part of a strategy, an attempt to see the bigger picture, even if the bigger picture is thirty-five thousand soldiers already diagnosed with PTSD, and more to come.’

‘That isn’t answering the question,’ I said.

‘No, it isn’t, is it? The name for what you’re implying is secondary trauma, or “contact distress”: the more deeply therapists involve themselves with victims, the more likely they are to experience some of their trauma. At the moment, mental health evaluations of therapists are practically non-existent. It’s self-evaluation, and nothing more. You know you’re broken only when you break.’

She drank half of her wine.

‘Now, tell me about Harold Proctor, and what you saw out there,’ she said.

I told her most of it, leaving out only a little of what Edward Geagan had revealed, and the money that was discovered in Proctor’s cabin. When I was finished, she didn’t speak, but maintained eye contact. If it was some kind of psychiatric trick designed to wear me down and blurt out everything that I’d kept hidden since childhood, it wasn’t working. I’d already given away more than I wanted about myself to her, and I wasn’t about to do it again. I had a vision of myself closing a stable door while a horse disappeared over the horizon.

‘What about the money?’ she said. ‘Or did you just forget to mention it?’

Clearly, the state cops were more susceptible to her wiles than I was. When next we met, I’d have a word with Walsh about maintaining some backbone and not coming over all giggly when a good-looking woman patted his arm and complimented him on his weapon.

‘I haven’t figured that part out yet,’ I said.

‘You’re not dumb, Mr. Parker, so don’t assume that I am. Let me suggest what conclusions I think you may have come to, and you can disagree with me when I’m done. You believe that Proctor was storing items in his motel, possibly, even probably, drugs. You believe that the cash in his cabin was a payment for his services. You believe that some, or all, of the men who have died might also have been involved in this same operation. Joel Tobias makes runs in his truck back and forth across the Canadian border, so you believe that he’s the likeliest transport link. Am I wrong?’

I didn’t respond, so she continued talking.

‘And yet I don’t think you’ve told the police all of this. I wonder why. Is it because you feel some loyalty to Bennett Patchett, and you don’t want to besmirch his son’s reputation unless you absolutely have to do so? I think that may be part of it. You’re a romantic, Mr. Parker, but sometimes, like all romantics, you confuse it with sentimentality. That explains why you’re cynical about the motives of others.

‘But you’re also a crusader, and that fits in with your romantic streak. That crusading impulse is essentially selfish: you’re a crusader because it gives you a sense of purpose, not because it serves the larger requirements of justice or society. In fact, when your own needs and the greater collective need have come into conflict, I suspect that you’ve usually chosen the former over the latter. That doesn’t make you a bad person, just an unreliable one. So, how’d I do?’

‘Close on Proctor and Tobias. I can’t comment on the second bout of free analysis.’

‘It’s not free. You’re going to pay for my drinks. What have I missed about Proctor and Tobias?’

‘I don’t think it’s drugs.’

‘Why not?’

‘I talked to someone who’d know if there was an attempt to increase the local supply, or to use the state as a staging post. It would involve squaring things with the Dominicans, and probably the Mexicans too. The gentleman to whom I spoke would also look for his cut.’

‘And if the new players just decided to dispense with the niceties?’

‘Then some men with guns might be tempted to dispense with them. There’s also the question of supply. Unless they’re growing bud themselves across the border, or are importing heroin straight from the source in Asia, they’d have to deal with the current suppliers somewhere along the line. It’s hard to keep those kinds of negotiations quiet, especially when they might threaten the status quo.’

‘If not drugs, then what?’

‘There might be something in their military records,’ I said, avoiding the question.

‘I’ve looked into the records of the deceased. There’s nothing.’

‘Look closer.’

‘I’ll ask you again: what are they smuggling? I think you know.’

‘I’ll tell you when I’m sure. Go back to the records. There must be something. If you’re concerned about the reputation of the military, then having the cops uncover a smuggling operation involving veterans isn’t going to help. It would be better if the military could be the instigators of any action against them.’

‘And in the meantime, what are you going to do?’

‘There’s always a weak link. I’m going to find it.’

I paid the tab, on the assumption that I could run it past the IRS as a justifiable expense if I claimed not to have enjoyed myself, which was largely true.

‘Are you driving back to Augusta tonight?’ I asked Saunders.

‘No, I’m staying in the same place that you are,’ she said.

I walked with her across the road to the motel.

‘Where’d you park?’

‘On the street,’ she said. ‘I’d ask you in for a nightcap, but I have no booze. Oh, and I don’t want to. There’s that too.’

‘I won’t take it personally.’

‘I really wish that you would,’ she said, and then she was gone.

Back in my room, I checked my cell phone. There was one message: it was from Louis, giving me the number of a motel, and the room in which he was staying. I used the room phone to call him. The main building was locked up for the night, and I wasn’t worried about anyone listening in. Nevertheless, we kept the conversation as circumspect as possible, just in case.

‘We had company,’ he said after Angel passed him the phone. ‘Two for dinner.’

‘They make it to the main course?’

‘Didn’t even last until the appetizers.’

‘And after?’

‘They went swimming.’

‘Well, at least they did it on an empty stomach.’

‘Yeah, can’t be too careful. Now it’s just the four of us.’

‘Four?’

‘Seems like you have a new career in relationship counseling.’

‘I’m not sure my skills are up to helping you with yours.’

‘We find ourselves in that much trouble, we’ll make a suicide pact first. In the meantime, you need to get over here. Our friend has turned out to be quite the conversationalist.’

‘I promised the state cops I’d hang around until morning.’

‘Well, they’ll miss you, but I think you need to hear this more.’

I told him it would take me a few hours to get there, and he said that they weren’t planning on going anywhere. As I drove out of the lot, a light still burned in Carrie Saunders’s room, but I didn’t think that it burned for me.