The Woman in the Woods

  “I get reality the other six days of the week. Sundays I keep for dreaming—and not talking to you, although I’m considering extending that prohibition to the rest of the week as well.”

  “Individual desire is inferior to the higher ideal.”

  “What?”

  “I think that may be Plato. Or it could be Socrates. I’m no expert.”

  Walsh stopped.

  “You’re ruining my day by being philosophical. And also just by being.”

  “You work for a law enforcement agency that quotes Voltaire on its website.”

  This was true. “To the living we owe respect, to the dead we owe the truth” was the ethos of the MSP’s Unsolved Homicide Unit, complemented by the motto Semper memento.

  Always remember.

  “Yeah?” said Walsh. “Well, I didn’t put it there.”

  “Walsh,” said Parker, quieter now, “just give me a few minutes.”

  Some of the air went out of the policeman.

  “I need coffee,” he said.

  “Arabica?”

  “Okay, but the one on Commercial.”

  It would mean that they were farther from Ruski’s, and therefore less likely to encounter any of Walsh’s cop buddies looking for a caffeine pick-me-up.

  “I’ll meet you there,” said Parker.

  “I can hardly wait.”

  * * *

  ONLY A HANDFUL OF tables were occupied when Parker arrived. It was an hour to closing, and most people with sense had headed home to avoid the forecast rain, just as Walsh had probably intended to do until he was waylaid by Parker. It looked as though it was going to be wet on and off for the rest of the week, but at least it would put paid to the last of the city’s accumulated ice.

  Walsh was seated at a table to the very rear, facing the front door but concealed by the gloom. Parker went to the counter, ordered an Americano for himself and, from memory, the sweetest, most calorific coffee on the menu for Walsh. To be safe, he also picked up enough packets of sugar to cause cane shares to rise.

  Walsh had divested himself of his coat and was staring at it with an air of pained disappointment, as though he had hoped that by removing its physical burden he might also relieve himself of afflictions to which he could ascribe neither name nor form. Outside, the city continued its rapid acquiescence to dusk. In the time it had taken the two men to drive down to the waterfront and seek shelter, a combination of cloud and the hour had caused near darkness to fall.

  “I hate winter,” said Walsh. “Thank God it’s over.”

  He added one sugar to his coffee, followed by two more, then took an experimental sip before bringing the total to five.

  Parker gestured at the empty packets.

  “If it’s any consolation, you’re unlikely to live to see another.”

  “Small pleasures. We take them where we can.”

  A young woman drifted by, trailing the scent of soap, and Walsh’s nose rose like a hound to the hunt. Parker had heard whispers that Walsh’s marriage was in trouble, and he and his wife were no longer living under the same roof. The news, though unsurprising, gave Parker no pleasure: guests at weddings involving police were well advised to skip the toasters or fryers and instead club together for a deposit on the services of a pair of good divorce attorneys. But Parker liked Walsh, even if a mutuality of feeling was no longer certain, and Walsh’s wife seemed like a nice woman. Perhaps they’d pull through, but only if Walsh had sense enough to ignore the tickle in his pants.

  “She’s too young for you,” said Parker, when it began to look as though Walsh might have become fatally distracted.

  “She’s too everything for me.”

  “Long as you know.”

  “You the voice of my conscience now?”

  “I’m not even the voice of my own.”

  “Long as you know.”

  “Touché,” said Parker.

  “Your boys been around town?”

  Parker guessed Walsh was referring to Angel and Louis.

  “I don’t think Louis would care much for being called ‘boy.’ ”

  “I’m sure he wouldn’t take it personally.”

  “I’m sure he would.”

  “The question still stands.”

  Parker knew that Walsh was keeping a watchful eye on Angel and Louis, and had been ever since they first chose to spend part of each year in Portland.

  “Not so much,” said Parker. “Angel is ill.”

  “Really? What kind of ill?”

  “The tumor kind.”

  Walsh, who until then had been doing his utmost to maintain a tone of barely veiled hostility, now moderated it.

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “So was he. Stage-two colon cancer. They caught it before it could spread to the lymph nodes, but not before it perforated the colon wall. Still, it was close. He’ll need chemotherapy once he’s recovered from the surgery, although he won’t lose his hair. He was more worried about sacrificing what’s left of it than he was a piece of his bowel.”

  “Jesus. Everybody’s getting cancer. I don’t recall it being like this in the past.”

  “It was always something. I think the world just keeps finding new ways to kill us.”

  “How is Louis taking it?”

  “About as well as you’d expect.”

  “That bad, huh?”

  “Still waters run deep.”

  “Cold, too.”

  “If you’re trying to score points, maybe you should wait until he gets back to town, so you can do it to his face.”

  “Maybe I will. And you haven’t answered my earlier question: Has he been up here lately?”

  “Can I ask why you’re interested?”

  “No, but let me remind you that if you’re looking for information—which I presume you are, because we’re sitting here—then that road runs two ways.”

  Parker gave up. He couldn’t see any percentage in obstruction.

  “He was here last weekend.”

  “You meet him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where?”

  “Various places.”

  “Any of them on Commercial?”

  “I don’t recall. And this doesn’t seem like an exchange of information. I think the correct word is ‘interrogation.’ ”

  Walsh arranged the sugar packets, opened and unopened, into a pattern on the table: a swastika.

  “Somebody blew up Billy Ocean’s truck.”

  “Not everyone likes R and B.”

  “You think you’re the first person to make that joke?”

  “It’s not even the first time I’ve made it.”

  “Yeah? How come?”

  “Billy’s old man tried to hire Moxie Castin to look into anyone who might have a personal grievance against his son, or an objection to how he chooses to express his political views, on account of how you flatfoots may not be up to the task.”

  “What did Moxie say?”

  “Moxie’s Jewish. What do you think Moxie said?”

  “Moxie’s Jewish?”

  “I know. Even I was surprised.”

  Walsh swiped away the sugar-packet swastika.

  “It takes someone of a very particular disposition to blow up a man’s truck because he doesn’t like his politics.”

  “From what I hear,” said Parker, “Billy Ocean doesn’t have any politics, or none worth the name. What Billy had was a truck decked with Confederate flags.”

  “All of which may be true, but blowing up his truck suggests a higher than usual level of intolerance.”

  “And driving around the northernmost state in the Union flying the flag of the Confederacy doesn’t? Give me a break. I made some calls after I spoke with Moxie. The business in Freeport and Augusta with the Klan? Word is that someone saw two men in a truck like Billy’s throwing objects into Freeport yards.”

  In January, residents in both areas had woken to find Klan flyers, wrapped in sandwich bags and weighted with stones,
lying in their driveways. The flyers were advertising a KKK neighborhood watch service, and came with an 800 number for something called the Klanline.

  “And two men who might, at a stretch, fit descriptions of you and Louis were seen drinking in an adjacent bar not long before Billy’s truck exploded,” said Walsh.

  “Is that so? And were two men fitting our descriptions seen blowing it up?”

  “No.”

  “Well, there you go.”

  “You have to admit it’s a hell of a coincidence.”

  “What, a black guy and a white guy drinking together in a bar the night a racist’s truck gets torched?”

  “This is Maine,” said Walsh. “There are black people here who can’t make black friends. You may even be the only person I know who has a black friend.”

  “You ought to expand your horizons.”

  “Every time I do, I live to regret it, especially when it comes to men of your acquaintance.”

  Walsh had briefly drifted too close to Louis during the events in Boreas, believing he could exploit Louis’s knowledge to advance the course of an investigation, and got his fingers burned because of it. Parker thought the experience might have exacerbated Walsh’s natural tendency to brood on old hurts.

  “I wish I could help you, but I can’t,” said Parker.

  Parker was keeping his tone level, even amused, throughout. He wasn’t about to rise to Walsh’s bait, and Walsh knew it. Both men drank their coffee. By now they were the last people in Arabica.

  “Then I guess the whole business is destined to remain unsolved,” said Walsh.

  “It could be for the best.”

  “Could be.” The troubled look returned to Walsh’s face. “You know, those flyers in driveways were likely just the work of a couple of troublemakers. Hell, we don’t have any Klan here, not since Ralph Brewster was shown the door.”

  Ralph Brewster was a Portland state senator who ran as the Republican nominee for governor back in 1924, when the Klan claimed a statewide membership of 40,000, largely by stoking up anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant feeling. Brewster always denied he was a Klansman, but nobody believed him, and it didn’t matter much either way since he supported the organization and accepted its endorsement in turn, which helped him to win the governorship in 1924. By the 1930s the Klan in Maine was a spent force, weakened by scandal and the general reluctance of Mainers to spend too much time hating one another. That situation had largely persisted until the present day.

  “But?” said Parker.

  Walsh scratched at his stubble. He looked ready for bed. Parker didn’t know how many beers Walsh might have drunk, but he guessed it was somewhere between “too many” and “not enough.” The coffee wasn’t helping. Whatever was gnawing at him ran too deep for that.

  “But,” said Walsh, “it’s like everybody’s temperature has gone up a couple of degrees recently. Klan literature and arson attacks can only send them higher, and eventually they’ll boil over so that someone gets hurt. Billy Ocean is an asshole, but so is the guy who blew up his truck. If you should happen to meet him, you can tell him I said that. If he has a problem with it, I’m sure he knows where to find me.”

  Parker nodded. He wasn’t about to pass on the message, but he knew that what Walsh had said wasn’t without substance.

  “That’s the end of the lesson,” said Walsh. “So, what do you want to know?”

  CHAPTER

  XXV

  Quayle sat in a comfortable chair by the window of his room, its walls decorated with landscape paintings of the state of New Hampshire, its floors the original nineteenth-century boards, polished to what he felt was just the wrong degree of brightness, its furniture either corresponding to the period of the inn’s construction or, as in the case of the bed, an expensive reproduction, and wished that he were elsewhere. He did not belong in this country, and perhaps not even in this time. He belonged to an older dispensation; the New World was too loud for him, its colors too intense. Most of all, he despised its desperate desire for a history, an adolescent chasing after the earned gravitas of age. A store not far from the inn professed to sell antiques, yet—as far as Quayle could tell—its entire stock amounted to no more than a random accumulation of near-modern junk. To set it ablaze would have been a kindness.

  The inn sat on land sheltered from the rest of the town by a line of evergreens, the gardens barely visible through dusk and rain. Quayle’s reflection stared back at him from the glass, like a cameo set against dark ceramic, and in this he found his comfort. Quayle was a creature of candles and gaslight, a liminal dweller in fog and shadow, but the animus driving him was older still, the product of a primordial murk that predated the dawn of life itself. Quayle possessed no memory of himself as an infant, or child, or even as a youth. His eyes had been opened in early adulthood, his consciousness flowering into immediate awareness of his purpose on this earth: to locate a single book, and enable it to do its work. When that task was complete, Quayle would seek oblivion. He did not wish to live to see what followed. He had witnessed too much as things stood.

  But perhaps this perception of a life extended almost beyond tolerance was merely a fantasy, a disorder of the mind; that, or the manifestation of a sense of mission passed down through generations of Quayles, like a recessive gene. After all, gravestones bore the Quayle name, urns stored Quayle ashes, and the earth hosted Quayle bones.

  Or someone’s name, someone’s ashes, someone’s bones.

  Beyond the open window, silent lightning lit the sky like impotent bolts of rage from a deity woken too late to prevent its own destruction. Quayle smelled burning on the air, and the fine blond hairs on his fingers rose as he extended his right hand toward the heavens, crooking a finger as though beckoning the Old God to him, inviting Him to bare His throat so that His pain might at last be brought to an end.

  Then we shall both sleep, Quayle thought, and it will be for the best.

  Tomorrow his work would begin anew. Before she went into the ground, he had obtained from Esther Bachmeier the name of the woman in Maine into whose care Karis Lamb had been entrusted: Maela Lombardi. He had an address for Lombardi in Cape Elizabeth, and already knew something of her background. Lombardi was a retired high school teacher, but—in common with the unfortunate Dobey—did not appear to work directly with any charities or women’s shelters. She was a secret helper, another point of connection on a carefully maintained series of ratlines designed to lead the vulnerable to safety.

  Quayle and Mors had buried Bachmeier alive, although not before inflicting such damage on her that Quayle doubted she suffered long beneath the weight of dirt and stone. He had been quite certain that Dobey was not telling the truth about Karis Lamb’s call from Maine, or was, at the very least, withholding valuable information. Bachmeier was required for corroboration, and had eventually given up Lombardi.

  And just as Quayle had never intended to leave Bachmeier alive, despite any promises to the contrary made to Errol Dobey, so also was Mors dispatched to take care of the waitresses who had seen Quayle’s face. Unfortunately, a concatenation of difficulties had forced Quayle and Mors to leave Cadillac with that mission unfulfilled. It was troubling, but only mildly so. Quayle had already altered his appearance through the simple expedients of a lighter hair dye, new spectacles, and the removal of his colored contact lenses. He believed he could now have passed either of those waitresses unrecognized, and the chef, too, but if time permitted he might yet send Mors after them again, if only as retribution for Dobey’s lies.

  Quayle wondered briefly if the killing of Dobey, and Bachmeier’s disappearance, might alert others to some potential threat to themselves. He thought not: fire was the great scourge of evidence, and Bachmeier’s grave would not easily be discovered. Only when he and Mors killed Lombardi—as they would almost certainly be forced to do, once they obtained the information they wanted from her—would the link between the deaths start to become apparent.

  But by then Quayle wo
uld know Karis Lamb’s whereabouts, and the identity under which she was hiding. His priority was to ensure that she did not have time to run before he could lay hands on her. This hunt had already gone on for too long. It was a drain on resources, and had ultimately forced Quayle to cross the water to this furious land, requiring him to abandon his London fastness. He and Mors had taken precautions: they were traveling under perfectly legal Dutch passports, but with names that bore no relation to reality; their fingerprints had been created with the aid of printed circuit boards and liquid gelatin that mimicked the thermal responses of human skin, and a variation on the same technology had been used to alter their irises. Little could be done about the photographic records of their faces now in the possession of the Department of Homeland Security, but even here preparation had paid off: the facial prosthetics were simple, easily applied, and more easily disposed of. Just as Quayle now bore little resemblance to the man who had read poetry in Dobey’s Diner, he and Mors were also shadows of the two people who had passed through U.S. Customs at Washington Dulles. When the time came for them to return to England, the prosthetics could be restored in a matter of hours. Yet travel was still unpleasant for Quayle, and only the most extreme of situations could have drawn him across the Atlantic itself.

  But the book required it. Until it was restored, Quayle would not be allowed to rest.

  And he was so very weary.

  He closed his eyes, and saw himself assemble the final scattered leaves of the volume, this creation fractured by name and fractured by nature.

  This Fractured Atlas.

  CHAPTER

  XXVI

  For once, Parker was able to be entirely open with Walsh about a client and a case. It made for a pleasant change, although Walsh appeared reluctant to accept that all might be as straightforward as it appeared—not that Parker could blame him, given the number of half-truths and lies by omission with which Walsh had been forced to deal over the years.

  Walsh was currently operating out of MCU-South in Gray, while MCU-North in Bangor was leading the investigation into the remains of the woman in the woods. Nevertheless, little went on in Maine law enforcement of which Walsh, as one of its senior investigators, was not aware.