They had ways…
“What happened to Lucy, Otis? What went wrong?”
“It was a mistake,” he said. He had grown almost calm, as though he were talking about a minor fender bender, or an error on his taxes. “They left her with me after…after.” He coughed, then went on, again letting what was done to Lucy Merrick, a fourteen-year-old girl who had lost her way, remain unsaid. “They were going to come back the next day, or could be it was a couple of days. I don’t remember. I’m confused now. I just had to look after her. She had a blanket and a mattress. I fed her, and I gave her some toys and some books. But it got real cold all of a sudden, real cold. I was going to bring her up to my place, but I was afraid that she might see something up there, something that would help them to identify me when we let her go. I had a little gasoline generator in the house, so I turned it on for her and she went to sleep.
“I had a mind to check on her every few hours, but I dozed off myself. When I woke up, she was lying on the floor.” He started sobbing again, and it took him almost a minute before he could continue. “I smelled the fumes when I got to the door. I wrapped a cloth around my face, and I still could hardly breathe. She was lying on the floor, and she was all red and purple. She’d been sick on herself. I don’t know how long she’d been dead.
“I swear, the generator had been working fine earlier. Maybe she’d tried to tinker with it. I just don’t know. I didn’t mean for it to happen. Oh God, I didn’t mean for it to happen that way.”
He started to wail. I let him cry for a while, then interrupted him.
“Where did you put her, Otis?”
“I wanted her to rest somewhere nice, near God and the angels. I buried her behind the steeple of the old church. It was the closest I could get to hallowed ground. I couldn’t mark the place or nothing, but she’s there. I sometimes put flowers on the spot in summer. I talk to her. I tell her I’m sorry for what happened.”
“And the private detective? What about Poole?”
“I had nothing to do with that.” He sounded indignant. “He wouldn’t walk away. He kept asking questions. I had to make a call. I buried him in the church too, but away from Lucy. Her place was special.”
“Who killed him?”
“I’ll confess my own sins, but I won’t confess another man’s. It’s not for me to do.”
“Daniel Clay? Was he involved?”
“I never met him,” Otis replied. “I don’t know what happened to him. I just heard the name. You remember now: I didn’t mean for it to happen the way it did. I just wanted her to be warm. I told you: I love children.”
“What was the Project, Otis?”
“The children were the Project,” he replied. “The little children. The others found them and brought them up here. That’s what we called it: the Project. It was our secret.”
“Who were those other men?”
“I can’t tell you. I got nothing more to say to you.”
“Okay, Otis, we’re going to come up there now. We’ll take you somewhere safe.”
But now, as the last minutes of his life slipped slowly by, the barriers that Otis Caswell had erected between himself and the reality of what he had done seemed to fall away.
“Nowhere’s safe,” he said. “I just want it to end.” He drew in a deep breath, stifling another sob. It seemed to give him some strength. “I gotta go now. I gotta let some men in.”
He put the phone down, and the connection was broken. I was on the road five minutes later, and at the spot where the trail to Caswell’s place joined the main road in ten. I flashed my lights where I knew Louis and Angel to be, but there was no sign of them. Farther ahead, the gate was open and the lock busted. I followed the trail to the house. There was a truck parked outside. Louis’s Lexus was beside it. The front door to the house was open, a light shining outside.
“It’s me,” I called.
“In here,” replied Louis, from somewhere to my right.
I followed his voice into a sparsely furnished bedroom. It had whitewashed walls. Exposed beams ran along the ceiling. Otis Caswell was hanging from one of them. There was an overturned chair on the floor, and drops of urine were still falling from his bare feet.
“I was out taking a leak,” said Angel. “I saw-” He struggled to find the words. “I saw the door was open, and I thought I saw men go in, but when we got up here there was nobody but Caswell, and he was already dead.”
I stepped forward and rolled up each sleeve of his shirt in turn. His skin was bare of tattoos. However else he was involved, Otis Caswell was not the man with the eagle on his arm. Angel and Louis looked at me, but said nothing.
“He knew,” I said. “He knew who they were, but he wouldn’t tell.”
Now he was dead, and that knowledge had died with him. Then I remembered the man killed by Frank Merrick. There was still time. First, though, we searched the house, carefully going through drawers and closets, checking the floors and the skirting for any hiding places. It was Angel who found the stash, in the end. There was a hole in the wall behind a half-empty bookcase. It contained bags of photographs, most printed from a computer, and dozens of unmarked videocassettes and DVDs. Angel leafed through a couple of the pictures, then put them down and stepped away. I glanced at them, but did not have the stomach to go through them all. There was no need. I knew what they would contain. Only the faces of the children would change.
Louis gestured at the cassettes and DVDs. There was a metal stand in one corner, dominated by a new flat-screen TV. It looked out of place in Caswell’s home.
“You want to look at these?”
“No. I have to leave,” I said. “Clean down anything you’ve touched, then you get out of here too.”
“You going to call the cops?” asked Angel.
I shook my head. “Not for a couple of hours.”
“What did he tell you?”
“He said that Merrick’s daughter died of carbon monoxide poisoning. He buried her behind the steeple in the forest.”
“You believed him?”
“I don’t know.” I looked at Caswell’s face, purple with blood. I could feel no pity for him, and my only regret was that he had died without revealing more.
“You want us to stay close?” asked Louis.
“Go back to Portland, but stay away from Scarborough. I need to look at a body, then I’ll call you.”
We went outside. The air was still, the forest quiet. There was an alien scent in the air. Behind me, I heard Louis sniff.
“Someone’s been smoking,” he said.
I walked past Caswell’s truck, over short grass and a small vegetable patch, until I came to where the forest began. After a few steps I found it: a roll-up, discarded in the dirt. I lifted it carefully and blew on the tip. It glowed red for an instant, then died. Louis appeared beside me, Angel close behind. They both had guns in their hands. I showed them the cigarette.
“He was here,” I said. “We led him to Caswell.”
“There’s a mark on the little finger of Caswell’s right hand,” said Angel. “Looks like there was a pinkie ring once. No sign of it now.”
I stared into the darkness of the forest, but I had no sense of the presence of another. The Collector was gone.
O’Rourke had done as he had promised. He had left word with the ME’s office to say that I might be able to identify the dead man. I was at the office by seven, and was joined soon after by O’Rourke and a pair of state police detectives, one of whom was Hansen. He didn’t speak as I was led into the icebox to view the body. In total, there were five bodies set to go under the ME’s knife: the unidentified man from the Old Moose Lodge, Mason Dubus, the two Russians, and Merrick. They were so pressed for space that the two Russians were being stored at an undertaker’s office nearby.
“Which one is Merrick?” I asked the ME’s assistant.
The man, whose name I did not know, pointed at the body nearest the wall. It was covered with a white plastic sheet.<
br />
“You feeling sorry for him?” It was Hansen. “He killed four men in twelve hours with your gun. You ought to be feeling sorry, but not for him.”
I said nothing. Instead, I stood over the body of Merrick’s killer. I think I even managed to keep my face expressionless when the man’s face was revealed, the red wound on the right side of his forehead still messy with dirt and congealed matter.
“I don’t know him,” I said.
“You sure?” asked O’Rourke.
“Yeah, I’m sure,” I said, as I turned away from the body of Jerry Legere, Rebecca Clay’s ex-husband. “He’s nobody I know.”
They would come back to haunt me, of course, all of the lies and half-truths. They would cost me more than I could then have imagined, although perhaps I had been living on borrowed time for so long that I shouldn’t have been surprised at the consequences. I could have given the detectives all that I knew. I could have told them about Andy Kellog and Otis Caswell and the bodies that might be buried within the walls of a ruined church, but I did not. I don’t know why. I think that maybe it was because I was close to the truth, and I wanted to reveal it for myself.
And even in that I was to be disappointed, for what, in the end, was the truth? Like the lawyer Elwin Stark had said, the only truth was that everybody lied.
Or perhaps it was because of Frank Merrick. I knew what he had done. I knew he had killed, and would have killed again if he had been allowed to live. I was still bruised and sore from where he had punched me, and I was aware of a lingering resentment at the way he had humiliated me in my own home. But in his love for his daughter, and in his single-minded obsession with discovering the truth behind her disappearance, and with punishing those responsible for it, I saw something of myself reflected.
Now that Lucy Merrick’s resting place had been revealed, the rest of the men who had led her to that place remained to be found. Three of those involved-Caswell, Legere, and, it now seemed, Dubus-were dead. Andy Kellog had recalled four masks, and I had seen no tattoos on the arms of Caswell or of Legere. The man with the eagle, the one who Andy felt was the leader, the dominant one, was still alive.
I was climbing into my car when a piece fell into place. I thought of the damage to one corner of the cottage in which Lucy Merrick had died, the holes in the wall and the marks where screws had once held something in place, and recalled part of what Caswell had said to me on the phone. It had bothered me at the time, but I was too intent upon squeezing him for more information to notice it. It came back to me now-“I had a mind to check on her every few hours, but I dozed off myself. When I woke up, she was lying on the floor.”-and I found the connection.
Three were dead, but now I had another name.
Chapter XXXIV
Raymon Lang lived between Bath and Brunswick, on a small patch of land off Route 1, close by the northern bank of the New Meadows River. I’d taken a cursory look at Lang’s home when I got there just before nine. He hadn’t done much with his property, apart from plant a tan trailer home on it that looked, at first sight, like a strong sneeze might blow it away. The trailer sat high off the ground. In a cursory nod to aesthetics, a kind of picket fence had been erected between the bottom of the trailer and the earth, masking the dirt and pipes beneath.
I had managed only three or four hours’ sleep that night, but I was not tired. The more I thought about what Caswell had told me before he died, the more convinced I was that Raymon Lang was involved in the abduction of Lucy Merrick. Caswell had told me that he had seen Lucy lying on the floor, dying or already dead. The question was: how had Caswell known? How could he have seen her when he had woken up? After all, had he been in the cabin with her, then he too would have died. He hadn’t fallen asleep there. He was sleeping back in his own place, which meant that there was a way of watching the cabin from his home. There was a camera. The mark in the corner of the cabin wall indicated where the camera had been. And whom did we know who put cameras in places? Raymon Lang, helped by his old buddy Jerry Legere, regrettably, no longer with us. A-Secure, the firm for which Lang worked, had also installed the security system at Daniel Clay’s house, which now seemed less like a coincidence than before. I wondered how Rebecca would take the news of her ex-husband’s death. I doubted that she would be overcome by grief, but who could be certain? I had seen wives weep themselves into a stupor over the sickbeds of abusive husbands, and children cry hysterically at the funerals of fathers who had torn stripes in their thighs and buttocks with a belt. Sometimes, I didn’t think they even understood why they were in tears, but grief was as good a name as any to give to their reason.
I guessed that Lang was also the other man involved in the killing of Frank Merrick. According to eyewitnesses, a silver or gray car had been seen leaving the scene, and from where I sat I could see Lang’s silver Sierra shining through the trees. The cops hadn’t picked it up on the road to the Old Moose Lodge as they headed north, but that didn’t mean anything. In the panic after the shooting, it might have taken the cops a while to get witness statements, by which time Lang could have driven as far as the highway. Even if someone had reported seeing a car during the initial 911 call, Lang would still have had time to get at least as far as Bingham, and there he would have enjoyed the choice of three routes: 16 north, 16 south, or to continue on the 201. He would probably have kept going south, but there were enough side roads after Bingham to enable him to avoid dozens of cops if he was lucky and kept his cool.
I was parked by the side of a gas station about fifty feet west of Lang’s drive, drinking coffee and reading the Press Herald. There was a Dunkin’ Donuts attached to the gas station, with seating for only a handful of customers, which meant that it wasn’t unusual to see people eating in their cars. It meant that I wasn’t likely to stand out while I was watching Lang’s place. After an hour, Lang emerged from the trailer, and the patch of silver started to move as he turned onto the main road and headed in the direction of Bath. Seconds later, Louis and Angel followed him in the Lexus. I had my cell phone close to hand in case it turned out to be just a short trip, even though Lang had his toolbox with him when he was walking to his car. I still gave him a half hour, on the off chance that he decided to head back for some reason, then left my car where it was and cut through the trees to get to the trailer.
Lang didn’t seem to keep a dog, which was good news. It’s hard to perform a little breaking and entering while a dog is trying to rip your throat out. The trailer door didn’t look like much, but I still didn’t have Angel’s ability to pick a lock. Frankly, it’s a lot harder than it looks, and I didn’t want to spend half an hour squatting in front of Lang’s door, trying to open it with a pick and tension tool. I used to own an electric rake, which did the job just as well, but the rake got lost when my old Mustang was shot up a few years back, and I’d never bothered to replace it. Anyway, the only reason a private detective might keep a rake in his car would be in order to bust illegally into someone’s place, and if my car was searched for any reason by the cops it would look bad, and I might lose my license. I didn’t need Angel to help me break into Lang’s trailer, because I didn’t plan on leaving Lang in any doubt that his place had been searched. At the very least, it would rattle him, and I wanted him rattled. Unlike Caswell, Lang didn’t look like the kind of guy who was going to reach for a noose when things got tough. Instead, if Merrick ’s fate was any indication, he was the kind to lash out. The thought that Lang might not be guilty of anything never really crossed my mind.
For the purposes of breaking into Lang’s trailer, I had a crowbar under my coat. I forced it between the door and the frame of the trailer, then kept pushing until the lock broke. The first thing that struck me about the interior of Lang’s trailer was that it was stiflingly hot inside. The second was that it was tidy, and therefore not what I had expected from a single man’s trailer. To the left was a galley-style kitchen with a table beyond it, surrounded by a three-sided couch arrangement that took up the entir
e lower quarter of the trailer. To the right, just before the sleeping area, was a La-Z-Boy recliner and an expensive Sony wide-screen television, beneath which stood a matching DVD, a DVD recorder, and a twin VCR. There were tapes and DVDs on a shelf beside it: action movies, some comedies, even a couple of Bogart and Cagney classics. Under them was a selection of porn on both DVD and video. I glanced at some of the titles but they seemed like pretty average fare. There was nothing related to children, but then I supposed that most of the stuff involving children was probably packaged to look like something else anyway; that, or it was buried on other tapes or disks so that it would not be found in the event of a casual search. I turned on the TV and picked some of the porn at random, skipping forward in case anything unusual was to be seen, but it was just as advertised. I could have spent an entire day trying to go through all the movies in the hope that I might find something, but there didn’t seem to be much point. It was also kind of depressing.
Next to the TV was a Home Depot computer desk, and a new PC. I tried accessing the computer but it was password protected. I turned it off and went through the books on the shelves and the magazines stacked beneath a small corner table. Again, there was nothing, not even porn. It was possible that Lang had other material hidden elsewhere, but after searching the entire trailer, I couldn’t find any trace of it. All that was left was the laundry basket in the spotless bathroom, which seemed to be full of Lang’s dirty T-shirts, underwear, and socks. I tipped it onto the floor just in case, but all it left me with was a pile of stained clothing and the smell of stale perspiration. In every other way, Lang appeared to be clean. I was disappointed, and for the first time I started to doubt my actions in relation to him. Maybe I should have called the cops. If there was incriminating material on his computer, then they could have found it. I had also managed to contaminate the trailer, so that even if they found evidence that Lang had been involved in Merrick’s killing-a bloodstained baseball bat, or a splattered bar-it wouldn’t take much of a lawyer to argue that I could have planted the weapons, assuming I confessed what I knew to the cops. For the moment, it seemed like Lang was a dead end. I would just have to wait and see how he reacted to the break-in.
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