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“He’s been there for years. He’s some kind of invalid. Can’t walk. They’ve been keeping him in a locked room.”

“Where are you getting this shit?”

“You think I just make this stuff up, Augie? If I had time to explain all this now, I would.”

“Where are you?”

“About an hour from Griffon. I found Claire Sanders. Her boyfriend, Dennis Mullavey, cut the lawn for Pearce. There was smoke coming from the house one day. He broke in, put it out, found Harry Pearce locked up downstairs.”

“Jesus. You got Mullavey with you, too?”

“No,” I said. “He’s dead. Haines killed him.”

“What?”

“Hanna Rodomski, too, by the look of it.”

“What?” Augie asked. “You know we’ve got the Skilling kid for that. They found—”

“I know what they found. I think Haines planted it. He could have done it anytime during the night.”

Another long pause from Augie. I filled it. “Soon as I drop Claire off, I’m going to that house. I’m getting Harry Pearce out of there.”

“Not without me,” my brother-in-law said quietly.

“Fine,” I said. “I’ll meet you down the corner from the Pearce house. I’m still the better part of an hour away.”

“I’ll be there,” Augie said, and hung up.

Claire looked over at me as I put the phone away. Her hand was full of damp tissues. “You really trust him?”

“Not entirely,” I said. “But I have to right now.”

I reached back into my jacket and handed her my phone. “Call your dad.”

She entered the number, put the phone to her ear. “No, Daddy, it’s me,” she said. Bert Sanders must have seen the caller ID and been expecting to hear my voice.

“I’m okay, I’m okay,” she said. “But Dennis, oh Daddy, Dennis is dead.” And she began to weep again.

I reached back into my jacket for the black notebook. With one hand on the wheel, I opened the book on my lap, got my thumb jammed in the middle to prop it open, then raised it to dashboard height so I could glance back and forth between the pages and the road.

I read a few parts at random.

“What the hell?” I said.

A different date was written at the top of every page in a small, precise handwriting. Then, Breakfast: Rice Krispies with milk, orange juice, banana, coffee with cream. Lunch: Peanut butter sandwich on white bread, two chocolate chip cookies, milk, apple. Dinner: Lasagna, Caesar salad, chocolate cake, tea.

I flipped to another day. Breakfast: Oatmeal with raisins and brown sugar, orange juice, coffee with cream. Lunch: Big Mac, french fries, Coke, apple pie. Dinner: Shake and bake chicken, rice with butter, peas, glass of water, no dessert.

Every page was the same.

Harry kept a record of every single thing he ate.

Claire had been talking to her father for about five minutes, filling him in on what she’d done, where she’d been, when she handed the phone to me. “He wants to talk to you.”

“Hey,” I said.

“Mr. Weaver, I can’t thank you enough. You saved her life.”

I wasn’t so sure it would have needed saving if I hadn’t led Haines to the cottage. “We’ll be back soon.”

“I’ll meet you on the way in,” he said. “I want to see her as soon as possible.”

“Okay,” I said. “The police are going to want to talk to her. First thing I think you should do is take her to a doctor. She may be suffering mild shock. She’s been through a hell of a lot.”

“Of course,” Sanders said. “I can’t tell you how grateful I am.”

It occurred to me I’d be passing the hospital just south of Griffon on the way. I told Sanders to meet me at the emergency room entrance. I was guessing no more than forty minutes.

“I’ll be there,” he said.

When I was done with the call I said to Claire, “Almost home.”

She nodded tiredly.

I handed her the book. “Have you looked at this?”

“Yeah. Dennis and I looked all through it. It’s kind of nuts.”

“Did you read through the whole thing?”

“Yup.”

“Is there anything else in it? Did he write about what was being done to him, about being kept locked up?”

“Nope. It’s just all about food. What he ate every day. Why would someone do that?”

“It might be a kind of obsessive-compulsive disorder,” I ventured.

“Dennis and I couldn’t figure out why he’d have wanted Dennis to have it.”

I thought about that. “It’s dated. And someone might recognize the writing. And Harry Pearce’s obsession with his diet probably predates his so-called death. It’s proof that he’s alive, that he has been for the last seven years.”

I wanted to take the conversation in another direction. “You said something, a while ago, that you haven’t explained. About Officer Haines. You said — your words — about him feeling you up. What was that about?”

“Oh yeah,” she said. “That’s actually a story about Scott.”

“Scott? What do you mean?”

“Okay, so, I told you the other night I didn’t really know Scott all that well.”

I glanced over. “Uh-huh.”

“And I didn’t, but sometimes he’d hang out with me and Hanna and Sean. Like, not a lot, but sometimes.” She paused. “He was okay. Kind of different, and a bit weird, but okay.”

“Thanks.”

“The thing is, he really stood up for me once. And it had to do with Ricky Haines.”

“What do you mean, he stood up for you?”

“Like, sort of protected me, that kind of thing.”

I gave her a look that said I wanted to know more. “When was this?”

“I don’t know. Not long before he, you know, before he died.”

“What happened?”

“A bunch of us were at Patchett’s, and okay, we’re all underage, I get that, but everyone does it. But we were coming out one night, and Scott happened to be there, kind of hanging around, and I was going down the side of the building, to the parking lot, you know?”

“Yeah, I know.”

“And Haines, he stops me and says, ‘We have to check you for drugs.’”

“Did you have any on you?”

“Jeez, no,” she said.

“So Haines, he says he has to search me, and I tell him he’s got no right to do that, but you know our cops, like they’ve ever worried about that kind of shit.”

“Go on.”

“So he puts me up against the wall, with my arms spread and everything, and he starts patting me down. And he starts coming up my body, and when he gets here” — and she pointed to her breasts — “he starts really checking them out.” She made her hands into cups. “Like that.”

I felt my cheeks flush with anger.

“So anyway, Scott, he’s been watching the whole thing, and when he sees the cop, you know, getting his rocks off, Scott kind of goes nuts.”

“What... did he do?” I asked. I remembered Scott telling us this story.

“He starts yelling, ‘Hey, pervert, why don’t you grab onto yourself!’ and other stuff, like ‘Rapist!’ and just general stuff like leave me alone,” she said.

I felt a small lump in my throat.

“What happened then?” I asked.

“The cop looked at him and told him to get lost or, you know, worse, and then Scott says something like ‘I’m gonna tell my uncle’ and ‘I’ll remember you.’ That kind of thing.”

“Scott threatened him?”

Claire nodded. “Yeah, kinda. Later, Scott says I should charge the guy with sexual assault, but I just didn’t want to get into it. I mean, it was all so complicated, with my dad having this political kind of fight with the chief, and I thought, right, if I say some cop assaulted me, the chief’ll just say my dad put me up to it to make the cops look bad. It’d be, like, this huge can of worms, you know? So I never even told my dad about it, because I knew he’d just go insane. But Scott, man, he was something, telling that cop he’d get him fired. He wasn’t even high when he said it.”