History echoes, history rhymes.
Parker’s grandfather, who spent most of his adult life in the uniform of a Maine state trooper, had witnessed the immediate aftermath of life’s dissolution in many forms: highway collisions; assaults leading to fatality; expirations in sleep, on the street, over dinner; hunting accidents; suicide; and murder. The old man gave long consideration to the actions of mortality, and the conclusion he reached was that the moment of a man’s passing was not written at the time of his birth, and Death possessed no stratagem. Death was a being of expediency; it had no need to deviate excessively from its path to find quarry. Humanity drifted in and out of striking distance, and if Death missed its mark the first time, the dupe would eventually come around again, and Death would barely have to exert itself to strike the terminal blow. Death was patient. Death was inexhaustible.
But Death also liked patterns. Death had its own cadence.
And so it was that Jasper Allen, who had faced down Gillick and Audet as they raced for the Canadian border, and welcomed a shard of masonry into his flesh for his troubles; Jasper Allen, who bore the name of his sire, and grandsire, and great-grandsire, back to a Jasper Allen who fought at the siege of Fort St George in December 1723, when the Abenaki surrounded the Thomaston stockade on Christmas Day and kept it under continuous assault for thirty days thereafter, only for that Jasper Allen, the first of his line, to lose his life a few months later, when the Abenaki trapped the whaling boats of Captain Winslow and Sergeant Harvey and butchered every white man they found; Jasper Allen – father, husband – who, after the birth of three daughters, had at last been gifted a son to whom he might pass on the eponym of his forebears; Jasper Allen, state trooper, heard Death’s meter, and danced unconsciously to it.
Allen was barely fifteen minutes from home when he pulled over a Honda Civic Coupe that was tearing up the blacktop on the road to LaGrange. The two young men inside were Dale Putnam and Gary Newhouse, although this would not become known until much later, just as it would not be clear why events transpired as they did until all but one of those involved were dead. Putnam had an outstanding warrant for probation violation and theft by deception. This in itself would have been enough to land him back in the county jail had he and Newhouse not also been transporting four hundred bundles of heroin in the trunk of the Honda, each bundle consisting of ten bags. They’d managed to strike a good deal on the heroin down in New York: $30 per bundle, or $12,000 for the batch, which in Maine could be sold for at least $15 per bag. So in return for their initial outlay, Putnam and Newhouse were guaranteed to turn a profit of $48,000, of which they’d have to kick back $18,000 to the guy who had fronted them the money, leaving them with $15,000 each to reinvest in heroin. This they fully intended to do, because Maine was just one big vein waiting to be fed: Newhouse personally knew three guys who were using five hundred bags a week, ten bags per shot.
So what they did not need was for some Herman Munster motherfucker dressed in blue to pull them over because they were doing maybe ten miles above the limit, especially with Putnam – who was behind the wheel – also coming down from a meth high, and thus on the verge of tweaking. All of which went some way toward explaining why, as he handed over his license, Putnam saw fit to pull a Hi-Point C-9 and shoot Jasper Allen through the underside of the jaw, killing him instantly. The two men then dumped the body in the bushes, and in an effort to sabotage the dashboard cam and the hard drive in the trunk, set fire to the cruiser before driving to the outskirts of Lincoln. There they hid the Honda in the garage of a run-down property that had been on the market for long enough to suggest it would never sell, and walked to a fast-food restaurant from which they called for a ride from their money man, to whom they initially decided to say nothing about the killing of a state trooper.
Putnam had been born on the same day as the late Ryan Gillick, and Newhouse came from the same town as Bertrand Audet. But again, these coincidences would only emerge over the days and weeks that followed. The immediate effect of Allen’s death – other than to leave a woman widowed, and four children without a father – was to cause the cancellation of the press conference called for the following day, and the withdrawal of most of the MSP evidence team from the dig site.
And Death, insatiable, marched on.
42
Quayle moved his chair closer to Maela Lombardi, so near that they might have spoken in whispers and still have been intelligible to each other. As with Errol Dobey, it lent the discourse a strange intimacy, one destined to be reinforced by the act with which it must inevitably conclude: the penetration to come, the yielding of the flesh to fatal invasion, that for now remained unacknowledged by both parties.
‘You appear very certain it’s Karis they’ve found,’ said Quayle.
‘The timing is right,’ Maela replied. ‘And how many mothers of newborns do you think are buried out in those woods?’
‘I couldn’t possibly say. But you might be lying.’
‘Why would I do that?’
‘To protect her.’
‘I think she was already long past protection by the time she came to me. She’d given up hope for herself. It was the baby she wanted to save.’
‘She told you this?’
‘She didn’t have to.’
Quayle looked to the woman with him. Maela caught a hint of some private exchange, a silent understanding, and realized that her interpretation of the situation was flawed. This wasn’t just about Karis, or the baby. But if not, then what else could it be?
‘So Dobey and Bachmeier sent her to you?’
‘By way of another staging post.’
‘Did they inform you she was coming?’
‘Esther said she might be.’
‘What did they share with you of her predicament?’
‘Nothing, except that Karis was in trouble, and was certain someone would be coming after her, someone bad.’
‘The father of the child?’
‘That’s what Esther assumed. Are you the father of the child?’
‘No, I am not.’
‘But here you are. Therefore Esther’s assumption was wrong.’
Quayle shook a finger at her in what might have been mistaken for good-natured warning.
‘I fear you’re playing semantic games with me. Perhaps you’d like Pallida to strike you again – or in common with the late Errol Dobey, you’re curious to find out what the world looks like when seen through one eye.’
Maela took a deep breath.
‘I want neither.’
‘Then give me straight answers. What did Karis tell you?’
‘She told me that the father of the baby was an occultist, and an abuser of women and children. She said that what she’d taken from him would destroy him. Those were her exact words. She didn’t elaborate, and I didn’t press her on it.’
‘Why?’
‘Because that wasn’t my role. I was her guardian, however briefly, not her interrogator.’
‘You can’t have guarded her very well if she ended up in a shallow grave.’
Maela winced. The barb stuck, but it didn’t take her long to shake off its sting. When she had done so, her gaze seemed keener than before, and she looked on Quayle more in disappointment than disgust, as once she might have regarded a schoolchild who used an inappropriate word in her presence.
‘That was unworthy, even of you,’ she said.