Terri Harkness, his contact at the Maine Town and City Clerks’ Association, agreed to inquire about birth certificate filings that might have raised an eyebrow, but she didn’t hold out much hope. Clerks took their roles seriously, she said, and nobody wanted a false filing to come back and bite. But she did admit that when it came to home births, they couldn’t do much more than take the word of the parent or parents, and she had personal knowledge of two very religious families in which grandparents were raising a grandchild as their own in order to protect a daughter from opprobrium.
‘And shouldn’t the police be asking these questions anyway?’ said Harkness.
‘The clerk at the Vital Records Office in Augusta told me they’d already received a request from the state police for assistance, now that the search of the site is winding down,’ said Parker, ‘but resources are likely to be stretched until they find Jasper Allen’s killers. My guess is that the police will be in touch with more of your members soon enough, but maybe I can save them some trouble.’
‘If you do figure out who has the child, you have to know they won’t be too pleased to see you.’
‘If I let the likely pleasure of my company guide my movements,’ Parker told her, ‘I’d never leave the house.’
Putnam, Newhouse, and Caldicott had proved smarter than anyone might previously have credited, and had so far managed to evade the police. The general view was that Caldicott was the bright one, although it was all relative, given that he was a midlevel Maine drug dealer now being hunted as a possible accessory to the killing of a state trooper.
If Caldicott was clever, Parker thought, he’d have ditched Putnam and Newhouse as quickly as possible and headed north or west. Parker’s guess was north – maybe into the County, as everyone in Maine called Aroostook, the largest territory in the state: almost seven thousand square miles, most of it uninhabited woodland. Caldicott knew the terrain; his people came from up Scopan way, close to the Allagash Wilderness. A man could lose himself in there and not be found until someone stumbled on his bones.
But if Caldicott was really clever, and also ruthless, he’d have done more than ditch Putnam and Newhouse: he’d have killed them. Right now there was only the word of his girlfriend that he’d supplied the car used in the shooting, and the presence of Putnam and Newhouse at Caldicott’s place on the night in question didn’t directly link him to Allen’s death. While the distinction between being an accessory before or after the fact had largely been erased in law, the reality was that an accessory after the fact faced a lighter sentence. As things stood, Caldicott was only in trouble for knowingly assisting a suspected felon or felons in avoiding arrest or trial, unless the police investigation uncovered evidence linking him to the planning of the drug buy that had ultimately resulted in Allen’s murder. There was also the testimony of Caldicott’s junkie girlfriend to consider, although it appeared she had now lawyered up in order to counter any possibility of her own indictment as an accessory, and junkies made poor witnesses. Whatever happened, Caldicott was in trouble, but he might be in less trouble if Putnam and Newhouse were to vanish from the face of the earth.
None of which was Parker’s problem.
He returned to the matter of the unidentified woman. What did he know of her? She was probably from out of state, so how did she come to be in Maine? What drew her to the northeast? She was pregnant, so it was possible that the father of the child was here. Yet somehow she ended up going into labor not in the safety of a hospital but out in the wild, and any witnesses to the birth and her subsequent passing had not seen fit to alert the authorities. Could the father of the child have been responsible for her burial? If so, why hide the body and the fact of the birth, unless he panicked when the woman died, fearing that the law might find a way to blame him for it. What if he was married, and the pregnancy the result of an affair? The lover shows up in his home state, heavy with his child, and he finds somewhere to accommodate her without his wife suspecting. When the woman dies giving birth, he gets rid of her along with the child and returns to his blameless life.
But if that was so, why wasn’t the child buried with the mother?
Parker rowed back. One certainty: this was a woman in trouble, because otherwise she would not have ended up in a hole in the woods. She was heavily pregnant, in an unfamiliar locale. To whom would she have turned? Planned Parenthood, perhaps, or one of the women’s refuges, yet no such organization in the state had come forward to claim knowledge of her.
Parker experienced a tickling at his memory, a detail from the past that was assuming new relevance in light of the current case. Then it came to him, and he made one final call, this time to Bangor. The woman with whom he wished to speak was absent, and would not be back until nightfall. Parker left a message advising that he would travel up to talk to her in person the next day. He knew he could have spoken with her over the phone, but he had learned from long experience that people, even those with no grudge against him, were often more forthcoming when dealt with face-to-face.
And anyway, he had other obligations that night.
51
Quayle did not like bars, or not bars like this: loud, convivial, and filled with staff that might remember a face. Quayle preferred older, darker watering holes, frequented by men and women who did not exchange glances or make conversation with those unknown to them, and only barely acknowledged those they did know; places with names originating from a time when the masses could not read, and inns were identifiable by their signs.
But perhaps in those London hostelries that had been in the same family for generations, a landlord might remark to his son or daughter, as they cleaned glasses or pulled pints, that the customer seated in the corner (‘a legal gentleman, if memory serves’) enjoyed a similar hereditary link to their beloved establishment, for this man’s father used to drink here, and indeed his father before him (‘for they bear the same likeness, which speaks of a strong bloodline’), even if the appellation of this august lineage of clientele would not quite come to the innkeeper (‘something to do with birds, I’m sure of it’), and it would never cross his mind to ask, because he was certain that this gentleman (‘keeps himself to himself, but pleasant enough with it’) would not welcome such inquiries, and perhaps the reason he and his forebears had offered their patronage down the years was precisely this discretion on the part of a long line of landlords (‘for we know when to look, and when to look away’), and so it should remain.