The Burning Soul

by John Connolly

  Engel bore the weary expression of a man who had held on to his stocks for a little too long, and had watched them plummet just as he had hoped to cash them in. All that he had left was junk. Tommy Morris was dead, and all his knowledge had died with him. Engel’s undercover man was out of the game, and was a prime candidate for an extended period of therapy. If my head hadn’t been aching so badly I might almost have felt sorry for Engel, but, as it was, his undercover agent was one of the reasons that my head was aching to begin with. Since he was no longer around to blame, I was happy to let Engel carry the can.

  ‘Hell of a mess to clean up,’ I said.

  ‘I’ve had a lot of practice,’ he replied, then added, ‘You’re lucky to be alive.’

  ‘I’ve had a lot of practice too.’

  Engel took a notebook from his pocket and opened it to a blank page. He laid a gold fountain pen beside it.

  ‘I’ve finished the initial debriefing of Martin Dempsey,’ he said.

  ‘I hope you took his gun away. I don’t think he’s too sure about where it should be pointed.’

  ‘He’s been deep for a long time. To be good at it, you have to subsume your old self in a new identity. It can be hard to restore it again, but I’m confident that he will.’

  ‘Is that part of your speech for the press conference? It sounds trite enough.’

  ‘You could always sue the federal government for the injuries you’ve received.’

  ‘I’ll add them to the list,’ I said. ‘The FBI already owes me a family.’

  In what probably passed for a gesture of contrition, Engel closed his notebook without having written a word.

  ‘Six men died in that initial confrontation: five at the scene, and one more on his way to the hospital. Francis Ryan was killed by Dempsey before the real shooting began, and Dempsey says that he also fatally wounded one of his attackers. You didn’t have a weapon. Tommy Morris died at the hands of Farrell’s killers. That leaves three men unaccounted for. Dempsey says that he didn’t see anyone else clearly, but he was aware of figures in the forest who might have taken down the remaining shooters. You have anything to add to that?’

  ‘Nothing except my grateful thanks to those involved.’

  ‘I figured you’d say that. You tell your hired gunmen to stay out of the state for a time. I’d also advise them against visiting bars in Dorchester, Somerville, and Charlestown. You never know how word spreads in these cases.’

  ‘Which raises an interesting question,’ I said. ‘How did Tommy Morris find out about Randall Haight, or Lonny Midas as we now know him? Somebody leaked the substance of the interview with him, otherwise Morris and your confused operative wouldn’t have ended up pummeling him in a chair. Were you responsible? Was it a calculated gamble to make Tommy trust Dempsey more?’

  ‘It wasn’t us,’ said Engel.

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘I have no reason to lie to you. The operation is ended.’

  ‘That’s not good enough. Somebody in that room told. Either deliberately or inadvertently, the information about Randall Haight’s confession was leaked to Morris. I didn’t do it. Aimee didn’t do it. That makes it someone on your side: one of the cops or agents in that room, or someone else who was subsequently made aware of what had been said.’

  ‘Well, the answer to that question may emerge in the next stage of the investigation, namely: Who killed Midas and the last gunman? They were both shot with the same weapon, left at the scene. It was an unregistered firearm, but we’re going to run ballistics matches on it. I have to ask: Were your dubious angels responsible?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘They wouldn’t lie to you?’

  ‘No, they wouldn’t. They also prefer not to leave guns lying around. They’re evidence, whatever way you look at it.’

  ‘Maybe Farrell sent a backup, just to be sure,’ said Engel. ‘We’ll ask around. For now, an operation that started half a decade ago is nothing but dust: years of effort for no result. Maybe if you weren’t such a lone wolf we could have got to Lonny Midas in time to use him as bait. We could have been waiting for Morris when he came.’

  ‘You’re forgetting that you had an agent in place all the time. It seems kind of harsh to put the blame on my shoulders when all Dempsey had to do was pick up a phone.’

  ‘Morris kept him out of the loop on this, right until the end.’

  ‘Maybe he didn’t trust him so much after all.’

  ‘We’ll never know.’

  ‘Right. And Anna Kore is still missing. You forgot to mention her, but then she was never a major concern of yours, was she?’

  ‘We’re going to search Randall Haight’s property – my mistake, Lonnie Midas’s property, given what we’ve now learned about him. It’s possible that he might have had an accomplice. Right now, it’s the best lead we have.’

  ‘Allan gave him an alibi,’ I said.

  ‘I know that. Do you have any reason to doubt it?’

  I took out my cell phone, opened the message folder, and showed him the anonymous missives about Chief Allan. He read through them, then handed the phone back to me.

  ‘Why didn’t you mention this before?’

  ‘I tend to be careful about potential slanders. I prefer to look into the possible truth of them before I go disseminating their substance.’

  ‘And what did you discover?’

  ‘Chief Allan has a girlfriend in Lincolnville. She’s young, and she has a child. If Allan is the father, then she was either barely legal when she became pregnant, or not legal at all if he was having sex with her for any length of time before she conceived.’

  ‘When did you discover this?’

  ‘Just yesterday, but then it was a day of discoveries for all of us.’

  ‘You have a name for the girl?’

  I gave it to him, along with the address of the apartment building and the number of her car’s license plate.

  ‘And your thinking is that Chief Allan is a man with a taste for young women, in a town where another young woman has gone missing?’

  ‘That’s the thinking of whoever has been sending these messages.’

  ‘You’re just full of surprises, aren’t you? We’ll talk with Allan. We’ll get a warrant to search his house as well.’

  ‘She’s not at his house,’ I said.

  Engel raised a quizzical eyebrow.

  ‘Dubious angels,’ I explained. ‘If Allan does have her, then she’s someplace else.’

  Engel thought for a moment.

  ‘All right. Anything else, while you’re unburdening yourself of secrets?’

  ‘One more thing: Allan made a call from a pay phone at the gas station on Main in Lincolnville at 8:34 p.m. yesterday.’

  ‘Just before a lot of men with guns descended on Pastor’s Bay,’ said Engel.

  ‘It would be interesting to know who he called.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it? You know, you might have made a good cop if you’d stuck with it, if you’d had the self-discipline and the ability to tame your ego. Instead you’re a mercenary who withholds information and makes bad judgment calls.’

  A horse-faced woman wearing a blue FBI windbreaker entered the room, a younger, preppy-looking guy hovering behind her with a gun at his waist. Engel nodded at them and stood. His mouth formed a moue as he looked down on me.

  ‘You should leave while you still can, Mr. Parker, before somebody takes it into his mind to put you under arrest. You didn’t behave well here. None of us did, but you in particular have done nothing to enhance your reputation.’

  I didn’t argue with him.

  37

  Chief Allan couldn’t be found. His cell phone rang out, and there was nobody home when Engel, accompanied by Gordon Walsh and two state troopers, paid a call to his house. His truck wasn’t in the drive either, so his license-plate details and a description of his vehicle were passed to both local and state forces, as well as to police in the contiguous states, the border patrol, and Canadian la
w enforcement. Walsh visited the apartment building in Lincolnville with a female state trooper named Abelena Forbes, and Mary Ellen Schrock admitted that she had been seeing Allan, but told Walsh and Forbes first that she was eighteen then, on reflection, seventeen when their sexual relationship began. Forbes asked her if she was sure of this, and she said that she was, but both Forbes and Walsh believed that she still was lying. But the girl stuck to her story: Allan had pulled over a car in which she was a passenger, and the driver, a twenty-two-year-old friend of Schrock’s, was found to be marginally over the limit. He was let off with a warning by Allan, who offered to drive Schrock home, although she could not recall the date of the alleged incident. Their relationship had begun a week later. When they asked her if she was aware of any similar relationships in which Allan might have been involved, either now or in the past, she grew agitated and said that she was not. This they also believed to be a lie. When they asked her if Allan had ever mentioned Anna Kore to her, she told them to leave.

  At the door, Forbes told her to find someone to look after her child, because when they came back with an arrest warrant they’d be taking her to Gray for questioning. It was Walsh who played good cop, figuring that Schrock was a young woman who responded better to male authority figures, particularly older males. He told her that they didn’t want her to get into any trouble but they needed to talk to Allan, and if she had heard from him then she ought to tell them. He reminded her that there was a girl missing, a girl who might at this very moment be suffering grave torments, who was probably very frightened and at risk of death. All they were asking for was any help that she could offer.

  Schrock began to cry. She was, in the end, little more than a child herself. She told them that Allan sometimes used her cell phone when he visited, both to make and to receive calls, but deleted the numbers before he gave the phone back to her. Schrock did not have online access to her account, as she simply topped up her phone credit when necessary. Walsh sought and received permission to access her call records from her service provider when she told him that Allan had used her phone the day before. Walsh made them coffee in the kitchen while Forbes called Engel about the cell phone records on the grounds that the feds could retrieve the relevant information faster than anyone else could. While they sat on the uncomfortable furniture, drinking cheap coffee and looking at the bare walls of Schrock’s dingy, dark apartment, the baby began to cry, and wouldn’t stop until Walsh took a turn with it, whereupon it promptly fell asleep in his arms.

  At that point, Schrock admitted that she had first had intercourse with Kurt Allan when she was fifteen.

  Both of the numbers called by Allan, and from which he had received calls, were traced to throwaway phones bought in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, as was the final call made from the gas station the previous night. The cell phones in question, though, had not been thrown away. One was found in the pocket of Tommy Morris, and the other in the car used by the hunters to drive to Pastor’s Bay. Allan had not only sold out the man he believed to be Randall Haight; he had also sold out Tommy Morris to his enemies. The apartment building in Lincolnville had previously been owned by a shelf operation in Boston, UIPC Strategies, Inc., and looked after by a property-management company based in Belfast. While the Belfast company still maintained the property, they informed the state police that the building in question had been sold three months earlier by a Boston bank when the company of ownership had defaulted on its loan. That company, UIPC, had been a front for Tommy Morris’s property investments. The trail became clearer: Allan had been one of Morris’s tame cops in Boston and had kept up the connection after moving to Maine, keeping an eye on Morris’s estranged sister while feeding him information that might be of use to him and facilitating the movement of drugs, weapons, and other contraband when required. In fact, it seemed likely that Morris had pointed Allan toward the job in Pastor’s Bay in the first place. In return, Morris paid him a retainer, and eventually gave his girlfriend and his child a place to live. But as Morris’s problems had mounted so Allan’s cash supply had been cut off, and his new family was no longer able to live free, or at a reduced rent, on Morris’s dime. The disappearance of Anna Kore had provided Allan with an opportunity to make some money off Tommy Morris’s scalp, and so he had lured him to Pastor’s Bay, baited his trap with Randall Haight, and then informed Oweny Farrell’s crew of where Morris could be found.

  A subpoena was immediately sought for access to Allan’s own cell phone records. The previous night, shortly after nine p.m., he had received a call to his cell phone from a previously unknown number. Foster, the Pastor’s Bay officer who had officially been on duty that night, confirmed that when he returned to the station at 9:10 p.m., Allan was gone. The phone used to make the call to Allan had not been found, but through a process of triangulation the source of the call was narrowed down to the woods near Lonny Midas’s home. Attempts to trace Allan by ‘pinging’ his cell phone proved fruitless, just as they had for Anna Kore’s phone. If Allan was still in possession of his cell phone, he had switched it off and removed the battery.

  Allan’s truck wasn’t found by the state police or the feds but by a sixteen-year-old boy and his fifteen-year-old girlfriend who had driven to a coastal lookout called Freyer’s Point in order to watch the sun set and enjoy a little quality time together. They spotted a vehicle in the woods as they approached the lookout, and not caring to engage in acts of intimacy when someone might be watching, decided to turn back and find somewhere more private. The boy saw that the driver’s door was open. Concerned, he went to take a look, and thought that he recognized Chief Allan’s truck. Rumors had already begun to spread around Pastor’s Bay that the chief was missing, so the boy called 911. The state police and the feds descended and found two cell phones in the glove compartment: Allan’s own, and the one that had been used to call him from the woods. To the police and the FBI, it seemed that Allan had fled. It was only when $10,000 in twenties and fifties was found hidden beneath the spare tire that they began to reconsider their assessment.

  Alongside the money and the phones, tied up in a blue plastic bag and freshly laundered, were Anna Kore’s blouse, skirt, and underwear.

  38

  I missed the furor caused by the discovery of Allan’s truck. Once Engel and Walsh had consented to let me leave the station house, although not the environs of Pastor’s Bay, I went to the disturbingly low-key bed-and-breakfast inn off Main Street operated by the twin sisters of uncertain age, and asked for a room. I was in no state to drive. My perforated eardrum was still causing me pain, although the feelings of nausea and vertigo had almost gone, but I was exhausted and my head ached. When I arrived at the door of the B and B, my clothes caked with dried mud, I expected to be told to find a tolerant motel or sleep in my car. Instead, the sisters, who answered the door together dressed in identical pale-blue dresses, showed me to their largest room ‘because it has a bath.’ They pointed out the robe in the closet and told me to leave my dirty clothes in a bag outside my door. They asked if I wanted something to eat, or a pot of coffee, but all I wanted to do was sleep. Their kindnesses were offered in an unsmiling, matter-of-fact way that made them all the more affecting.

  I slept from noon until after four. When I woke, there were three messages on my phone. I hadn’t even heard it ring. One was from Angel, pointing out in the most discreet way, without mentioning any names, that they hadn’t been able to remove the tracking device from Allan’s car before leaving town, and maybe I might like to see about rectifying the problem. He also advised me to check my email.

  The second message had been left by Denny Kraus’s attorney, informing me that the judge had just decided that Denny was mentally incompetent to stand trial, based on Denny’s proposed solution to the whole problem of the killing of Philip Espvall.

  ‘Look,’ Denny had apparently told the judge that morning, his face a picture of reasonableness, ‘I’ll just get another dog . . .’

  The third message
, which reduced some of the benefits that my rest had brought, came from Gordon Walsh, ordering me to return his call as soon as I received his message, or face the direst consequences. He hadn’t left me much choice, so I dialed his number and let his wrath wash over me. In between calling me every kind of asshole under the sun, he let me know about the interview with Allan’s girlfriend and told me that Allan’s truck had been found, along with a sum of money and clothing similar to that worn by Anna Kore when she disappeared. The tentative assumption the cops were now operating under was that, in addition to double-crossing Tommy Morris by selling him out to his enemies, Allan had also provided a false alibi for Midas. Both men had colluded in the abduction of Anna Kore, and Allan was now a suspect in Midas’s murder, killing him in order to cover his tracks when Tommy Morris failed to do the job for him, then killing Oweny Farrell’s last surviving gunman as well just to be sure. The truck was already being forensically examined, which meant that, if the job was done well, the tracker would be found, and whatever trouble I’d been in up to now would be as nothing compared with what would follow. A fingertip search of both the Midas and Allan properties was also under way.

  Walsh then called me an asshole some more, and informed me that Mrs. Shaye had admitted to sending the series of anonymous text messages about Allan to my phone. She told the cops that she’d known about Allan’s relationship with Schrock for some time, based on conversations that she’d overheard between Allan and his then wife, and subsequently between Allan and the girl. While she said that she hadn’t necessarily connected Allan to Anna Kore’s disappearance, she still didn’t feel that he was a suitable person to be involved in such an investigation or, indeed, to be the chief of police. My arrival had given her the opportunity to alert someone to her boss’s indiscretions, and she had taken it. She apologized for any trouble she’d caused, and for not being more open in her approach. She had tendered her resignation from the department but it had been declined, at least while the investigation into Anna’s fate continued.