The Unquiet-CP-6 (39 page)

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

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

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

Then the smile faded.

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

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

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

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

“You ask him about that tattoo?”

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

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

“How is Andy?”

“Recovering. His nose is still a mess.”

“And mentally?”

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

“Anything interesting?”

“He thinks Merrick is going to kill you.”

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

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

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

“He thinks his daughter’s dead?”

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

“Do you think she’s dead?”

“Yes.”

“So what are you going to do now?”

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

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

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

She snorted but didn’t reply.

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

“I’m billing you. It wasn’t charity.”

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

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

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

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

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

Four

Into the dark night

Resignedly I go,

I am not so afraid of the dark night

As the friends I do not know,

I do not fear the night above,

As I fear the friends below

—STEVIE SMITH, “DIRGE”

Chapter XXVI

I made the call while I was slipping a speed loader for the .38 into my jacket pocket. Louis answered on the second ring. He and Angel had hit the Collector’s safe house within an hour of Bob Johnson’s call to the inn, and had left a message on my cell informing me that they were, to use Angel’s words, “in country.”

“So I figure you got busted from the joint,” said Louis.

“Yeah, it was spectacular. Explosions, gunfire, the whole deal. You ought to have been there.”

“Anywhere be better than here.”

He sounded tetchy. Spending long periods of time with his partner in an enclosed space tended to do that to him. I figured their home life must be something to see.

“You say that now. Before this is over, I’ll bet you’ll be looking back fondly on your time spent in that car. You find anything?”

“We got nothing ’cause there’s nothing to get. House is empty. We checked before we start freezing our asses off out here. Nothing’s changed since then. We still freezing our asses off. Place still looked the same, except for one small difference: the closet in the basement was empty. Looks like the freak moved his collection.”

The Collector knew that someone had been in his house; he had discovered the trespass in his own way.

“Leave it,” I said. “If Merrick hasn’t returned there by now, he’s not going to.”

It had been a long shot to begin with. Merrick knew that the house would be the first place we would look for him. He had gone underground instead. I told Louis to have Angel drop him in Augusta, then pick up a rental car and head back to Scarborough. Angel would drive north to Jackman to see what he could find out there, as well as keeping watch for Merrick, because I was certain that Merrick would head for Jackman, and Gilead, eventually.

“How come he get to go to Jackman and I got to stay down there with you?” asked Louis.

“You know when you drop a lump of coal in snow?” I said.

“Yeah.”

“Well, that’s why you’re not going to Jackman.”

“You a closet racist, man.”

“You know, sometimes I almost forget you’re black.”

“Yeah? Well, I never forget you’re white. I seen you dance.”

With that, he hung up.

My next call was to Rebecca Clay to inform her that Merrick was well and truly off the leash. She didn’t take the news well, but agreed to let Jackie Garner shadow her again, with the Fulcis in tow. Even if she hadn’t agreed, I would have browbeaten her into it eventually. Moments after I finished talking to Rebecca, I received a call from an unexpected source. Joel Harmon was on the end of the line: not his secretary, not Todd, the driver who knew how to hold a gun, but the man himself.

“Someone broke into my house early this morning,” he said. “I was up in Bangor last night so I wasn’t there when it happened. Todd discovered the damage to the window this morning.”

“Why are you telling me this, Mr. Harmon?” I wasn’t on Joel Harmon’s dime, and my head still ached from the chloroform.

“My office was ransacked. I’m trying to figure out if anything was taken. But I thought you might be interested to know that one of Daniel Clay’s paintings was vandalized. Nothing else was damaged in the same way, and none of the other paintings were touched, but the Gilead landscape was torn apart.”

“Don’t you have an alarm system?”

“It’s hooked up to the telephone. The line was cut.”

“And there was nobody in the house?”

“Only my wife.” There was a pause. “She slept through it all.”

“That’s quite a deep sleep, Mr. Harmon.”

“Don’t be a smart-ass. You’ve met her. You don’t need me to tell you that she’s doped up to the eyeballs. She could sleep through the apocalypse.”

“Any indication of who might have been responsible?”

“You talk like a fucking lawyer, you know that?” I could almost hear the spittle landing on the phone. “Of course I have a fucking idea! He cut the phone lines, but one of the security cameras on the grounds picked him up. The Scarborough cops came out here and identified him as Frank Merrick. This is the same guy who’s been terrorizing Rebecca Clay, right? Now I hear he may have blown some pedophile’s head off in a trailer park on the same night he busted into the house where my wife was sleeping. The hell does he want from me?”

“You were a friend of Daniel Clay’s. He wants to find him. Maybe he figured you’d know where he was.”

“If I knew where he was, I’d have told someone long before now. My question is, how did he know to come looking for me?”

“I found out about you and Clay easily enough. So could Merrick.”

“Yeah? Well how come that the night you came to see me, the car Merrick was driving at the time was seen outside my property? You know what I think, you fucking asshole? I think he followed you. You brought him to my door. You put my family at risk, all for a man who’s long dead. You prick!”

I hung up. Harmon was probably right, but I didn’t want to hear about it. I had enough baggage to carry already, and too much on my mind to worry about his painting or his anger at me. At least the damage confirmed my suspicion that Gilead was Merrick’s ultimate destination. I felt as if I had spent a week wading through mud, and I regretted the day that Rebecca Clay had called me. I wasn’t even sure what I was looking for anymore. Rebecca had hired me to get rid of Merrick, and instead he was roaming wild. Ricky Demarcian was dead, and the use of my gun made me culpable in his killing. According to the police, Demarcian had been involved in child pornography, and possibly even the supply of women and children to clients. Someone had handed him on a plate to Merrick, who might simply have killed him out of rage, finding in Demarcian’s shooting a convenient outlet for some of his own anger at whoever was responsible for what had happened to his daughter, or he might have learned something from Demarcian before his death. If he did, then Demarcian was also a piece of the puzzle, linked to Clay and Gilead and abusers with the faces of birds, but the man with the eagle tattoo, the only solid means of identifying those responsible for abusing Andy Kellog and, it seemed, Lucy Merrick, remained elusive. I couldn’t talk to any more of the victims because they were protected by bonds of confidentiality, or by the simple fact that nobody was aware of who they were. And I was still no closer to discovering the truth about Daniel Clay’s disappearance, or the extent of his involvement in the abuse of his patients, but nobody had asked me to do that anyway. I had never felt more frustrated, more at a loss as to how to proceed.

So I decided to place my head in the lion’s mouth. I made a call and told the woman on the other end of the phone that I was on my way to see her boss. She didn’t reply, but it didn’t matter. The Collector would find out soon enough.

The office of Eldritch and Associates was still knee deep in old paper and short on associates when I arrived. It was also short of Eldritches.

“He ain’t here,” said the secretary. Her hair was still big and still black, but this time her blouse was dark blue with a white frilled collar. An overlarge silver crucifix hung from a chain around her neck. She looked like a minister who specialized in cheap lesbian weddings. “You hadn’t hung up so soon, I’d have told you you were wasting your time coming down here.”

“When are you expecting him back?”

“When he comes back. I’m his secretary, not his keeper.”

She fed a sheet of paper into an old electric typewriter and began tapping out a letter. Her cigarette never moved from the corner of her mouth. She had perfected the art of puffing on it without touching it with her hand until it became necessary to do so in order to prevent the dangling column of ash from sending her to meet her maker in an inferno of burning paper, assuming her maker was prepared to own up and claim her.

“Maybe you could call him and let him know that I’m here,” I said, after a couple of minutes had passed in noncompanionable silence.

“He doesn’t use a cell phone. He doesn’t like ’em. Says they give you cancer.” She squinted at me. “You use a cell phone?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

She returned to her typing.

I took in the nicotine-encrusted walls and ceiling. “A safe workplace is a happy workplace,” I said. “I can wait for him.”

“Not here you can’t. We’re closing for lunch.”

“Kind of early for lunch.”

“It’s a busy day. I been run off my feet.”

She finished typing, then carefully removed the letter from the typewriter. The letter was then added to a pile of similar documents in a wire tray, none of which looked like they were ever likely to be sent. Some of those at the bottom had already yellowed.

“Do you ever get rid of any of this stuff ?” I asked, indicating the stacks of paper and dusty files.

“Sometimes people die,” she said. “Then we move their files to a storage facility.”

“They could die here, and just be buried under paper.”

She stood and retrieved a drab olive overcoat from a battered coatrack.

“You have to go now,” she said. “You’re just too much fun for me.”

“I’ll come back after lunch.”

“You do that.”

“Any idea when that might be?”

“Nope. Could be a long one.”

“I’ll be waiting when you return.”

“Uh-huh. Be still my heart.”

She opened the office door and waited for me to leave before locking it with a brass key that she kept in her purse. Then she followed me down the stairs and double-locked the main door before climbing into a rusted brown Caddy parked in Tulley’s lot. My own car was down the block. There didn’t seem to be much more that I could do other than to get a bite to eat and wait around in the hope that Eldritch might materialize, unless I just gave up and drove home. Even if Eldritch made an appearance, he wasn’t my principal reason for being there. It was the man who paid his bills. I couldn’t force Eldritch to tell me more about him. Well, I could, but I found it hard to imagine myself grappling with the old lawyer in an effort to make him confess what he knew. At worst, I saw him disintegrate into fragments of dust in my hands, staining my jacket with his remains.