‘I’ll ask.’
Parker could always try the Cadillac cops, assuming Patton had reported the attempted abduction, but in the past he’d enjoyed mixed experiences with small-town police departments, given that at least one of them had conspired in attempting to have him killed. Under the circumstances, a certain amount of caution on his part was forgivable.
‘You think you could do that now?’ he asked.
Bow stepped outside to make the call. Parker watched her as she walked back and forth. He could see she was engaged in a conversation, and not just leaving a message. That was good.
He checked his notes. Karis was an unusual name, and there couldn’t be many missing persons who shared it. This assumed, of course, that Karis had been reported missing to begin with. The absence of a deluge of concerned individuals coming forward to offer that name as a possible identifier suggested she might not have been.
Molly Bow returned.
‘She’s going to call Leila and make sure it’s okay to give her number to you. I didn’t tell her that you’d probably find Leila anyway. I didn’t think it would help.’
Bow set her phone down on the table, but muted it so that if a call came through, it would light up without making a racket.
‘A woman after my own heart,’ said Parker.
‘I sincerely hope not.’ She worried at her lower lip. ‘I saw the Silver Alert for Maela. Do those things work?’
‘Sometimes, if a senior has just wandered off.’
‘But Maela hasn’t wandered off, has she?’
‘I doubt it.’
‘It doesn’t make any sense to me. Why would someone want to hurt Maela, Dobey, or anyone else because of this body found in the woods? All they could have known was her name.’
‘If Karis is Jane Doe, she was running from someone. As she was pregnant, maybe this person was hired by the father of the child, or is the father.’
‘But to kill someone, just to find out what happened to a baby?’
‘You’ve met men who were willing to kill their partners for trying to take their children away from them.’
Bow thought about this.
‘I have. I can even understand the kind of rage and narcissism that could give rise to it. But if it is Karis who was buried in the woods, she’s long dead. Nothing more can be done to hurt her. So what is this person trying to achieve if Maela and the others have somehow been targeted?’
‘To discover where the child is. The rest could be revenge.’
‘Revenge?’
Parker was thinking aloud now. Bow was only barely present to him.
‘For getting involved. For helping to hide Karis. For shielding the child. It’s the father. It has to be.’
The phone before them lit up. Bow took it in hand and went back outside, but not before Parker gave her his pen and a page torn from his notebook. When she returned, a number was written on the paper.
‘Leila Patton will talk to you,’ she said.
Parker accompanied Bow to her car, the sun pleasantly warm on their faces. A man might almost have been tempted to venture out without a jacket, if he were prepared to trust in the continued clemency of the weather, and indeed God Himself. Parker wasn’t so inclined, on either count.
Across the lot, a woman was putting an infant into the child seat in the back of her car. While she was occupied with this, her other child, a boy of about three, made a break for freedom. Parker was about to call out a warning when the woman saw what was happening and headed off in pursuit.
That was how easy it was, Parker thought: a moment’s inattention.
Jane Doe now had a possible identity: Karis. How did she reach a point where she could have been lost without anyone caring what might have happened to her? Bad luck? Mental illness? Poverty? These were circumstances, not excuses. They could not be used to justify an unmarked grave. It was too late for her now, but perhaps not too late for her child. Moxie Castin understood this, and so did Parker.
He patted the roof of Molly Bow’s car as she pulled away, any annoyance with her now departed entirely, because she cared too.
A woman after his own heart.
Moxie Castin was trying to recall the last time he’d been involved in a telephone conversation as frustrating as the one in which he was currently engaged. The man on the other end of the line was calling from a public phone, but appeared to be under the impression that Moxie enjoyed the same resources as the NSA when it came to establishing the whereabouts of those who communicated with him. The guy would stay on the phone for no longer than three minutes at a time, having decided – probably from watching too many movies – that three minutes plus was required by law enforcement to trace a call. Moxie tried to convince him that this hadn’t been the case since the 1980s, although Moxie wasn’t tracing calls back then, just as he wasn’t trying to trace this call now. But the caller pointed out to Moxie, not unreasonably, that this was just what someone who was trying to trace a call would say, and so another three minutes ended with the sound of a dial tone in Moxie’s ear.
From the voice, and his knowledge of telephones and law enforcement, Moxie guessed the caller wasn’t young. He was a Mainer, too; that was clear from the accent. But more important, Moxie believed this might well be the man responsible for putting Jane Doe in the ground, which meant the caller also knew the fate of her child.
‘We didn’t kill her,’ said the man, when he called for the third time.
Moxie wrote ‘WE’ in big letters on his legal pad, alongside the notes he was taking, using his own shorthand, of everything that was said.
‘Who’s “we?”’ Moxie asked.
The caller seemed to realize that he’d made a mistake, but couldn’t take it back now. Moxie glanced at the clock. Ninety seconds down, ninety seconds to go.
‘Doesn’t matter.’
‘Okay.’
‘She was in trouble when we found her. She’d started giving birth alone in the woods, but she was bleeding a lot when we came across her. My – well, one of us knew some first aid, but it wasn’t enough to save her, not by a long shot.’
‘What was her name?’ Moxie asked.
A pause, then: ‘Karis. That was her first name, and it’s all I’m giving you, for now.’
‘What about the child?’
‘The child was alive. He still is.’
Moxie added ‘male’ to his pad.
‘She asked us to look after him,’ the man continued. ‘She wanted us to keep him safe.’
‘Why didn’t you call the police, or social services?’
‘She made us promise not to, right before she died. She said the boy would be in danger from the father if we did.’
Moxie decided to make the big play.
‘How do I know you’re telling the truth about this? No offense meant, but in cases like this we get a lot of odd people making outlandish claims.’
‘Why would I call you just to lie?’
The man sounded genuinely puzzled. Under less taxing circumstances, Moxie might have shared the sad truth that a great many individuals called him just to lie, mostly in order to avoid going to jail. The law wasn’t a great business to be in if one valued truth, or even justice. It was all Moxie could do to keep from drowning in cynicism.
‘Well,’ said Moxie, ‘folk make claims because they want to feel important, or they’re lonely.’
‘I know I’m not important, and I’m not lonely.’
‘Sometimes they’re just plain crazy.’
‘I’m not crazy either.’
‘You don’t sound crazy,’ Moxie admitted, ‘but while what you’re telling me may or may not be true, I have no way of knowing either way without—’
‘I carved a Star of David on a tree near where I buried her.’
‘That’s been on the news.’
‘I carved it on a spruce, facing north. I started adding a date, then thought better of it, so the bark below the star is damaged.’
This could easily be checked, so why would the caller lie about it?
‘Right,’ said Moxie. ‘Now I believe you. Why did you carve the star?’
‘Because she wore a Star of David on a chain round her neck. I thought it was the right thing to do.’