The Woman in the Woods

by John Connolly

  Finally, some common sense had to come into play. Even the coldest of individuals would feel concern at driving any distance with a body concealed in the trunk of a car, or hidden in the bed of a truck. The aim would be to rid oneself of the remains as quickly as possible, which meant that no one unfamiliar with the land on which the body was found would have chosen it as a dumping ground. It was not just secluded; it was too secluded. No, only a local would have adjudged it appropriate for a secret burial.

  Then what of the child? Assuming it was not interred near the mother—and Parker was increasingly tending toward the belief, shared by Allen and Hubbell, that its absence from the mother’s grave offered some prospect for its survival—then whoever dug the hole was either still in possession of the child or knew where it was. This wasn’t necessarily a positive development: there were men—women, too, but they were rarer—whose depravity could be fed by a baby. Either way, the mystery of the lost child was likely to be solved in the region. Someone from Piscataquis or its immediate environs knew its fate.

  But it was possible that some fresh information might emerge as a result of the press conference scheduled for the following day, one the local news services would be encouraged to pitch to the nationals. The infant was the hook. The body of a woman found in the woods would not be enough to draw out-of-state interest, but add a narrative in which she was not simply another Jane Doe buried in a shallow grave (and what did it say about humankind, Parker thought, that this was not considered sufficiently worthy of attention?) but a new mother, one whose child was still missing, and the media would have a mystery.

  What did appear certain, though, was that the anonymous woman was not from Maine. The state currently had fewer than thirty ongoing missing-persons cases being investigated by the Major Crimes Unit of the MSP, most of which involved males. Of the cases involving women, none fit the time frame or the age profile of the recovered body.

  By the time the lights of Portland appeared in the distance, Parker had put together a plan of approach, but he knew he was likely to be either one step behind or ahead of the state police in everything he did, because they would be following the same investigative processes. For once, Parker was not in competition with law enforcement, or working to protect a client whose interests might not be best served by exposure to a police investigation. Yet neither did he feel entirely comfortable about taking Moxie Castin’s money for a job that the police were qualified to do equally well, if not better.

  He called Moxie and gave him a rundown on what he had learned so far, which wasn’t much at all. But Parker did share his belief that the person responsible for burying the woman was native to Piscataquis County, although it didn’t necessarily mean that he or she—or the child, if it still lived—remained in the area, or even the state.

  “Do I detect a note of unhappiness?” Moxie asked.

  “Call it a pang of conscience.”

  “Over what?”

  “I get the feeling the police are on top of this one, which means I’m uncomfortable about taking money for walking the same ground.”

  “You’ll never make a lawyer if you start having qualms.”

  “I’ll try to hide the pain those words have caused me. Otherwise, I think we should see what comes out of tomorrow’s press conference. If all the police get is an echo, we’ll talk again. If we’re operating on the assumption that the child is alive, I already have some thoughts on how to proceed, but it’ll be time-consuming, and unpleasant.”

  Parker had made a call to Walsh on the way back to Portland. According to the detective, the investigators were probably going to wait for the completion of the search, and confirmation of the presence or absence of further remains, before taking the next step, which would involve a general approach to the state’s medical professionals, and pediatricians in particular, seeking information on any unexpected postnatal consultations corresponding to the time of Jane Doe’s death. It was possible that this might produce some leads, but the end result would still be as Parker had suggested.

  “Because nobody wants a stranger knocking on their door and asking if their child is really blood to them?” said Moxie.

  “That’s it exactly.”

  “I appreciate your honesty, even if it means you’re going to die poor. I’m not only paying you to look into this, but also to shadow the police. Bill me for a few hours each day, at least for now. I’d prefer you to stay on top of it.”

  “There is one other thing.”

  “Go on.”

  “I had a visit from Bobby Ocean.”

  “He’s persistent.”

  “He’s more than that. He seems to be of the opinion that I bear some responsibility for the destruction of his son’s truck. He also referred to you as a ‘Semite,’ and in a tone that leads me to suspect he may not have been serious about putting business your way. He came to you because of me. Oh, and he doesn’t care much for blacks and homosexuals either, although he didn’t express it in precisely those terms. He suggested I tell the ‘Negroes and queers’ of my acquaintance that a new order was rising.”

  “The Negroes and queers of your acquaintance?” said Moxie. “At least you’ll only have to make one call. So the son learned at his father’s knee?”

  “I may have indicated something along those lines to Bobby Ocean.”

  “I bet he took it under advisement. Fortunately for you, he’s completely mistaken about your involvement in the immolation of the truck.”

  Moxie never conducted any conversation over a phone line that he wouldn’t be unconcerned about hearing played back to him in a court of law or in a police interview room.

  “He is, but I may have struggled to disabuse him of that notion.”

  “Then let him live with it. Bobby Ocean’s not a criminal. Any retribution he might seek would probably be through legal channels. He’s a bigot, but he’s not a fool.”

  “Unlike his son.”

  “Which begs the question: Why wasn’t Billy knocking on your door seeking restitution?”

  “I don’t think Billy’s father has shared with him any misguided suspicions he might have.”

  “Because if he did, Billy might retaliate with an act of gross stupidity.”

  “Which could result in Billy ending up in jail, or getting hurt—or worse.”

  “And,” said Moxie, “the kind of person who’d blow up a truck due to its Confederate-themed décor probably wouldn’t appreciate the owner getting in his face over it.”

  Parker considered all possible outcomes from a confrontation between Louis and Billy Ocean.

  “Actually,” Parker replied, “he probably would.”

  CHAPTER

  XXXIX

  Billy Ocean hated folks calling him by that name. He hadn’t always hated it. To begin with, he’d enjoyed having a nickname, especially after seeing those movies with George Clooney as the con artist Danny Ocean. His pleasure had only increased when it was pointed out to him that the Oceans’ movies were based on an older film, one in which Frank Sinatra played Danny Ocean, and you didn’t get much cooler than Sinatra in his Rat Pack prime.

  The problem was that Billy’s father had been given his nickname out of a kind of respect, even a little affection. He was Bobby Ocean, King of the Wharfs. He wasn’t someone you wanted to cross, but he did his best not to screw over the workingman, not as long as the workingman was white—or if Bobby did screw him over, he made sure to hide his misdeeds behind a corporate entity that could be linked to him only by conjecture.

  It was natural, then, that his son should inherit the Ocean moniker, just as he was destined someday to become Prince of the Piers, the heir to the empire. Except it hadn’t worked out that way, because his father didn’t trust Billy enough to make him privy to the important decisions, the ones that related to multimillion-dollar building projects, the endeavors that were changing the character of the city, stamping it with the identity of a man who had started out cleaning fish guts from market floors. Bobby
Ocean had encouraged his son to learn about the family’s various business interests from the bottom up, to earn the respect of the men who would ultimately contribute to his wealth by laboring alongside them, but Billy didn’t have time for that kind of shit. Surely that was why his old man had slaved his ass off to begin with: so his son could ascend from a more elevated position, raising his father’s legacy to greater heights because he wasn’t mired in scales and fish heads.

  But his father didn’t see it that way. His father looked at Billy and could barely conceal his disappointment. Billy resembled a bargain-basement version of his old man: soft where the sire was muscular; dull-eyed where he was watchful; and conniving where he was clever. Billy was dumb and self-centered, but he wasn’t so dumb and self-centered as to be unable to perceive his father’s true feelings. It was just that he couldn’t comprehend the reason for them.

  So instead of sitting in on meetings with developers, or managing a couple of bars and fancy restaurants with a sideline in chasing tail, Billy was scrabbling in the dirt. He knew folks around town laughed at him behind his back—and sometimes, if they’d had enough to drink, right in his face, although they always pretended after that it was all in good fun. “We didn’t mean anything by it,” they’d say. “We’re just joshing with you. You’re a good guy, Billy.” An arm would be thrown over his shoulders. Someone would sing a semi-mocking chorus of “When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Get Going.” (This was another thorn in Billy’s side: he listened to a lot of rap music, because one thing the Negroes did well was rap, although maybe not as well as Eminem, who was the best as far as Billy was concerned, and blacker than black. But Billy didn’t like having a nickname associated with a Negro. It wasn’t right.) So the call would go up for another round of drinks, and Billy would smile and take it because it was to this his father had reduced him: the butt of a joke, a punch for stronger men.

  And then to cap it all, someone had blown up his fucking truck.

  Billy loved that truck. It was everything he’d dreamed it would be, but he’d barely grown familiar with its ways before someone reduced it to a smoking shell. To make matters worse, Billy was supposed to be paying the insurance monthly, but what with one thing and another, including certain liquidity issues, he’d let the payments lapse.

  Man, was his father pissed when he heard that.

  Which left Billy looking for clues in the aftermath of the arson attack, only to receive shrugs in return. He knew there was no shortage of resentment toward him and his father. In a city as small as Portland, a man like Bobby Ocean couldn’t rise to a position of power without leaving wreckage in his wake, and some of the resulting anger would inevitably be deflected in his son’s direction. But blowing up a truck was a big step to take. Scratching it with a key, maybe, or slashing its tires: after all, Billy had done such deeds and worse to the vehicles of others. Destroying a thing of beauty like his truck, though . . .

  Well, that required a debased mind.

  But over the last couple of days, Billy had come to suspect his father knew more about what might have occurred than he was willing to share with his son. This inkling was the result of a conversation with Dean Harper, who had worked on the boats with his father back in the day. Now, thanks to Bobby’s loyalty to those who were loyal to him, Harper served as his driver, messenger, and general man-at-arms. Dean wasn’t considered bright, but he was a lot smarter than he pretended to be, and there wasn’t much that went on along the waterfront to which he was not privy.

  Dean Harper’s weakness was alcohol, although he was hardly unique around the piers in this respect. Yet Dean was more disciplined than most in his habits. Twice a month, starting on Friday night and ending early Sunday morning, Dean went on the kind of bender that would frighten demons back into hell, which had led to him being blacklisted by all of the city’s better drinking establishments, and even some of the worse ones. Admittedly Dean enjoyed a golden period for about two hours on the Friday evening, when he was still only knocking back beers and hadn’t yet transformed into the hulking, brooding figure that had once, in the depths of a particularly bleak drunk, tried to ram a cruise liner with a lobster boat. It was during the most recent of these mellow patches that Dean let slip to Billy something about a “shine” being in the bar shortly before Billy’s truck went “the way of the Hindenburg,” a reference Billy didn’t get, but figured involved smoke and fire.

  “I can’t tell you nothin’ more, Billy,” Dean had added. “Your old man . . .”

  Whereupon Dean’s mood had suddenly darkened, and he’d wandered off to bust up a pool table, leaving Billy to pay the tab and think about what he’d just heard.

  A shine, the flags on his truck: it all started to make sense now. A Negro had taken offense at Billy’s choice of decoration, and the end result was the immolation of Billy’s pride and joy. Billy didn’t know a whole lot about history, but he recalled that brave men had died for his right to freedom of expression—which Billy chose to interpret as the right to be as offensive as he chose—and those fine individuals were not going to have sacrificed themselves in vain.

  Billy didn’t like to think of the coloreds as shines, or—much worse—niggers. His father didn’t hold with that kind of language, and had passed this on to his son. Bobby Ocean took the view that only uncouth men used racially derogatory terms, so in public they were “blacks,” and otherwise “Negroes.” A man, said Bobby, could demean the Negroes all he liked—Latinos, Jews, and Arabs, too—but had to learn to temper his language in both public and private. It was important to appear reasonable, to disguise prejudice with plausibility. Be moderate in your speech, his father would say, so you can be radical in your actions.

  Queers were different, though. As far as Bobby Ocean was concerned, you could call them what you liked.

  Bobby Ocean fucking hated queers.

  So Billy had stoked himself with some Dutch courage and gone to confront his father with this newfound knowledge gleaned from Dean Harper. The response hadn’t even been a denial on his father’s part, just a quietly spoken instruction to get the fuck back to his own apartment and never again mention that fucking truck in his father’s presence. Dean Harper was also given his walking papers, having crossed the line drawn in the aftermath of the cruiser/lobster boat incident, which left Billy with even fewer friends in his father’s circle than before.

  A Negro, Billy thought.

  A fucking Negro.

  CHAPTER

  XL

  Maela Lombardi regained consciousness in her favorite armchair. It took her a while before she could manage to keep her eyes open, and her head throbbed with a nausea-inducing headache reminiscent of the worst migraines she’d ever suffered. She heard someone moan, and was briefly confused and irritated by the sound until she realized that she was the one making it.

  A man was seated before her. He was reading from a small volume in his lap, and did not so much as glance up when Lombardi exhibited signs of wakefulness. She grasped the opportunity to examine him: his build, thin but not frail; his clothing, a mix of velvets and tweeds, finished off with a pair of sensible brown brogues; his face, handsome in a cold way, the eyes intelligent and curious, but entirely without warmth. A slim, elegant finger was raised over the page he was contemplating, as though he were silently taking issue with the author’s words.

  Maela tried to recall how she’d ended up in the chair. She remembered being uncomfortable in her own space, and a bad smell, or combination of smells, then nothing. She was compos mentis enough to realize she hadn’t simply fallen or taken a turn, and therefore whoever was responsible for placing her in the armchair had not done so out of any great concern for her well-being.

  She tested her arms and legs. They had not been secured in any way. She could, she supposed, have tried to make a break for freedom, but she didn’t imagine that she’d get very far in her current state, which probably explained the absence of restraints; that, and the fact she was a small woman in her seven
ties with a bum hip and a bad back, which limited her options, even under the best of circumstances.

  Which these, most assuredly, were not.

  The man spoke, still without tearing himself from his book.

  “What are you thinking?” he said.

  Maela tried to speak, but her mouth was too dry. Movement came from behind her, and a woman’s hand extended a glass of water. Maela made an effort to turn her head, but even this slight exertion caused her nausea to increase exponentially, and it was all she could do not to puke on the floor. She grasped the glass with both hands to drink from it. The water was mercifully cold, and had the effect of clearing some of the fog from her mind. Her eyes appraised more closely the face of the man in the chair. She decided she didn’t care for him at all.

  “I was thinking,” she said, once she cleared her throat, “that some of the more educated Nazis probably resembled you. Not the hoodlums like Bormann or Röhm, but those who fancied themselves sophisticates: Heydrich, perhaps, or Eichmann—those who took pride in using the correct silverware.”

  The man smiled. It wasn’t a false smile. He appeared genuinely amused.

  “That’s quite a statement from a woman at the mercy of strangers.”

  Maela finished her water, and set the glass on the small circular table to her right, where she kept the clicker for the TV alongside a bag of sea salt caramels from Len Libby’s.

  “I don’t believe you have any mercy in you at all,” she said.

  “Oh, you’d be surprised.”

  Only now did he give her his full attention, and Maela experienced a sensation similar to the one she sometimes felt in great art galleries, when she stared at a face in a painting by an Old Master and discerned the amplitude of centuries.

  “Are you Jewish?” he asked. “I’m wondering about your earlier analogy.”