11
The Pastor’s Bay Police Department occupied one part of the municipal building, along with, according to a sign outside the door and a brief glimpse of the interior through its windows as I passed by, the town clerk’s office, the fire department, local sanitation, and assorted meeting rooms, cubbyholes, unoccupied desks piled high with paper, and probably the Pastor’s Bay collection of Halloween costumes, Santa Claus hats and beards, and stuffed-animal heads. The disappearance of Anna Kore meant that the demands on the building had increased significantly, and there were now various state police vehicles, dark unmarked SUVs, and a mobile crime-scene unit parked in its lot alongside a single, slightly battered Pastor’s Bay Police Department Explorer. There was also the Winnebago that CID sometimes used as a mobile command post, but I could see no signs of activity around it.
I had wanted to see Randall Haight in his own environment, as though by doing so I might come to a better understanding of him, but the only conclusion I had drawn from our encounter was that Haight remained a lost soul, a deeply confused and conflicted man. Increasingly, Judge Bowens’s social experiment, well-intentioned though it might have been, appeared to have resulted in profound existential consequences for the young man whom he had tried to help. That, in turn, raised the question of whether or not Lonny Midas had endured a similar crisis of identity.
There wasn’t much in Pastor’s Bay to occupy those with time on their hands: a few stores, the local bars, a bank, and a post office. The town’s pharmacy wasn’t part of a chain, and occupied an old redbrick building at the western end of Main Street. A hand-lettered sign on its door warned: WE DO NOT STOCK OXYCONTIN. There had been a rash of robberies at drugstores in the state, most of them carried out by sweaty, twitchy young men looking for little more than a way to feed their own addictions using Oxycodone, Vicodin, and Xanax. For the most part they favored blades over guns, and they were desperate enough to lash out at customers and pharmacists who didn’t cooperate. They’d have to be pretty dumb to come all the way out to Pastor’s Bay to score, though. Even if they managed to get away from the town itself there were five miles of narrow two-lane road before they reached another major route, which meant it would be easy to pick them up once the alarm had been raised.
I walked back toward the municipal building. The Explorer was gone. I hadn’t noticed it leave. Some detective I was. I still had no sense of Pastor’s Bay as a place, and no real idea of how I was going to set about tackling Randall Haight’s problem. Maybe if I hung around long enough somebody would feel the urge to confess. There was a coffee shop called Hallowed Grounds across the street, so, with no better option to hand, I went in and ordered a Turkey Nudo sandwich and a bottle of water.
‘You have trouble with drugstore robberies around here?’ I asked the guy behind the counter who took my order.
‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘You planning a heist?’
‘I just noticed the sign on the pharmacy door that says it doesn’t stock OxyContin.’
‘Pre-emptive tactics,’ he said. ‘Guess you’ll have to shop elsewhere for your opioid needs.’
‘Funny,’ I said. ‘You’re so dry you could be used as kindling.’
I took a seat at the window to watch the town’s comings and goings while the kid put my order together. He was in his early twenties and already had enough piercings and tattoos to suggest that he viewed his body merely as a work in progress, a canvas for a largely uninspired collection of ideas revolving around Maori culture, Buddhism, Celtic mythology, and Scandinavian death metal, judging by his T-shirt which depicted a Kiss reject who, if I remembered correctly, had been jailed for murdering another Kiss reject, and maybe burning a church or two along the way. Say what you like about Gene Simmons, but the worst he could do would be to date your daughter. Very loud music was playing very softly on the store’s sound system, to which the barista was shaking his greasy hair over the coffee and baked goods. The Turkey Nudo had been premade and shrink-wrapped, so I was okay, unless it was laughing boy who had made it in the first place. I wondered if he’d taken into account the effect gravity would have on his skin and muscle tone as the years went by. By the time he was fifty, some of those tattoos would be around his knees.
Hell, I thought, pretty soon I’ll be fifty, and I was already sounding like an old man. Let the kid have his fun. Had Jennifer lived, she’d have been within sight of her teens by now, and I’d be worrying about piercings, and boys, and beginning sentences with ‘No daughter of mine is going out dressed like . . .’
But she hadn’t lived, and it would be a few years before I had to worry about Sam in that way. Maybe she’d keep me young, but taking cheap shots in my head at a kid from a small town like Pastor’s Bay who was just trying not to get dragged down by the place wouldn’t help any. I’d end up like Lonny Midas’s father, not understanding, and not wanting to understand.
He brought me my sandwich and water, and threw in a packet of chips free.
‘All part of the service,’ he said. ‘I’m not happy until you’re not happy.’
His kindness made me feel even more guilty. Just to rub it in, the music changed. Guitars were replaced by a piano, and a woman’s voice with a foreign accent began to sing a cover version of a song that sounded vaguely familiar, although it took me a moment to place it. I looked back at the counter, where the kid was bopping along in a more restrained manner to this one as well.
‘Hey, is that . . . Abba?’ I asked.
‘I don’t think so.’ He trotted to the stereo and picked up a CD case. ‘Susanna, uh, I think it’s pronounced “Wallumr?d,” with a weird line through the ?. It’s my girlfriend’s, but I can only play it at certain times of the day, usually when the place is quiet. It’s a management thing. Some people find it kind of depressing.’
It wasn’t depressing. It was soft, and sad, and haunting, but not depressing.
‘It’s a cover of an Abba song,’ I said. ‘‘Lay All Your Love on Me.” And please don’t ask me how I know that.’
‘Yeah, Abba? Don’t think I’m familiar with them.’
‘Swedish. Same neck of the woods as that Norwegian Count Whatever on your T-shirt, more or less. Not as big on church-burning, though, or not that I can recall.’
‘Yeah, the Count is one mean bastard. I just like the music, though. Music’s music, you know. Quiet or loud, it’s either good or bad.’ He changed the grounds in the coffee maker, and started filling a pot. ‘You a cop?’ he asked.
‘Nope.’
‘Fed?’
‘Nope.’
‘Reporter?’
‘Nope.’
‘Rumpelstiltskin?’
‘Maybe.’
He laughed.
‘I’m a private investigator,’ I said.
‘No shit? You here about the Kore girl?’
‘No, just some boring client stuff. Why, you know her?’
‘Knew her to see around.’ He corrected himself. ‘I know her to see around. She seems okay. Runs with a younger crowd, but it’s not like there are so many kids around here that you don’t know everyone by name.’
‘Any idea what might have happened to her?’
‘Nuh-uh. If she was a little older, I’d have said that she might have lit out for the city. Boston or New York, maybe, not Bangor or Portland. They’re no better than here, not really; they’re just bigger. If you’re gonna run, run far, or else this place is going to haul you right back again.’
‘You’re still here.’
‘I’m trying to change the system from within, fighting the good fight, all that kind of bullshit.’
‘If not you, then who?’
‘Exactly.’
‘So you don’t think Anna Kore ran away?’
‘Nope. Not that girls her age don’t run away, but she doesn’t seem like the sort. Everyone says she was okay.’
‘That doesn’t sound good for her.’
‘No, I guess not.’
He went silent. Susanna Wallumr?d was singing about her few little love affairs. She sounded weary of them all.
‘Did she have a boyfriend?’
‘I thought you said that you weren’t here about her.’
‘I’m not. I’m just professionally curious.’
He folded his arms and sized me up.
‘Chief Allan said I was to tell him if anyone came asking about her.’
‘I’m sure he did. I figure I’ll be talking to him soon enough. So: Did she have a boyfriend?’
‘No. Her mom was – is – pretty protective of her, or that’s what I heard. Anna was kept on a tight chain, you know, having a single mom and all. She probably would have eased up on her eventually.’
‘Yeah. Well, with luck she’ll still get that chance.’
‘Amen to that.’
He turned his back and started rearranging the last of the pastries. I continued eating, and watched the folk of Pastor’s Bay go about their business. Although school was done for the day, I saw no young people on the streets.
‘Thanks for the sandwich,’ I said. ‘I’ll see you around.’
‘Sure. You have a good day now.’
I drove toward the bridge, the sun now long past its zenith. I thought about Selina Day, and Lonny Midas. I wondered where Lonny was now. Haight had told me that Lonny’s parents died while he was locked up, but there was still his older brother, Jerry, to consider. Maybe Lonny had been in touch with him since his release, but if so, then what of it? What could Lonny Midas tell me that Haight couldn’t? Then again, I was assuming that Haight was the only one whose secret had been discovered. If the information had come from someone involved with the two men during the period of their preparation for release, then Midas might have been targeted too.
But I was also aware of something else that Haight had revealed: his belief that, had he been older, Lonny Midas might have been willing to kill him to ensure that he remained silent about what they had done. Could Lonny Midas have borne a grudge against Haight throughout the period of their incarceration and, upon his release, set out to find him and undermine his new existence? Could Lonny Midas even have abducted Anna Kore to further that aim? They were big jumps to make: too big. They were symptoms of my frustration, and part of me wanted to walk away and let Randall Haight sink or swim depending on how the situation developed. What kept me from dropping the case back into Aimee Price’s lap was the slim possibility that Anna Kore’s disappearance was somehow linked to Haight’s past, but so far I could discern no direct connection between them.
The bridge came into view, the slowly rotting pilings of its predecessor beside it like a shadow given substance. I was halfway across when the black-and-white Explorer emerged from a copse of trees on the far side of the water, lights flashing, and blocked the road. I had been expecting to see it ever since the kid at the coffee shop mentioned the chief of police’s edict. It was my own fault for overstepping the line.
I kept going until I cleared the bridge, then pulled over and placed my hands on the steering wheel. A man in his late thirties, shorter than I was but with the build of a swimmer or a rower, climbed out of the driver’s side of the Explorer, his hand on his weapon and the body of the vehicle between us. His hair was black, and he wore a mustache. Chief Allan looked older in person than he did on TV, and the mustache didn’t do him any favors. He approached me slowly. I waited until he was close enough to see my entire body, then carefully shifted my left hand to roll down the window.
‘License and registration, please,’ he said.