John Connolly - The Unquiet

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.

“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.

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.