Выбрать главу

"Don't worry," I said, lying a little. "I'm here for professional reasons, not personal ones."

"Then I certainly don't want to hear about it." She turned, her case beneath her arm. "Excuse me, I have work to do."

I put out a hand to touch her arm, and she glared at me. I withdrew it. "Rachel, please. I need your help."

"Please, let me leave. You're blocking my way."

I moved back and she shuffled past me, her head down. She had the door open when I spoke again. "Rachel, listen to me, just for a moment. If not for me, then for Walter Cole."

She stopped at the door, but didn't turn around. "What about Walter?"

"His daughter Ellen is missing. I'm not sure, but it may have something to do with a case I'm working on. It may also be connected somehow to Thani Pho, the student who was killed last week."

Rachel paused, then took a deep breath, closed the door and sat down in the seat I had previously occupied. Just to keep things equal, I sat down in her seat.

"You have two minutes," she said.

"I need you to read a file, and give me an opinion on it."

"I don't do that anymore."

"I hear you're working on a study about the connection between violent crime and brain disorders, something involving brain scans."

I knew a little more than that. Rachel was involved in research into dysfunctions in two areas of the brain, the amygdala and the frontal lobe. As I understood it from reading a copy of an article she had contributed to a psychology journal, the amygdala, a tiny area of tissue in the unconscious brain, generates feelings of alarm and emotion, allowing us to respond to the distress of others. The frontal lobe is where emotions are registered, where self-consciousness emerges and plans are constructed. It is also the part of the brain that controls our impulses.

In psychopaths, it was now believed, the frontal lobe failed to respond when confronted with an emotional situation, possibly due to a failure in the amygdala itself or in the processes used to send its signals to the cortex. Rachel, and others like her, were pressing for a huge brain-scan survey on convicted criminals, arguing that they could reveal a connection between brain damage and psychopathic criminal behavior.

She frowned. "You seem to know a lot. I'm not sure that I like the idea of you keeping tabs on me."

I felt that twinge of resentment again. I felt it so strongly that my mouth twitched involuntarily. "It's not like that, but I see your ego is still strong and healthy."

Rachel smiled slightly, a tiny, fleeting thing. "The rest of me isn't quite so robust. I'm going to be scarred for life. I'm in therapy twice weekly and I've had to give up my own practice. I still think of you, and you still frighten me. Sometimes."

"I'm sorry." Maybe it was my imagination, but there was something in that pause, in that sometimes, that implied she thought of me in other ways too.

"I know. Tell me about this file."

And I did, giving her a brief run through the history of the killings, adding some of what Mrs. Schneider had told me and some of what I suspected, or had guessed, myself. "Most of it is in here." I raised the battered manila folder. "I'd like you to take a look, see what you can come up with."

She reached out and I slid the file to her across the long table. She flicked quickly through the handwritten notes, the carbon copies, the photographs. One of them was a crime scene photo taken by the banks of the Little Wilson. "Oh my God," she whispered, and closed her eyes. When she opened them again, there was a new light in them, the spark of professional curiosity but also something else, something that had attracted me to her in the first place.

It was empathy.

"It could take a couple of days," she said.

"I don't have a couple of days. I need it tonight."

"Not possible. I'm sorry, but I couldn't even begin to do it in that time."

"Rachel, no one believes me. No one will accept that this man could ever have existed or, worse, could still be alive now. But he's out there. I can feel him, Rachel. I need to understand him, in however small a way. I need something, anything, to make him real, to bring him out of that file and to form a recognizable picture of him. Please. I've got this jumble of details in my head, and I need someone to help me make sense of it. There's no one else I can turn to and, anyway, you're the best criminal psychologist I know."

"I'm the only criminal psychologist you know," she said, and that smile came again.

"There's that as well."

She stood. "There's no way I'll have anything for you tonight, but meet me tomorrow at the Coop bookstore, at, say, eleven o'clock. I'll give you what I have then."

"Thank you," I said.

"You're welcome." And with that she was gone.

I stayed where I always stayed when I was in Boston, in the Nolan House over on G Street in south Boston. It was a quiet bed-and-breakfast, with antique furniture and a couple of okay restaurants close by. I checked in with Angel and Louis, but there was no movement in Dark Hollow.

"You see Rachel?" asked Angel.

"Yes, I saw her."

"She okay?"

"She didn't seem too pleased to see me."

"You bring back bad memories."

"Story of my life. Maybe someday, someone will see me and think happy thoughts."

"Never happen," he said. "Hang loose, and tell her we were asking after her."

"I will. Any move out at the Payne house?"

"The younger guy went into town to buy milk and groceries, that's about all. No sign of Billy Purdue, or Tony Celli, or Stritch, but Louis is still acting funny. Stritch is around here somewhere, that much we can be sure of. Sooner you're back here, the better."

I showered, put on a clean T-shirt and jeans, and found a copy of the Gousha deluxe road atlas from 1995 among the guidebooks and magazines in the hallway of the Nolan House. The Gousha listed eight Medinas-Texas, Tennessee, Washington, Wisconsin, New York, North Dakota, Michigan and Ohio-and one Medinah, in Illinois. I ruled out all of the northern towns in the hope that my grandfather was right about Caleb's southern roots, which left Tennessee and Texas. I tried Tennessee first. No one in the Gibson County sheriff's office recalled a Caleb Kyle who might or might not have killed his mother on a farm sometime in the 1940s but, as a deputy told me helpfully, that didn't mean it didn't happen, it just meant that nobody around could recall it happening. I made a call to the state police, just on the off chance, but got the same reply: no Caleb Kyle.

It was approaching eight-thirty when I started calling Texas. Medina, it emerged, was in Bandera County, not Medina County, so my first call to the Medina County Sheriff didn't get me very far. But I hit lucky on the second call, real lucky, and I couldn't help wondering how my grandfather would have felt had he got this far and learned the truth about Caleb Kyle.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

The sheriff's name was Dan Tannen, a deputy told me. I waited to be transferred to the sheriff's own office. After a couple of clicks on the line, a female voice said: "Hello?" "Sheriff Tannen?" I asked. It was a good guess.

"That's me," she said. "You don't sound surprised."

"Should I be?"

"I've been mistaken for the secretary a couple of times. Pisses me to hell, I tell you. The Dan is short for Danielle, for what it's worth. I hear you're asking about Caleb Kyle?"

"That's right," I said. "I'm a private investigator, working out of Portland, Maine. I'm-"

She interrupted me to ask: "Where did you hear that name?"