‘It doesn’t mean that the star and the body are connected.’
‘No, but if there’s one subject on which we’re not short of experts in this state, it’s trees. It’s all still approximate, but the star was probably carved at around the same time that body went into the ground.’
‘And you’re sure it’s a Star of David?’
‘It was carefully done. I don’t believe there’s any doubt.’
‘Has anyone mentioned hate crime?’
‘It came up. The M.E. is still waiting on toxicology results. They’ll take another five weeks to appear, but I don’t recall hearing about many hate crime poisonings. And it’s just a Star of David: no swastika alongside it, no anti-Semitic indicators. The star looks to be a marker, even a memorial, and nothing more.’
Parker glanced again at the bag by Moxie’s side.
‘Torah glasses,’ he said.
‘Torah glasses,’ Moxie echoed, raising a hand for the check. ‘It may surprise you, but I tend to believe the best of people. It’s because I mostly see the worst, and being an optimist is the only way I can keep getting out of bed in the morning. I think someone buried that woman but held on to her child, and I’m hoping it was for a noble reason. Whether it was or not, the person or persons responsible will be getting very worried right now. When the police find them – and my feeling is that they will be found, because someone who takes the time to carve a Star of David as a makeshift memorial doesn’t strike me as a professional disposer of bodies – they’re going to need advice and representation. Call it my service for the dead woman. Yours too, although in your case you’ll also be paid for your time.’
‘What do you want me to do?’
‘I’ve exhausted my source. I’ve found out all I’m going to, for now.’
By this Parker guessed that Moxie’s contact was someone close to the M.E.’s office rather than the state police.
‘I don’t have many friends in Augusta,’ said Parker.
‘I’m a lawyer – I don’t have any at all. Learn what you can. Shadow the investigation. I want to believe that child is alive.’
‘Against the odds.’
‘That’s right.’
‘The state police may not like me riding their coattails.’
‘This isn’t a homicide – not yet, maybe not ever. The only crime that’s been committed so far is an unregistered burial.’
The check came. Moxie paid in cash, and tipped generously.
‘So?’ he asked Parker.
‘I guess I’m hired.’
Moxie grinned.
‘That’s my boy,’ he said. ‘It’s just a shame that your more unusual skill sets won’t be required for this investigation. Hell, you probably won’t even have to raise your voice …’
23
It had taken Holly Weaver’s father two days to return to his home outside Guilford, days during which Holly had died a thousand deaths, a hundred of them alone in the hours after the discovery of the body in the woods. Owen Weaver drove a big rig for a living, and was down in Florida when the woman was found. At forty cents a mile that represented good money – the best he’d earned in a while, because the winter months were always slow, and her father preferred to work in New England when possible. But then winter was bad for a lot of folks in Maine. Holly worked as a secretary and receptionist for a medical supply company in Dover-Foxcroft. She’d been lucky to hold on to all her hours in January and February – lucky to hold on to her job – while waitressing work on the weekends gave her the chance to squirrel away some cash without the IRS biting. At least Daniel was in kindergarten now, which made things a little easier. She wasn’t paying as much in childcare, wasn’t— What if they found out? What if they arrived with their flashing lights and took Daniel away?
She’d die.
Make those a thousand and one deaths.
She’d been so frightened that she hadn’t even used her own phone to call her father after the body was found. They listened in to calls, didn’t they: the police, the CIA, the NSA? Holly had a vision of endless white rooms filled with people, all with headphones clamped to their ears, flicking between conversations, waiting for keywords: ISIS, explosive, murder, body, found, shallow, grave. She knew it probably wasn’t like that in reality. They had computers programmed to pick up on phrases. She’d read about it somewhere, or thought she had. Surely they could spy on pay phones too? But at least with a pay phone some prospect of anonymity existed. If you were dumb enough to talk about bad stuff on your cell, you might as well put the cuffs on your own wrists and wait for them to come by and arrest you.
So she left her cell phone by the TV before emptying the nickels and dimes from the little milkmaid money box that she kept on the mantelpiece: her ‘treat fund,’ she called it, even though she was often forced to raid it for new clothing or shoes for the boy, he was growing so fast.
A thousand and two deaths.
She put all the coins in an old sock, secured Daniel in the child seat in case of an accident— A thousand and three.
Enough.
—and headed to the gas station, where there was a pay phone she could use. Rain was falling, and the wipers left streaks on the windshield. They needed to be replaced, but she didn’t have the money for it, not this month, and she didn’t want to ask her father because he already gave her too much. Sometimes Holly suspected her father kept working only because of her and Daniel, although he assured her that he enjoyed being out on the road. He claimed to double-clutch down hills even while sleeping in his bed at home, and he used a truck logbook as a diary.
Her father was part of a subspecies with its own rules, and its own language. She’d grown up listening to him talk of the ‘chicken chokers,’ who moved animals, and the ‘suicide jockeys’, with their loads of hazardous materials. But he was also different from so many of his kind, who drifted like tumbleweeds through life: no home, or not much of one beyond a mildewed apartment; no family, or none with whom they were in contact; no money, or none beyond what they could keep in their wallets; and no future, or none beyond the next job. Owen Weaver wasn’t one of the wanderers, and if he valued the freedom of the road, he treasured his daughter and grandson more. Yet he still loved that damn rig, and the solitude of his cab, and the conversations at truck stops that always began with the same question: ‘Whatcha driving?’
But Owen Weaver was past sixty, and his back hurt like a bitch after nearly forty years behind the wheel of various semis. Holly supposed she could have sold the house that she and her son shared, and gone to live with her father next door, but the house was all she had, and pride prevented her from parting with it – pride, and the knowledge that much as she loved her father, and much as he cherished his daughter and Daniel, he wasn’t a man to share his space easily. Two wives, one of them her own mother, could have attested to that.
Holly missed her mother. She’d died too soon at thirty-five, and her father had remarried too soon in the aftermath, perhaps out of panic at being left alone to care for a young daughter. He’d realized the error of his ways quickly enough, as did his second wife. They’d parted amicably but irrevocably, and since then only a few women had shared Owen Weaver’s bed, although none lingered. Until Holly left school, her father took only local haulage jobs, mostly managing to be home in time for dinner, and often before. Holly had always known her father would do anything for her, anything at all.