Chapter XX
M errick had told the police that he was mostly sleeping in his car, but they didn’t believe him, and I didn’t either. That was why Angel had been detailed to follow him when he was released from jail. According to Angel, Merrick had picked up a cab at the rank beside the bus station, then had checked into a motel out by the Maine Mall before closing his drapes and, apparently, going to sleep. There was no sign of his red car at the motel, though, and when, after six hours, Merrick had still not made an appearance, Angel had taken it upon himself to find out what was going on. He had bought a take-out pizza, carried it into the motel, and knocked on the door of Merrick’s room. When there was no reply, he broke into the room, only to find Merrick gone. There was a police cruiser at the motel, too, probably dispatched for the same reason Angel had been, but the cop had enjoyed no more luck than Angel.
“He knew that someone might put a tail on him,” Angel said, as he and Louis sat in my kitchen, Walter, now returned once more from the care of the Johnsons, sniffing at Angel’s feet and chewing on the ends of his laces. “There must have been three or four different ways out of the place. That was probably why he chose it.”
I wasn’t too surprised. Wherever Merrick had been holed up prior to his arrest, it wasn’t at a shoppers’ motel. I called Matt Mayberry to see if he had turned up anything useful.
“I’ve been kind of busy; otherwise, I’d have called you myself,” Matt said, when I eventually got through to him. He told me that he had concentrated his initial search on tax assessors’ offices in the city of Portland and its immediate vicinity, before expanding it to a sixty-mile radius. “I’ve found two so far. One is in Saco, but it’s still tied up in litigation after nearly four years. Apparently, the city published a pending sale notice for its tax liens on some middle-aged man’s property while he was receiving treatment for cancer, then without notice allegedly prematurely conducted a sealed-bid sale. Get this, though: when he refused to leave the property upon his release from the hospital they sent in a SWAT team to remove him forcibly. The guy didn’t even have hair! The hell is up with you people in Maine? The whole business is making its way through Superior Court at the moment, but it’s moving at the pace of an arthritic tortoise. I’ve got copies of pretrial memoranda if you want to see them.”
“How is Eldritch involved in it?”
“He’s the owner of record, as trustee. I ran a couple of additional searches on him, though, and I’ve found his name attached to various property sales as far west as California, but they’re all old references, and when I followed them up title had passed on again. The Maine sales are the most recent by a long shot and, well, they don’t follow the pattern of the others.”
“In what way?”
“Well, I couldn’t swear to this, but it looks like at least part of Eldritch’s business lies, or lay, in sourcing properties for individuals or companies who didn’t want their names attached as owners. But, like I told you, most of the references I can find are prehistoric, which leads me to guess that Eldritch has since moved on to other things, or he’s just not doing it as much, or he’s simply learned to hide his tracks better. Some of these properties have a paper trail after them like you wouldn’t believe, which could be a way of disguising the fact that, despite a blizzard of additional sales and transfers, de facto ownership of the premises in question remained the same. That’s just a suspicion, though, and it would take a whole team of experts with a lot of time on their hands to prove it.
“The Saco sale looks like an error of judgment. Maybe Eldritch was instructed to find a property for a client, this one looked like a steal, then it all went to hell in a handcart because the city mishandled the whole business. It was probably just crossed wires, but the result was that Eldritch got caught up in the kind of legal quagmire that he seems to have spent so much time and effort trying to avoid.
“Which brings us to the second property, purchased within weeks of black flags rising over the Saco sale. It’s near someplace called Welchville. You ever hear of it?”
“Vaguely. I think it’s somewhere between Mechanic Falls and Oxford.”
“Whatever. I couldn’t even find it on a regular map.”
“It’s not the kind of place that people put on regular maps. There’s not a whole lot there. Hell, there’s not a whole lot in Mechanic Falls, and Welchville makes it look like a metropolis.”
“Well, remind me to search someplace else for my retirement home. Anyhow, I found it eventually. The property is on Sevenoaks Road, close by Willow Brook. Doesn’t look like there’s much else nearby, which fits with what you just told me, so it shouldn’t be hard to find. Number Eleven-eighty. Don’t know what happened to numbers one to eleven-seventy-nine, but I guess they’re out there somewhere. Those two properties are it for Maine so far. If you want me to widen the search, it’s going to take more time than I have, so I’ll have to pass it on to someone else, and he may not work for free like I do.”
I told Matt I’d let him know, but the Welchville property sounded like a good place to start. Welchvillle was close enough to Portland to make the city and its surrounds easily accessible, and far enough away to offer privacy, even a bolt-hole if necessary. People in places like Welchville and Mechanic Falls didn’t go sticking their noses into other folk’s business, not unless someone gave them a reason to do it.
The daylight was gone, but that suited us. It seemed wiser to approach the Welchville house under cover of night. If Merrick was there, then there was some chance that he might not see us coming. But I was also interested in the timing of Eldritch’s purchase of the house. Merrick had been in jail when the house was bought, and was a long way from his eventual release, which meant either that Eldritch was planning very far ahead, or the house was purchased for another purpose entirely. According to Matt, Eldritch was still the owner of record, but I couldn’t see him spending much time in Welchville, which begged the question: who had been using the house for the last four years?
We took the Mustang, heading away from the coast, skirting Auburn and Lewiston until we left the bigger towns behind and entered rural Maine, even though it was within easy reach of the state’s largest city. Portland might have begun to sprawl, swallowing up smaller communities and threatening the identity of others, but out here the city could have been hundreds of miles away. It was another world of narrow roads and scattered houses, of small towns with empty streets, the quiet disturbed only by the rumble of passing trucks and the occasional car, and even they grew less and less frequent as we traveled farther west. Occasionally, a line of streetlights would appear, illuminating a stretch of road that was seemingly identical to all the rest yet, somehow, merited an individual touch courtesy of the county.
“Why?” asked Angel.
“Why what?” I said.
“Why would anyone live out here?”
We had barely left 495, and already he was feeling anxious for city lights. He was sitting in the backseat, his arms folded like a sulky child.
“Not everyone wants to live in a city.”
“I do.”
“Equally, not everyone wants to live close to people like you.”
Route 121 wound its lazy way through Minot and Hackett Mills, then Mechanic Falls itself, before intersecting with 26. There was less than a mile to go. Beside me, Louis removed a Glock from the folds of his coat. From behind, I heard the telltale sound of a round being chambered. If there was someone living on Sevenoaks Road, whether Merrick or an unknown other, we didn’t expect him to be pleased to see us.