The Unquiet

by John Connolly

  Instead of sitting at her desk, Price cleared some space on a couch and invited me to sit there, while she took an upright chair alongside it. There was a small table between us, and the secretary, whose name was Ernest, set down some cups and a coffeepot, and took one of the muffins for his trouble. The seating arrangement left me sitting slightly lower, and slightly less comfortably, than Price. It was, I knew, quite deliberate. It seemed like Aimee Price had learned the hard way always to assume the worst, and to take every advantage available in anticipation of the battles to come. She wore a large diamond engagement ring. It sparkled in the winter sunlight as if there were bright living things moving within the stones.

  “Nice rock,” I said.

  She smiled. “Are you an appraiser as well as a detective?”

  “I’m multitalented. In case the whole detecting thing doesn’t work out, I’ll have something to fall back on.”

  “You seem to be doing okay at it,” she said. “You make the papers a lot.” She reconsidered what she had just said. “No, I guess that’s not true. It’s just that when you do make the papers, it kind of stands out. I bet you have all your press framed too.”

  “I’ve built a shrine to myself.”

  “Well, good luck attracting fellow worshipers. You wanted to talk to me about Andy Kellog?”

  It was straight down to business.

  “I’d like to see him,” I said.

  “He’s in the Max. It’s off-limits to everyone.”

  “Except you.”

  “I’m his lawyer and even I have to jump through hoops to get near him in there. What’s your interest in Andy?”

  “Daniel Clay.”

  Price’s face grew stony. “What about him?”

  “His daughter hired me. She’s been having some trouble with an individual who’s anxious to trace her father. It seems this individual was an acquaintance of Andy Kellog’s in jail.”

  “ Merrick,” said Price. “It’s Frank Merrick, isn’t it?”

  “You know about him?”

  “I couldn’t help but be aware of him. He and Andy were close.”

  I waited. Price leaned back in her chair.

  “Where to begin?” she said. “I took on Andy Kellog pro bono. I don’t know how much of his circumstances you’re familiar with, but I’ll give you a short summary. Abandoned as a baby, taken in by his mother’s sister, brutalized by her and her husband, then passed around to some of the husband’s buddies for the purposes of sexual abuse. He started running away at the age of eight, and was practically wild by twelve. Medicated from the age of nine; severe learning difficulties; never made it past third grade. Eventually, he ended up in a halfway house for severely disturbed children, run on a wing and a prayer with minimal state funding, and that’s when he was referred to Daniel Clay. It was part of a pilot program. Dr. Clay specialized in traumatized children, particularly those who had been victims of physical or sexual abuse. A number of children were selected for the program, and Andy was one of them.”

  “Who decided which kids were admitted?”

  “A panel of mental health workers, social workers, and Clay himself. Apparently, there was some improvement in Andy’s condition right from the start. The sessions with Dr. Clay seemed to be working for him. He grew more communicative, less aggressive. It was decided that he might benefit from interaction with a family outside of the environment of the state home, so he began to spend a couple of days each week with a family in Bingham. They ran a lodge for outdoor pursuits: you know, hunting, hiking, rafting, that kind of thing. Eventually, Andy was allowed to live with them, with the mental health workers and child protection people keeping in regular touch on him. Well, that was the idea, but they were always overstretched, so as long as he wasn’t getting into any trouble, they left well enough alone and moved on to other cases. He was allowed a certain degree of freedom, but mostly he preferred to stay close to the family and the lodge. This was during the summer season. Then things got busier, there wasn’t always time to watch Andy twenty-four/seven, and-”

  She stopped.

  “Do you have children, Mr. Parker?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t. I thought I might have wanted them once, but I don’t think it’s going to happen now. Maybe it’s for the best, when you see the things that people are capable of doing to them.” She wet her lips, as though her system was trying to silence her by drying out her mouth. “Andy was abducted from near the lodge. He went missing for a couple of hours one afternoon, and when he returned he was very quiet. Nobody paid too much heed. You know, Andy still wasn’t like the other kids. He had his moods, and the folks who were looking after him had learned to let them blow over. They figured that it didn’t hurt to allow him explore the woods by himself. They were good people. I think they just let their guard down where Andy was concerned.

  “Anyhow, it wasn’t until the third or fourth time it happened that notice was taken. Someone, I think it was the mother, went to see how Andy was, and he just attacked her. He went wild, clawing at her hair, her face. Eventually, they had to sit on him and pin him down until the police came. He wouldn’t go back to Clay, and the child-care workers could only get him to talk about fragments of what had occurred. He was returned to the institution, and he stayed there until he was seventeen. After that, he hit the streets and was lost. He couldn’t afford the medication that he needed, so he fell into dealing, robbery, violence. He’s doing fifteen years, but he doesn’t belong in the Max. I’ve been trying to get him admitted to Riverview Psychiatric. That’s where he should really be. I’ve had no luck so far. The state has decided that he’s a criminal, and the state is never wrong.”

  “Why didn’t he tell anyone about the abuse?”

  Price nibbled at her muffin. I noticed that her hands moved when she was thinking, her fingers always beating out some pattern on the edge of her chair, testing her fingernails or, as in this case, pulling apart the muffin before her. It seemed to be part of her thought processes.

  “It’s complicated,” she said. “In part, it was probably a product of the earlier abuse, where the adults responsible for him were not only aware of what was happening but actively colluded in it. Andy had little or no trust in authority figures, and the foster couple in Bingham had only just begun to break down his barriers when the new abuse occurred. But from what he told me later, the men who abused him threatened to hurt the couple’s eight-year-old daughter if he said anything about what was happening to him. Her name was Michelle, and Andy had grown very fond of her. He was protective of her, in his way. That was why he went back.”

  “Went back?”

  “The men told Andy where he should wait for them each Tuesday. Sometimes they came, sometimes they didn’t, but Andy was always there in case they did. He didn’t want anything to happen to Michelle. There was a clearing about half a mile from the house with a creek nearby, and a trail led down to it from the road, wide enough to take a single vehicle. Andy would sit there, and one of them would come for him. He was told always to sit facing the creek, and never to turn around when he heard someone arriving. He would be blindfolded, walked to the car, and driven away.”

  I felt something in my throat, and my eyes stung. I looked away from Price. I had an image in my head of a boy sitting on a log, the sound of water rushing nearby, sunlight spearing through the trees and birds singing, then footsteps approaching, and darkness.

  “I hear he’s been taken to the chair a couple of times.”

  She glanced at me, perhaps surprised at how much I knew. “More than a couple. It’s a vicious circle. Andy’s medicated, but the medication needs to be monitored and the dosages adjusted. It isn’t monitored, though, so the meds stop working as well as they should, Andy gets distressed, he lashes out, the guards punish him, he ends up more disturbed, and the meds have even less effect on him than before. It’s not Andy’s fault, but try explaining that to a prison guard who’s just had Andy’s urine thrown all over him. And A
ndy’s not untypical: there’s an escalating cycle occurring at the Supermax. Everyone can see it, but nobody knows what to do about it, or nobody even wants to do something about it, depending upon how depressed I’m feeling. You take a mentally unstable prisoner who commits some infraction of the rules while part of the general population. You confine him in a brightly lit cell without distractions, surrounded by other prisoners who are even more disturbed than he is. Under the strain, he violates more rules. He’s punished by being placed in the chair, which makes him even wilder than before. He commits more serious breaches of the rules, or assaults a guard, and his sentence is increased. The end result, in the case of someone like Andy, is that he’s driven insane, even suicidal. And what does a threat of suicide get you? More time in the chair.

  “Winston Churchill once said that you can judge a society by the way it treats its prisoners. You know, there was all of this stuff about Abu Ghraib and what we we’re doing to Muslims in Iraq and in Guantánamo and in Afghanistan and wherever else we’ve decided to lock up those whom we perceive to be a threat. People seemed surprised by it, but all they had to do was look around them. We do it to our own people. We try children as adults. We lock up, even execute, the mentally ill. And we tie people naked to chairs in ice-cold rooms because their medication isn’t working. If we can do that here, then how the hell can anybody be surprised when we don’t treat our enemies any better?”

  Her voice had grown louder as she became more angry. Ernest knocked on the door and poked his head in.

  “Everything okay, Aimee?” he asked, looking at me as if I was to blame for the disturbance, which I suppose, in a way, I was.

  “It’s fine, Ernest.”

  “You want more coffee?”

  She shook her head. “I’m wired as it is. Mr. Parker?”

  “No, I’m good.”

  She waited until the door had closed before continuing.

  “Sorry about that,” said Aimee.

  “For what?”

  “For giving you the rant. I guess you probably don’t agree with me.”

  “Why would you say that?”

  “Because of what I’ve read about you. You’ve killed people. You seem like a harsh judge.”

  I wasn’t sure how to respond. Part of me was surprised by her words, maybe even annoyed by them, but there was no edge to them. She was simply calling it as she saw it.

  “I didn’t think that I had a choice,” I replied. “Not then. Maybe now, knowing what I know, I might have acted differently in some cases, but not all.”

  “You did what you thought was right.”

  “I’ve started to believe that most people do what they think is right. The problems arise when what they do is right for themselves, but not what’s right for others.”

  “Selfishness?”

  “Perhaps. Self-interest. Self-preservation. A whole lot of concepts with ‘self ’ in them.”

  “Did you make mistakes when you did what you did?”

  I realized that I was being tested in some way, that Price’s questions were a way of gauging whether or not I should be allowed to see Andy Kellog. I tried to answer them as honestly as I could.

  “No, not at the end.”

  “So you don’t make mistakes?”

  “Not like that.”

  “You never shot anyone who didn’t have a gun in his hand, is that what you’re saying?”

  “No, because that’s not true either.”

  There was a silence then, until Aimee Price put her hands to her forehead and gave a growl of frustration.

  “Some of that is none of my business,” she said. “I’m sorry. Again.”

  “I’m asking you questions. I don’t see why you can’t ask some back. You frowned when I mentioned Daniel Clay’s name, though. Why?”

  “Because I know what people say about him. I’ve heard the stories.”

  “And you believe them?”

  “Somebody betrayed Andy Kellog to those men. It wasn’t a coincidence.”

  “ Merrick doesn’t think so either.”

  “Frank Merrick is obsessed. Something inside him broke when his daughter disappeared. I don’t know if it makes him more dangerous or less dangerous than he was.”

  “What can you tell me about him?”

  “Not much. You probably know all that you need to about his conviction, the stuff in Virginia: the killing of Barton Riddick, and the bullet match that linked Merrick to the shooting. It doesn’t interest me a great deal, to be honest. My main concern was, and remains, Andy Kellog. When Merrick first began forming some kind of bond with Andy, I thought what most people would: you know, a vulnerable younger man, an older, harder prisoner, but it wasn’t like that. Merrick really seemed to be looking out for Andy as best he could.”

  She had begun to doodle on the legal pad on her lap as she spoke. I don’t think she was even fully aware of what she was doing. She didn’t look down at the pad as the pencil moved across it, and she didn’t look at me, preferring instead to gaze out at the cold winter light beyond her window.

  She was drawing the heads of birds.

  “I heard that Merrick got transferred to the Supermax just so he could stay close to Kellog,” I said.

  “I’m curious to know the source of your information, but it’s certainly right on the money. Merrick got transferred, and made it clear that anyone who messed with Andy would answer to him. Even in a place like the Max, there are ways and means. Except the only person from whom Merrick couldn’t protect Andy was Andy himself.

  “In the meantime, the AG’s office in Virginia began setting in motion indictment on the Riddick killing. It rattled on and on, and as the date of Merrick ’s release from the Max approached, the papers were served and he was notified of his extradition. Then something peculiar happened: another lawyer intervened on Merrick ’s behalf.”

  “Eldritch,” I said.

  “That’s right. The intervention was troublesome in a number of ways. It didn’t seem like Eldritch had ever had any previous contact with Merrick, and Andy told me that the lawyer had initiated the contact. This old man just turned up and offered to take on Merrick ’s case, but from what I found out later, Eldritch didn’t seem to specialize in any kind of criminal work. He did corporate stuff, real estate, all strictly white-collar, so he was an unusual candidate for a crusading attorney. Nevertheless, he tied Merrick’s case in with a challenge to bullet matching being assembled by a group of liberal lawyers, and turned up evidence of a shooting involving the same weapon used to kill Riddick, but committed while Merrick was behind bars. The Feds began to backtrack on bullet matching, and Virginia came to the realization there wasn’t enough evidence to get a conviction on the Riddick shooting, and if there’s one thing a prosecutor hates to do, it’s to pursue a case that looks like it’s doomed from the start. Merrick spent a few months in a cell in Virginia, then was released. He’d served his full sentence in Maine, so he was free and clear.”

  “Do you think he regretted leaving Andy Kellog in the Max?”

  “Sure, but by then he seemed to have decided that there were things he needed to do outside.”

  “Like find out what had happened to his daughter?”

  “Yes.”

  I closed my notebook. There would be other questions, but for now I was done.

  “I’d still like to talk to Andy,” I said.

  “I’ll make some inquiries.”

  I thanked her and gave her my card.

  “About Frank Merrick,” she said, as I was about to leave. “I think he did kill Riddick, and a whole lot of others too.”

  “I know his reputation,” I said. “Do you believe Eldritch was wrong to intervene?”

  “I don’t know why Eldritch intervened, but it wasn’t out of a concern for justice. He did some good though, even inadvertently. Bullet matching was flawed. The case against Merrick was equally flawed. If you let even one of those slip by, then the whole system falls apart, or crumbles a little more than i
t’s crumbling already. If Eldritch hadn’t taken the case, maybe I would have sought a pro hac vice order and taken it myself.” She smiled. “I stress ‘maybe.’”

  “You wouldn’t want Frank Merrick as a client.”

  “Even hearing that he’s back in Maine makes me nervous.”

  “He hasn’t tried to contact you about Andy?”

  “No. You have any idea where he’s staying while he’s up here?”

  It was a good question, and it set off a train of thought. If Eldritch had provided Merrick with a car, and perhaps funds too, he might also have supplied a place for him to stay. If that was the case, there might be a way to find it, and perhaps discover more about both Merrick and Eldritch’s client.

  I stood to leave. At the door of her office, Aimee Price said: “So Daniel Clay’s daughter is paying you to do all this?”

  “No, not this,” I said. “She’s paying me to keep her safe from Merrick.”

  “So why are you here?”

  “For the same reason that you might have taken on Merrick’s case. There’s something wrong here. It bothers me. I’d like to find out what it is.”

  She nodded. “I’ll be in touch about Andy,” she said.

  Rebecca Clay called me, and I updated her on the situation with Merrick. Eldritch had informed his client that he would be unable to do anything for him until Monday, when he would petition a judge if Merrick continued to remain in custody without charge. O’Rourke wasn’t confident that any judge would allow the Scarborough cops to continue to hold him if he had already spent forty-eight hours behind bars, even allowing for the fact that the letter of the law entitled them to keep him for a further forty-eight.

  “What then?” asked Rebecca.

  “I’m pretty certain that he’s not going to bother you again. I saw what happened when they told him he was going to be locked up for the weekend. He’s not afraid of jail, but he is afraid of losing his freedom to search for his daughter. That freedom is now tied up with your continued well-being. I’ll serve him with the court order upon his release, but, if you’re agreeable, we’ll keep an eye on you for a day or two after he’s released, just in case.”