27
Randall Haight didn’t respond well to the news that Anna Kore’s uncle was a Boston mobster who was being hunted by his own people and the FBI, and who would almost certainly attempt to involve himself in the search for his missing niece. He knew that he was at risk from Tommy Morris if word got out about his past. It wouldn’t matter to Morris that Haight had been questioned and effectively cleared by the police of any involvement in his niece’s disappearance. He was a child killer, and Morris would instinctively assume that he knew more than he had revealed.
Briefly, Haight fired Aimee and, by extension, me. He reconsidered when he realized that, if he was in trouble now, he’d be in more trouble without us. I also introduced him to the Fulcis, which simultaneously reassured and unsettled him, in the same way the Duke of Wellington was said to have noted of his soldiers that, while he was uncertain of their possible effect on the enemy, by God, they frightened him. Then again, Wellington had also called his own men ‘the scum of the earth’, which the Fulcis were not. They had their own code of honor, particularly when it came to women. Insults centering on mothers did not sit well with the Fulcis. I was pretty sure that there were other aspects of behavior about which they might have set concepts of honor, but I couldn’t think of any offhand.
Haight was reluctant to have the Fulcis stay at his home unless it became absolutely necessary, and it was true that the sight of their monster truck parked on his property might attract attention to him. In addition, it was unclear what the result of his discussions with the police might be. I was sure that Walsh and Allan would let us know if there was any indication that Haight’s story was about to become public knowledge, and it was in their interests as much as ours to keep it quiet. The last thing they needed was misguided media speculation about a possible suspect, which would further strain their manpower. Nevertheless, I would have preferred it if Haight had acceded to our request to let the Fulcis bed down in his house, but the more we pressed him, the less willing he was to consider the possibility. The concession we reached was that the Fulcis would become his shadows if we learned that the facts of Haight’s past could no longer remain hidden. Depending upon the situation, they could either plant themselves on Haight’s property like the trunks of trees or they could move him to safety. I had already made arrangements for him to be quietly placed at the Colony near Sebago Lake if necessary. The Colony was a retreat house for troubled men, often those suffering from addiction or other social difficulties. The company might not be to Haight’s taste, but those involved in the Colony’s running would make no judgment upon him, and they were very, very discreet.
After a little more sulking, and some calming words from Aimee and me, Haight returned to Pastor’s Bay. I gave him a half hour start, then followed him north.
Angel and Louis had checked into an inn called the Blithe Spirit, about four miles from Pastor’s Bay. It was run by an elderly couple named the Harveys, whose first question to them was ‘Are you gay?’
‘Would that be a problem?’ said Louis.
‘Oh no,’ said Mrs. Harvey, who was bent almost double by arthritis but moved surprisingly fast, like a hare with a minor disability. ‘We like gay people. They’re very tidy.’
Her husband nodded along enthusiastically, although his smile had apparently faltered as he tried to balance their firmly held belief in the neatness of all gay people with Angel’s presence on their property. They had provided Angel and Louis with a large room on the second floor overlooking the neat garden at the rear of the house. The Harveys had only two rooms available to rent, and the other was unoccupied for now. According to Angel, the décor erred on the side of chintzy but was otherwise perfectly acceptable.
‘So, tell me about Kurt Allan,’ I said, as we sat in the living room of the inn, its picture window looking out on a small pond and a glade of black ash trees that had lost most of their leaves. The Harveys had provided a pot of tea, served on a silver tray alongside china cups and the kind of dainty cookies that small girls fed to dolls at parties.
‘If he is a pedophile, he’s hiding it well,’ said Angel. ‘I went through his computer files, his library, even his attic. There was one skin mag, but it was standard stuff. Same with the porn websites that he’s accessed. His e-mail is so dull that I almost dozed off reading it. He has a landline, but it doesn’t look like he uses it much; there was dust on the phone. On most levels, he looks clean.’
He let that last statement hang.
‘Meaning?’
‘He makes a base salary of fifty thousand dollars. Over the last year, he’s managed to supplement that through overtime, but it’s only brought him up by another five grand. He’s eating alimony payments of a thousand a month, although it looks like he agreed to them and didn’t contest the figure.’
A thousand a month was a lot on a salary of 50K. That pretty much constituted a punitive payment.
‘Any indication of why he agreed?’
‘He has a file of correspondence from the divorce, but it very carefully avoids mentioning specific details. Stated grounds were “irreconcilable marital differences”.’
‘“Irreconcilable marital differences” is a catch-all,’ I said. ‘It can cover anything from bank robbery to whistling “Dixie” during sex. They didn’t want the real reason for the divorce to be made known in the filing.’
‘There were a couple of references to the “troubling nature” of Allan’s behavior in the letters from his ex-wife’s attorney to his attorney, but that was it.’
‘Where is she now?’
‘The alimony payments are made to a bank in Seattle, which is about as far away from her ex-husband as she can get without moving to Russia. There’s no evidence in the house that Allan and his wife have stayed in touch.’
‘So Chief Allan is living on mac and cheese in order to buy his wife’s silence?’
‘You’d have thought,’ said Angel. ‘He has twenty-three hundred dollars in his checking account, and is making minimum payments to his 401(K). But until last year he was paying a lot of bills in cash, and even on a quick run-through it’s clear that his outgoings and income don’t balance. The disparity isn’t huge, but it’s there.’
‘How big is the disparity?’
‘Uh, five hundred a month, sometimes more. I’d guess that, until a couple of months ago, he had money coming in on the side, enough to take the sting off his alimony, but that’s now been cut off. Could be bribes, or maybe he just picked up some other work along the way: security, escorting businessmen to the bank, collecting bottles for the fifteen-cent deposit. It’s not a lot of cash, but it was there, and it was regular.’
‘You tag his truck?’
‘Yeah, behind his rear fender. It’s small, with a limited power supply. We could have run it off his battery, but that truck is a piece of shit. Any trouble under the hood and a large device would be spotted before the engine cooled. We’ll get a couple of days out of it, max, then we’ll have to change it.’
‘He’s taking time off tomorrow. If he’s doing something he shouldn’t be doing, then he won’t be looking to the Pastor’s Bay PD for his ride. It’s best if I keep my distance, so you stay with him. If he does anything interesting, let me know and I can come take a look.’
We drank some more tea, and I gave them the summarized version of all that had happened at Aimee’s office.
‘If the cops have it in hand, seems like you’re out of a job,’ said Louis.
‘I wasn’t exactly cracking the case wide open before they got to it,’ I admitted. ‘But I’m curious about Lonny Midas.’
Haight had implied once again that Midas might hold a grudge against him for admitting to the police what they had done to Selina Day. I still believed that Haight was holding back on aspects of his history, including the precise extent of his role in her death. After all, he had been there right until the final act, and he could have backed out at any time. He might have been in thrall to Midas, as he claimed, but he had also confessed to a degree of sexual interest in the girl. Nevertheless, Midas had to be seen as the instigator of the assault. Again, I had only Haight’s word on how troubled Midas might have been in his youth, but if he was capable of targeting a girl and dragging her into a barn then he was already manifesting an aberrant sexuality. Haight had received counseling and therapy while in custody, so it was probable that Lonny Midas had too. The unsealing of the records would provide some insight into both of them, as well as the degree to which Midas blamed his friend for confessing their crime to the police. Also, if the cops were given Midas’s new identity they could begin to trace his movements and find out if he had made his way to this state.
But if Midas was involved he probably wasn’t acting alone. He couldn’t risk being seen by Haight, assuming he hadn’t made some dramatic alteration to his appearance, so he’d need somebody close to Pastor’s Bay who would be able to report back on how Haight was reacting. All of these strands connected back to a killing three decades before in a small North Dakota town.
‘Have you ever been to North Dakota?’ I asked Louis.
‘Yep. Second-coldest state in the Union, after Alaska. You know what’s the third coldest?’
‘Let me guess: Maine.’
‘Give that man mittens.’
‘Have you been to Alaska?’
‘Yep.’
‘Well, go you. You’re collecting the set.’
There was a soft knock on the door, and Mrs. Harvey padded in to take away the tray.
‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Are you gay too?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘not yet.’
‘Oh.’ She tried to hide her disappointment, then brightened. ‘Well, you never know,’ she concluded, and patted me on the shoulder before picking up the tray and disappearing.
‘Tolerant,’ I said.
‘Accepting,’ said Louis.
‘Senile,’ said Angel.