‘You don’t know me well enough to make that judgment, yet I concede you may be right. I withdraw the remark. In return, you might try to explain how a young woman who came to you for help now lies in a morgue after many years in the ground.’
‘She wouldn’t stay,’ said Maela. Her voice trembled, but on this occasion she was not ashamed to show emotion. It was no sign of weakness: she was right to feel sorrow for Karis and her lost child, and with this came guilt at her own failings. Maela had been unable to persuade Karis to remain with her. Two nights was as long as Karis would allow herself to rest. That was how scared she was of those who might come after her. Now, gazing upon this interloper in her home, Maela appreciated that Karis had been wise to be scared.
Because Maela decided that Quayle, either by nature or inclination, was not quite human.
‘But you must have passed her along to someone else, just as Dobey and Bachmeier entrusted her to you.’
‘I gave her some names,’ Maela admitted. She wiped away a tear. ‘She was planning to go to Canada, and I had contacts in Quebec and New Brunswick.’
‘But not elsewhere in Maine?’
‘No. She didn’t want to tarry here.’
Quayle took all this in, then turned to Mors.
‘Well?’
‘I think we should blind her,’ said Mors.
‘I think so, too.’
‘No!’ The word emerged as a scream from Maela’s throat, more like the cry of a bird than any mortal sound. ‘Please, I’m telling you the truth. I drove her to the bus station, and she bought tickets for three different destinations: Bangor, Montreal, and Fredericton, New Brunswick. She then asked me to leave, so I wouldn’t know which route she’d taken.’
‘Didn’t she trust you to keep her secrets?’
‘Not if faced with someone like you.’
Quayle sat back in the chair. The volume of Marcus Aurelius had remained in his left hand throughout, and now he stroked it with the fingers of his right, like a kitten curled.
‘You are a formidable woman, Ms Lombardi,’ he said. ‘I really do admire you a great deal.’
‘But not enough to let me live,’ said Maela.
She could no longer tell if she was crying for Karis or herself, for both or for all: for every frightened, bruised, and tortured woman or girl who had ever come to her seeking help and consolation. And who would take her place after she was gone? There would always be too few people in this world who cared enough to put themselves at risk for the sake of strangers, and too many who sought to inflict pain on the familiar and nameless alike.
‘No,’ said Quayle, ‘not enough for that.’
‘Then damn you both to hell.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Quayle, even as Mors drifted from her perch to circle and descend. ‘But I promise it won’t hurt.’
And it did not.
43
Parker attended the funeral of Jasper Allen. The little Methodist chapel was so full that the mourners spilled out into the spring sunshine, and the service was broadcast to the assembly via a hurriedly arranged system of loudspeakers. Representatives from police departments in New England and beyond came to pay tribute, so Parker knew a lot of the faces. He spoke with one or two of those in attendance, including Gordon Walsh, but otherwise kept his distance. He had nothing to offer. He had met Allen only once, and liked him. That was all there was to it.
The service was simple: some hymns, a sermon, and a eulogy from the colonel of the Maine State Police, who had known Allen personally. They had both grown up in Millinocket, only a year apart in age. Fatalities among Maine state troopers while on duty were rare; Parker thought they might amount to double figures, but just barely, and of those Allen was only the third or fourth to be killed by gunfire. Lawmen never became inured to the deaths of their own, even in the most violent of cities, but the shock was always greater in a state like Maine, which ranked among the lowest in the Union for rates of violent crime, generally slugging it out with Vermont for the honor.
Parker listened to the colonel’s words, and watched a blackbird picking at a patch of damp soil in the shadow of the chapel. It was the first blackbird he’d seen that year. Typically they didn’t return to the state until later in March, closely followed by turkey vultures, then the robins and sparrows in early April. To know birds was to know seasons; another aspect of life here that Parker had learned from his grandfather. The long winter silence of the woods, fields, and marshes was being broken by avian song at last.
The service ended. Parker did not linger, nor did he head to the cemetery. He didn’t want to see Allen’s weeping wife again, or stare upon his shocked children. He’d witnessed grief too often to wish to carry the burden of it without necessity, or indulge in any voyeuristic partaking in the misery of others.
The car used by Allen’s killers had been found burned out the night before. Parker gleaned from Walsh that a witness – a woman named Letty Ouellette – had come forward to claim her boyfriend had picked up two men on the evening of the shooting, not far from where the car was discovered, and brought them home. Both of the new arrivals appeared nervous, and she overheard a subsequent conversation about a gun, although she didn’t pick up any further details because she was exiled upstairs to watch TV and mind her own business.
The boyfriend, who went by the extravagant name of Hebron Caldicott – Heb to his associates – made a living buying and selling used vehicles, and Ouellette thought the make and model of the burned-out car sounded similar to one that had, until recently, been taking up space in the lot adjoining their property. She had also indicated, albeit reluctantly, that Heb Caldicott subsidized his income from the motor industry by distributing OxyContin, crystal meth, and cocaine, and had recently expanded into heroin.
All this Ouellette elected to share with the police because Caldicott, with whom she’d been living for the past eight months, had suggested that she might like to sleep with ‘Dale,’ and maybe ‘Gary’ too, in order to calm them down and keep them distracted while Caldicott went out and took care of some urgent business. When Ouellette responded that she had no intention of fucking two transients just to keep them occupied – or for any other reason – good old Heb Caldicott, who seemed pretty overwrought himself to Ouellette, punched her so hard that she briefly lost consciousness. When she came to, Caldicott informed her that she’d fuck whomever he told her to fuck, and she ought to start making herself pretty for his friends, because they were going to spend time with her whether she liked it or not. He then locked Ouellette in the bedroom, at which point she decided their relationship had come to its natural conclusion, and the best thing would be to climb out a window and seek accommodation elsewhere.