The Charlie Parker Collection 2

by John Connolly

  Her face changed, the tone of her voice transforming with it, and her cheeks flushed red with anger.

  “Well, be sure that you look closely at him, because that’s what you’ll become if all of this doesn’t stop: an empty vessel motivated by hatred and revenge and frustrated love. In the end, we’re not apart just because I’m afraid for Sam and myself, or scared for you and for what might happen to all of us as a consequence of your work. I’m frightened of you, of the fact that part of you is drawn to evil and pain and wretchedness, that the anger and hurt that you feel will always need to be fed. It will never end. You talk of Merrick as a man unable to forgive. Well, you can’t forgive either. You can’t forgive yourself for not being there to protect your wife and child, and you can’t forgive them for dying on you. And maybe I thought that that might change, that having us in your life would enable you to heal a little, to find some peace with us, but there will be no peace. You want it, but you can’t bring yourself to embrace it. You just—”

  She was starting to cry now. I moved to her but she stepped away.

  “No,” she said softly. “Please don’t.”

  She walked away, and I let her go.

  17

  Eldritch arrived in Maine early on Monday morning, accompanied by a younger man who had the distracted yet slightly desperate air of an alcoholic who has forgotten where the bottle is hidden. Eldritch allowed his colleague to make all of the running in petitioning the judge, only contributing a few words on behalf of his client at the end of the submission, his soft, reasonable tones conveying the impression that Merrick was a peace-loving man whose actions, born out of a concern for the well-being of his lost child, had been cruelly misinterpreted by an uncaring world. Nevertheless, he gave a promise, on Merrick’s behalf, for Merrick did not speak during the hearing, to adhere to any and all conditions of the court order about to be served, and requested, with all due deference, that his client be released forthwith.

  The judge, whose name was Nola Hight, was no fool. In her fifteen years at the bench she had heard just about every excuse known to man, and she wasn’t about to take Eldritch or Merrick at face value.

  “Your client spent ten years in jail for attempted murder, Mr. Eldritch,” she said.

  “Aggravated assault, Your Honor,” Eldritch’s young assistant corrected. Judge Hight glared at him so hard his hair started to singe.

  “With respect, Your Honor, I’m not sure that is relevant to the matter before the court,” said Eldritch, attempting to smooth the judge’s ruffled feathers through tone alone. “My client served his time for that offense. He is a changed man, chastened by his experiences.”

  Judge Hight gave Eldritch a look that would have reduced a lesser man to charred flesh. Eldritch merely wavered where he stood, as though his brittle form had been briefly buffeted by a gentle breeze.

  “He will be chastened for the maximum term allowable under law if he comes before this court again in connection with the matter in hand,” she said. “Am I making myself clear, counsel?”

  “Indisputably,” said Eldritch. “Your Honor is as reasonable as she is wise.”

  Judge Hight debated finding him in contempt of court for sarcasm, then gave up.

  “Get the hell out of my courtroom,” she said.

  It was still early, barely after ten. Merrick was due for release at eleven once his paperwork had been processed. When they let him out of the Cumberland County lockup, I was waiting, and I served him with the court order forbidding further contact with Rebecca Clay on pain of imprisonment and/or a fine. He took it, read it carefully, then slipped it into the pocket of his jacket. He looked crumpled and tired, the way most people did after a couple of nights in a cell.

  “That was low, what you did,” he said.

  “You mean setting the cops on you? You were terrorizing a young woman. That also seems kind of low. You need to reconsider your standards. They’re all screwed up.”

  He might have heard me, but he wasn’t really listening. He wasn’t even looking at me. He was staring at a spot somewhere over my right shoulder, letting me know that I wasn’t even worthy of eye contact.

  “Men ought to deal with each other like men,” he continued, red rising into his face as though he were being boiled from below. “You set the hounds on me when all I wanted to do was talk. You and missy both, you got no honor.”

  “Let me buy you breakfast,” I said. “Maybe we can work something out.”

  Merrick waved a hand in dismissal.

  “Keep your breakfast and your talk. The time for talking with you is over.”

  “You may not believe this, but I have some sympathy for you,” I said. “You want to find out what happened to your daughter. I know what that feels like. If I can help you, then I will, but scaring Rebecca Clay isn’t the way to go about it. If you approach her again you’ll be picked up and put back behind bars: the Cumberland County lockup if you’re lucky, but Warren if you’re not. That could be another year out of your life, another year spent not getting any closer to finding out the truth about your daughter’s disappearance.”

  Merrick looked at me for the first time since we’d begun talking.

  “I’m done with the Clay woman,” he said. “But I ain’t done with you. I’ll give you some advice, though, in return for what you just gave me. Stay out of this, and maybe I’ll be merciful the next time our paths cross.”

  With that he pushed past me and began walking toward the bus station. He looked smaller than before, his shoulders slightly hunched, his jeans stained from his time behind bars. Once again, I felt pity for him. Despite all that I knew about him, and all that he was suspected of doing, he was still a father seeking his lost child. Perhaps it was all he had left, but I knew the damage that could be caused by that kind of single-minded intensity. I knew because I had once wrought it myself. Rebecca Clay might be safe from him, at least for the present, but Merrick was not going to stop. He would keep looking until he found out the truth, or until someone forced him to desist. Either way, it could only end with a death.

  I called Rebecca and told her that I didn’t believe Merrick would trouble her for the time being, but there were no guarantees.

  “I understand,” she said. “I don’t want men outside my house any longer, though. I can’t live that way. Will you thank them for me, and bill me?”

  “One last thing, Miss Clay,” I said. “If the choice was given to you, would you want your father found?”

  She thought about the question.

  “Wherever he is, he made the choice that brought him there,” she said softly. “I told you before: I think sometimes about Jim Poole. He went away, and he never came back. I like to pretend that I don’t know if it was because of me, if he vanished because I asked him to look for my father, or if something else happened to him, something equally bad. But when I can’t sleep, when I’m lying alone in my room in the darkness, I know it was my fault. In the daylight, I can convince myself that it wasn’t, but I know the truth. I don’t know you, Mr. Parker. I asked you to help me, and you did, and I’ll pay you for your time and your efforts, but we don’t know each other. If something were to happen to you because you asked questions about my father, then we’d be bound by it, and I don’t want to be bound to you, not like that. Do you understand? I’m trying to let it go. I want you to do the same.”

  She hung up. Maybe she was right. Maybe Daniel Clay should be left wherever he was, either above or below ground. But it wasn’t up to her, or me, not any longer. Merrick was out there, and so was the person who had instructed Eldritch to bankroll him. Rebecca Clay’s part in this might have been over, but mine wasn’t.

  When the Maine State Prison was based in Thomaston it was hard to miss. It stood slap bang on the main road into town, a massive edifice on Route 1 that had survived two fires and, even after being rebuilt, renovated, extended, and occasionally updated, still resembled the early-nineteenth-century penitentiary that it had once been. It felt like the
town itself had developed around the prison, although in truth there had been a trading post at Thomaston since the seventeenth century. Nevertheless, the prison dominated the landscape of the community, both physically and, perhaps, psychologically. If one mentioned Thomaston to anyone in Maine, the first thing that came to mind was the penitentiary. I wondered sometimes what it was like to live in a place whose principal claim to fame was the incarceration of human beings. It might have been that, after a while, you just forgot about it, or failed to notice the effect it had on the people and the town. Perhaps it was only those who visited Thomaston who immediately felt that an oppressive miasma hung over the place, as though the misery of those locked behind the prison’s walls had seeped into the atmosphere, coloring it with gray, weighing it down like particles of lead in the air. Then again, it certainly kept the crime rate low. Thomaston was the kind of place where there was a violent crime once every two or three years, and its crime index was about one-third of the national average. It might have been that the presence of a huge prison on the doorstep made those tempted by a life of crime reconsider their career options.

  Warren was different, though. The town was a little larger than Thomaston, and its identity was not so bound up with the penitentiary. The new state prison had grown gradually, beginning with the opening of the Supermax, then the Mental Health Stabilization Unit, and finally the transfer of the general population from Thomaston to the new facility. Compared to the old prison, it was a little harder to find, squirreled away on Route 97, or at least as squirreled away as a place with a thousand prisoners and four hundred employees can be. I drove along Cushing Road, past the Bolduc Correctional Facility on the left, until I came to the brick and stone sign to the right of the road announcing the Maine State Prison, with the years 1824 and 2001 beneath, the first commemorating the founding of the original prison, and the second the opening of the new facility.

  Warren looked more like a modern industrial plant than a prison, an impression reinforced by the big maintenance area to the right that appeared to house the prison’s power plant. Bird feeders made from buoys hung on the lawn outside the main entrance, and everything looked new and freshly painted. It was the silence that gave away the true nature of the place, though; that, and the name, white on green above the door, and the razor wire on top of the double fencing, and the presence of the blue uniformed guards with their striped trousers, and the beaten-down look of those waiting in the lobby to visit their loved ones. All told, you didn’t have to look too hard to figure out that, whatever cosmetic adjustments had been made to the façade, this was still as much a prison as Thomaston ever was.

  Aimee Price had clearly pulled some strings to get me access to Andy Kellog. Visitor clearances could sometimes take up to six weeks. Then again, Price was entitled to see her client whenever she chose, and I wasn’t exactly unknown to the prison authorities. I had visited the preacher Faulkner when he was incarcerated at Thomaston, an encounter that had been memorable for all the wrong reasons, but this was my first time at the new facility.

  It wasn’t a complete surprise, therefore, to see a familiar figure standing beside Price when I eventually cleared security and entered the body of the prison: Joe Long, the colonel of the guards. He hadn’t changed much since last we’d met. He was still big, still tacitum, and still radiated the kind of authority that kept a thousand criminals on the right side of respectful. His uniform was starched and pressed, and everything that was supposed to gleam did so spectacularly. There was a little more gray in his mustache than before, but I decided not to point that out. Beneath his gruff exterior, I sensed there was a sensitive child just waiting to be hugged. I didn’t want to hurt his feeling, singular.

  “Back again,” he said, in a tone that suggested I was forever bothering him by knocking on the door at all hours of the day and night, demanding that I be let in to play with the other kids.

  “Can’t stay away from men in jails,” I said.

  “Yeah, we get a lot of that here,” he replied.

  That Joe Long. What a kidder. If he was any drier, he’d have been Arizona.

  “I like the new place,” I said. “It’s institutional, but homey. I can see your hand at work in the decor: the institutional grays, the stone, the wire. It all just screams you.”

  He allowed his gaze to linger on me for just a moment or two longer than was strictly necessary, then turned smartly on his heel and told us to follow him. Aimee Price fell into step beside me, and a second guard, named Woodbury, brought up the rear.

  “You just have friends everywhere, don’t you?” she said.

  “If I ever end up in here as a guest, I’m hoping he’ll look out for me.”

  “Yeah, good luck with that. You ever find yourself in that much trouble, make a shank.”

  Our footsteps echoed along the corridor. Now there was noise: unseen men talking and shouting, steel doors opening and closing, the distant sound of radios and TVs. That was the thing about prisons: inside, they were never quiet, not even at night. It was never possible to be anything but acutely aware of the men incarcerated around you. It was worse in the dark, after lights out, when the nature of the sound changed. It was then that the loneliness and desperation of their situation would hit prisoners, and the snores and wheezes would be interspersed with the cries of men enduring nightmares and the weeping of those who had not yet learned to accommodate themselves to the prospect of years in such a place, or who would never reach that accommodation. Tween had once told me that during his longest stretch inside—two years of a three-year B&E sentence—he did not get a single undisturbed night’s sleep. It was that, he said, that wore him down. The irony was that when he was released, he was unable to sleep either, unaccustomed as he was to the comparative silence of the city.

  “They’re transferring Andy from the Supermax to a noncontact room for our meeting,” said Aimee. “It’s not ideal, and you won’t get any sense of the Max for yourself, but it’s the best that I could do. Andy is still considered a risk to himself and others.”

  Price excused herself to use the bathroom before we sat down with Kellog. That left just me and Joe Long. Woodbury kept his distance, content to stare at the floor and the walls.

  “Been a while since we’ve seen you,” said Long. “What is it, three, four years?”

  “You sound almost regretful.”

  “Yeah, almost.” Long straightened his tie, carefully brushing away some flecks of lint that had had the temerity to affix themselves to him. “You ever hear tell what happened to that preacher Faulkner?” he asked. “They say he just plain disappeared.”

  “That’s the rumor.”

  Long, finished with his tie, examined me from behind his glasses, and stroked his mustache thoughtfully.

  “Strange that he never showed up again,” he continued. “Hard for a man like that just to vanish, what with so many people looking for him. Kind of makes you wonder if they’re looking in the wrong direction. Up, so to speak, instead of down. Above ground instead of below.”

  “I guess we’ll never know,” I said.

  “Guess not. Probably for the best. The preacher would be no loss, but the law’s the law. Man could find himself behind bars for something like that, and that wouldn’t be a good place for him to be.”

  If Long was expecting me to break down and confess something, he was disappointed.

  “Yeah, I hear it hasn’t been good for Andy Kellog,” I said. “He seems to be having problems adjusting.”

  “Andy Kellog has a lot of problems. Some of them he makes for himself.”

  “Can’t help Macing him in the middle of the night and tying him naked to a chair. I think someone in this place missed his vocation. There we are, spending taxpayers’ money flying bad guys to Egypt and Saudi Arabia to be softened up, when we could just put them on a Trailways bus and send them here.”

  For the first time, there was a flicker of emotion on Long’s face.

  “It’s used for restrain
t,” he said, “not torture.”

  He said it very softly, almost as if he didn’t believe what he was saying enough to enunciate it loudly.

  “It’s torture if it drives a man crazy,” I replied.

  Long opened his mouth to say something else, but before he could speak Aimee Price reappeared.

  “Okay,” she said. “Let’s see him.”

  The door across from us was opened by Woodbury, and we entered a room divided in two by a thick pane of Plexiglas. A series of booths, each with its own speaker system, allowed a degree of privacy to those visiting, although it wasn’t required that morning. Only one prisoner stood on the opposite side of the glass, two guards hovering stony-faced behind him. He wore an orange jumpsuit and a collar-and-tie arrangement of chains that kept his hands cuffed and his legs manacled. He was shorter than I was, and unlike a lot of men in prison he didn’t seem to have put on any excess weight because of the diet and the lack of exercise. Instead, the jumpsuit seemed too big for him, the sleeves hanging down almost to the second line of knuckles on each hand. He had pale skin and fine black hair, cut unevenly so that the fringe sloped downward from left to right across his forehead. His eyes were set deep in his skull, overshadowed by a narrow but swollen brow. His nose had been broken more than once and had set crookedly. His mouth was small, the lips very thin. His lower jaw trembled constantly, as though he were on the verge of tears. When he saw Aimee he smiled widely. One of his front teeth was missing. The others were gray with plaque.