15
Aimee was forced to cancel our morning meeting owing to an incident of domestic violence that left a fifty-year-old man with a broken arm, a fractured skull, and a collection of busted ribs. His assailant was his forty-three-year-old wife, who weighed barely ninety pounds fully clothed and soaking wet, and was so soft-spoken that only bats could hear her. Apparently her husband had been beating on her for the first nineteen years of their marriage, and so she had decided to mark the start of their twentieth year together by encouraging him to turn over a new leaf through the judicious application of a lump hammer while he was sleeping off a drunk. A women’s refuge for which Aimee provided pro bono services called her in to speak to the woman, so Aimee had postponed our discussion until the afternoon.
There was only a scattering of worshippers at the eight a.m. Mass at St. Maximillian Kolbe in Scarborough when I arrived. I slipped into a pew at the back, and kept my head down throughout. I didn’t go to church so much anymore; I went when I needed consolation, or just a space in which to breathe for a time. I found a peace there, the peace that comes from distancing oneself from the mundane, if only for a little while, and embracing the possibility of a peace beyond this world. I could never tell when the urge to seek out that space would strike me, but it came to me that morning after Aimee postponed our meeting, and I did not fight it.
Louis had once asked me if I believed in God after all that I had seen and all I had gone through, most particularly the loss of Susan and Jennifer. I gave him three answers, which was probably at least two more than he had been expecting. I told him that I found it easier to believe in God than not to believe, for if I believed in nothing then the deaths of Susan and Jennifer were pointless and without reason, and I preferred to hope that their loss was part of a pattern I did not yet understand. I told him that the God in whom I believed sometimes looked away. He was a distractible God, a God overwhelmed by our demands, and we were so very, very small, and there were so very, very many of us. I told him that I understood how that could be the case. My God was like a parent always trying to watch out for His children, but you couldn’t always be there for your children, no matter how hard you tried. I had not been there for Jennifer when she most needed me, and I refused to blame my God for that.
And I told him that I believed in God because I had seen His opposite. I had seen all that He was not, and been touched by it, and so I could no more deny the possibility of an ultimate goodness to set against such depravity than I could deny that daylight followed darkness, and night the day.
All this I told him, and he was silent afterward.
When Mass was over, I drove out to the Palace Diner in Biddeford and ate breakfast. Some might have felt that it was a ways to go for breakfast, but those people hadn’t eaten in the Palace. I lingered over coffee, and read the newspaper, and just as I was relaxed and ready to face the day my phone beeped to indicate that I had a new message. I read it, saved it, and felt my good humor vanish.
I returned home and began working my way through Randall Haight’s list of names, using distinguishing information to trace their movements over the years in case any had been employed in a capacity that might have brought them into contact with prisons, and cross-referencing names and addresses against prison records in an effort to establish if anyone in Pastor’s Bay had either served time in North Dakota, Vermont, or New Hampshire, or had close relatives who had served time in those states. I drew a blank on them all, but it was only the first stage in what might prove to be a long, drawn-out process of picking apart the weave of dozens of potentially interconnected lives.
I drove to South Freeport shortly after one, and parked in the lot beside Aimee’s building. There were no ravens in the trees today. They were elsewhere, and that was fine with me. In the past, I had seen great black ravens squatting on the walls of the old prison at Thomaston, and they had seemed at once both monstrous birds and more, entities that mutated as I watched them, emissaries from a world more tainted than this one. That image had never left me, and now when I saw such birds I wondered at their true nature, and their true purpose.
I smelled coffee brewing when I stepped into the office, and Aimee’s voice called a greeting from the little kitchen beside reception. Seconds later, she appeared carrying a pot on a tray, along with a pair of chicken wraps and two purple asters in a vase.
‘Very domesticated,’ I said. ‘He might marry you after all.’
‘Your fascination with my marital arrangements never ceases to amaze me,’ she said. ‘If I didn’t know better, I’d suspect you were jealous and wanted to take his place.’
‘I’m just thinking about the free legal aid.’
‘Thanks. If you keep getting picked up for asking awkward questions, you’ll need to drive around with permanent counsel in the passenger seat of that man toy you drive.’
‘It’s just a car.’
‘A Camry is just a car. That’s a midlife crisis on wheels.’
I took a seat at her desk. She poured the coffee, I took a wrap, and we began.
‘So, where are we?’ she said.
‘We’re nowhere.’
I told her about my conversation with Randall Haight, my encounter with Allan, and my subsequent dealings with Gordon Walsh. I didn’t tell her that he had used my daughter’s murder to prick my conscience, or about the blowup that followed. I told myself that it wasn’t relevant, which was only partly true. Then I showed her the latest envelope that had been sent to Haight. Her face betrayed no feelings as she examined the photographs. Neither did she comment on the short film of the clothes laid out in the barn, but merely watched it in silence. When it was over, she said only, ‘It’s escalating.’
‘Yes.’
‘You had those pictures with you when the cops took you in?’
‘They were in the trunk.’
‘You’re lucky they didn’t search your car. You could have been in a whole lot of trouble. I’ll keep them here for now, and mark them as case evidence.’ She put the envelope in a plastic bag, sealed it, and placed it in her safe.
‘What else?’ she said.
‘I’ve begun trawling the list of names Haight gave me in the hope of establishing a connection, but there’s nothing so far. Unless I can come up with a smoking gun pretty quickly, we’re looking at a fingertip search through personal lives that could take weeks or months. But if it turns out that Haight’s problem is linked to the abduction of Anna Kore—’
‘Assuming it is an abduction,’ Aimee interrupted. ‘Kids that age do run away, you know.’
‘I don’t get the impression that she was the kind,’ I replied. ‘I didn’t get that vibe from Walsh either. They’re worried. Let’s accept that she’s been taken against her will.’
‘Agreed. Reluctantly.’
‘Then our problem remains this: We still have no way of knowing, as yet, if Haight’s difficulties are connected to her disappearance.’
‘And that’s a big leap anyway.’
‘Look, I’ll be straight with you. My conversation with Walsh pricked my conscience. It wasn’t pleasant, and we exchanged some harsh words, but he was right and I was wrong. I’m not sure that we’re entitled to make the call on whether Haight’s problem is material to the investigation into Anna Kore. Personally, I still don’t like the aspect of coincidence here. One girl disappears, and a man jailed for the killing of another girl of roughly the same age finds himself the target of threats from an unknown source. Because these are threats: threats of revelation, threats of blackmail, maybe even threats of physical harm at some point in the future.
‘Leaving that aside, we have a duty to tell the police what we know. We’re withholding evidence that may be linked to the commission of a crime. Now, I accept that legally it’s a gray area, and it’s unlikely that either of us would end up behind bars for it, but I don’t want a murdered girl on my conscience, and neither do you.’
Aimee finished one half of her wrap and started on the other. I had taken only a bite or two of mine, but then I was careful about speaking with my mouth full. Aimee had no such concerns. She had once told me that one of the problems with being a lawyer was that there was either too much to say and too little time in which to say it, or too little to say and too much time to fill.
‘I spoke to Haight again an hour ago,’ she said, still chewing.
‘And?’
‘He has suggested a compromise.’
‘Which is?’
‘Through me, he hands over all the material that he’s been sent so far to the police for examination, but I don’t reveal the source.’
I thought about it. ‘They won’t go for it. For one thing, you’ll have to explain the relevance of the photographs and the disc. Once you do that, they’ll want to interview him, and he’ll be on their suspect list, and as we know, he doesn’t have an alibi for the period during which Anna went missing. Even if, by some miracle, it was agreed that he wasn’t a suspect, he’d still have to come forward to be fingerprinted and give DNA samples in order to exclude him from any evidence found on the envelopes or the photographs.’
‘I didn’t think it would work either,’ she said. ‘He knows that his options are growing more and more limited, but I don’t believe he’ll break until he’s trapped in a corner. You’re serious about going to the cops if he doesn’t come around?’
‘I don’t want to ruin a man’s life, but part of me feels that the consequences of approaching the cops might not be as terrible as he thinks.’
‘No?’ She sounded skeptical.
‘They’ll be bad, but people have survived worse.’
‘He’ll need protection,’ she said.
‘I’ve thought about that. We can put the Fulcis on the house.’
Some of the blood ran from Aimee’s face.
‘You’re not serious. They’re—’ She tried to find the right word, but the choices were overwhelming. In the end, she settled for ‘insane.’
‘They’re not insane,’ I said. ‘They’re medicated. The medication keeps them borderline sane. Now, if they weren’t taking their medication then I might accept your diagnosis, but, with respect, you’re not a member of the medical profession. I’m not sure you should be tossing words like “insane” around, especially where the Fulcis are concerned. They’re very sensitive men. They’re also very big, sensitive men.’