Parker didn’t need to go through the possibilities with Corriveau, because he knew she would be thinking along the same lines. The first of them was that Lombardi might have been complicit in what befell Jane Doe – and her child – and decided to run when the investigation began to gather steam. But given Lombardi’s commitment to women in danger, this seemed unlikely, if not entirely out of the question.
The second possibility was that Lombardi did indeed know Jane Doe’s identity, but was choosing to keep it concealed in order to protect the child. This still didn’t explain Lombardi’s absence, unless she was now on the road with the child somehow in tow.
The third possibility was that Lombardi’s knowledge of Jane Doe meant she was a danger to those who had put the woman in the ground and caused her child to vanish, which meant that Lombardi might now be dead.
The final possibility was one that Parker would need to discuss with Molly Bow before either he or the police could pursue it further: that someone else was interested in Jane Doe or her child, and had traced her flight along the network.
Which also presaged no good for Maela Lombardi.
Parker promised Corriveau he would stay in touch. It struck him that he was making a lot of similar promises to law enforcement. He might have to start billing the state for calls.
He had barely hung up on Corriveau when his phone rang again. Caller ID gave him a name.
‘Molly,’ he said.
And Molly Bow replied: ‘I think we should talk.’
67
Moxie Castin had largely put thoughts of Jane Doe to one side. By hiring Parker, he was doing what he could for her and the child – if that child still lived. Moxie was not a good or particularly observant Jew, but he appreciated the subtle distinction between a mitzveh and a mitzvah. Technically, a mitzveh was something done for someone else, a good deed; a mitzvah represented the will of God. By privately funding a search for Jane Doe’s child, Moxie figured he was killing two birds with one stone: it was a good deed, and probably also represented God’s will.
A considerable number of Moxie’s colleagues in Maine’s legal community were of the opinion that he was crazy to involve himself with Charlie Parker. Sometimes Moxie was inclined to share this view, but generally he tended to disagree. In its way, Moxie thought, Parker’s ongoing presence in his life might also cover a couple of mitzvot.
Plus Parker made Moxie’s professional life interesting, and occasionally worthwhile. Right now, by contrast, Moxie was reviewing the file of a woman who claimed to have slipped on artificial snow at a shopping mall, resulting in a fractured ankle, a dislocated shoulder, and sexual assault by a plastic elf. Moxie wasn’t entirely sure that a plastic elf could commit sexual assault, being an inanimate object shaped as a mythical being, but it was quite clear from the woman’s statement, and the testimony of a number of shocked witnesses, that she had landed intimately and uncomfortably on the outstretched foot of one of Santa’s elves. That foot represented at least an extra ten grand in compensation, so Moxie had ordered the elf in question to be wrapped in plastic and held as evidence. It was an open-and-shut case, the only issue to be decided being the extent of damages, but it hardly represented a “mitzveh,” and was certainly not one of the six hundred and thirteen mitzvot. Moxie didn’t have to check to be sure of that.
So when his secretary came on the line, Moxie was grateful for the distraction from the intimate details of the bruising sustained in the elf incident, even before his secretary told him what the caller wanted to talk to him about.
The Woman in the Woods.
Parker met Molly Bow in Augusta, which, while not quite equidistant from Portland and Bangor, represented a similar degree of inconvenience for both of them, Parker being disinclined to drive all the way to Bangor to hear something that Bow should have told him when last they met.
Bow was already waiting when Parker arrived at Fat Cat’s on State. She was sipping something that looked healthy and organic, and probably contained soy milk, which always struck Parker as defeating the purpose of going to a coffee shop to begin with. He approached her before heading for the counter, held out his hand, and asked for three bucks.
‘For what?’
‘For my coffee. I figure I should make you pay for my gas as well, but I’ll wait to hear what you have to say before I start calculating.’
Bow muttered, but eventually came up with a five from her bag.
‘I want change,’ she said.
Parker ordered an Americano, tipped well, and brought back a quarter.
‘Your change,’ he said.
‘You are a frustrating man.’
‘You have no idea.’ He sipped his coffee. ‘So what didn’t you tell me yesterday?’
Bow didn’t enjoy being forced into an admission, so every word was like a thorn on her tongue.
‘That Maela’s wasn’t the only name I knew.’
Parker had suspected as much.
‘Someone else in Maine?’
‘No, that much was true; Maela is it as far as this state is concerned. The other name is for a woman in Sioux City. She’s also been struggling to reach Maela, so she contacted me instead.’
‘And?’
‘She told me that a couple of weeks ago, a fire in Cadillac, Indiana, killed a man named Errol Dobey. He owned a diner, as well as dealing in, and collecting, rare books. He was heavily involved in what we do. His girlfriend, Esther Bachmeier, went missing at about the same time. She was also part of it.’
‘What do the police think?’
‘There’s no sign the fire was anything but accidental. Dobey liked to smoke a little pot late at night, and there had been one or two close calls in the past. He lost part of his collection to a fire back in 2008, but it seemed he’d been more careful since then.’
‘And Bachmeier?’
‘She wasn’t the sort to go starting fires, either deliberately or accidentally, or so I’m told. She and Dobey were good people. Well, Dobey was, and Esther, I guess, still could be. God, you know what I mean. I shouldn’t be speaking of her in the past tense.’
‘I did the same thing this morning, talking to the state police about Maela Lombardi.’ He caught Bow’s look. ‘I didn’t mention your name, and Solange Corriveau didn’t press me on it, but if what you’re about to tell me is relevant to the investigation, I’ll have to share it with the police.’
Bow didn’t raise any objections. Parker could see that she was rattled. He waited for her to continue.
‘The evening after the fire,’ said Bow, ‘someone tried to snatch one of Dobey’s waitresses, a girl named Leila Patton, from in front of her home. Patton started screaming and fought back. She managed to gouge her attacker with a key. Patton thinks she might have caught her badly in the face, because there was blood on the key when she was done.’
‘Caught “her”?’
‘The attacker was a woman. Masked, but definitely a woman.’
‘So how does this connect to Lombardi?’ he asked.
‘About five years ago – my Sioux City contact wasn’t entirely sure of the dates, because it’s not like anyone keeps formal records – Dobey and Bachmeier may have sent a woman on to Maine, via Chicago. She was heavily pregnant.’
‘Did this woman have a name?’
‘Karis.’
‘Second name?’
‘My contact didn’t know it, and at least one of those who did is now dead.’
Parker was writing everything down in his notebook. In the good old days, back when he was younger and more vigorous, he might have trusted memory alone, but no longer.
‘I need the name and number of the contact.’
‘No. She told me all she can. I guarantee it. You can set the cops on me if you like, but it won’t make any difference.’
‘I’m sorry, but as I warned, I’ll probably have to. I don’t imagine it’ll involve a whole lot of trouble for you, but continuing to withhold your name will definitely cause problems for me.’
‘Whatever.’
‘What about Leila Patton? Anyone have a number for her?’
Again, in the good old days, Parker would just have dialed 411, but half the people he knew now appeared to rely on cell phones alone, and that went double for those under thirty.