Walsh then called me an asshole one last time, just in case I hadn’t been listening closely, and warned me that I still wasn’t to leave Pastor’s Bay until he’d had an opportunity to call me an asshole some more in person, and maybe see about having my license permanently rescinded this time.
‘Asshole,’ he said, in conclusion, before hanging up. Even after the substance of the preceding conversation, he managed to make it sound fresh.
There was a basket outside my bedroom door. My clothes, now cleaned and folded, were inside, along with two fresh scones wrapped in a napkin. I showered again, and ate one of the scones while I dressed. I turned on my laptop, but the Internet service for the B and B was password-protected. There was nobody around when I went downstairs, so I left a note to say that I wasn’t checking out yet, and used the second key on my door fob to lock the front door behind me.
The news trucks were back with a vengeance on Main Street, and not just the locals either, while the parking lot of the municipal building was jammed with official vehicles. Danny was still behind the counter at Hallowed Grounds. He was playing the last Roxy Music CD, so he should have been wearing a tuxedo with his bow tie undone instead of a T-shirt featuring the original cover of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.
‘You don’t look so good,’ he said.
‘In this case, appearances don’t deceive,’ I replied. ‘Mind if I check my e-mail?’
‘Go ahead,’ he said. ‘I’m about to close up, but you take your time. I’ve got a lot of stuff to do first, so I’ll be here for a while.’
I took a seat at a corner table. Without asking, Danny brought me coffee.
‘On the house,’ he said. ‘Hear you were involved in what went down last night.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Still no sign of Anna Kore?’
‘Not that I know of.’
‘They’re saying Chief Allan might have taken her.’
‘That on the news?’
‘I don’t watch the news, but if people are talking about it then it soon will be.’
He locked the front door, turned the sign to CLOSED, and started cleaning up behind the counter. I checked the local news sites and found Allan’s photo on all of them. He was now officially a suspect in Anna Kore’s disappearance, but speculation abounded that he might have committed suicide, or made it appear that he had done so.
I logged in to my e-mail account. There was a Yahoo message with Angel’s distinctive ‘777’ tag on the temporary address. It contained a new cell phone number, along with the words ‘necessary evil.’ I called it from my own cell. I wasn’t worried about the number being traced back to Angel and Louis. That cell phone would be in pieces by the end of the day.
‘You get the tag from the truck?’ he asked.
‘Have you seen the news?’
‘That’s what concerns us. Pity. It was a nice piece of equipment. We’ll erase everything, clear the tracks.’
‘Send the record of Allan’s journeys to me first,’ I said.
The GPS program automatically recorded the route taken by the trace vehicle. It also allowed for timings to be retained, so that it was possible to figure out how long the subject had spent in any given location.
‘If your laptop is subpoenaed, it’ll be an admission of guilt. Without it, you have deniability.’
‘Send it anyway,’ I said. ‘I lost deniability a long time ago.’
After about fifteen minutes, the record from the tag came through as a series of maps. Angel had separated each journey Allan had taken into a series of files, with the dates and timings recorded beneath. The trips themselves appeared as red lines on the maps.
If nothing else, the trip record confirmed that Allan had killed Lonny Midas and the unknown gunman. It showed him leaving the Pastor’s Bay Police Department at 9:08 p.m. and traveling to the spot at which the bodies had later been found before heading back to the outskirts of town, where he waited for the alarm to be raised.
Allan’s final trip, taken shortly before eleven a.m. that day, followed a route from the municipal building in Pastor’s Bay and west out of town, but Allan’s home lay south, across the causeway. According to the timings, his truck had remained at a point on Red Leaf Road for two hours before continuing southwest to its final resting place at Freyer’s Point.
I opened the white pages and did a reverse address search for Red Leaf Road. It came up with three names. Two of them I didn’t recognize; one of them I did. I clicked on the name, noted the number of the house, and did a Google map search for the address. When I had it, I compared its location on Google to the point on the map where Allan’s truck had stopped for an hour.
They were the same.
Allan’s last trip had included a stop at the home of Ruth and Patrick Shaye.
39
The Shaye house was set back from Red Leaf Road behind a line of maturing silver birches, now denuded by the fall winds. It was a large, three-story dwelling, and had been freshly painted with off-white paint, probably during the summer. There were planter boxes on the sills of the upper and lower windows filled with hardy green shrubs, and the garden had been planted with winter flowers and perennials: cardinal flowers and larkspur, comfrey and obedient plants. The lawn grass bore signs of patching, although the old and new growths would soon be indistinguishable, and the boundaries of the beds were marked with house bricks painted white. Fresh gravel had been laid on the drive. It was all very neat and clean, the kind of house that forces its neighbors to step up to the plate and not allow their own properties to fall into neglect.
Before leaving Pastor’s Bay, I had checked to see if Mrs. Shaye and her son were still at the municipal building. They were: Patrick I could see in the parking lot, and Mrs. Shaye was working behind the main desk. I called Walsh along the way, but his phone rang a couple of times and then went to voice mail. I figured he’d rejected the call when he saw the number. I left a message telling him what I knew – that Allan had stopped off at the Shaye house before vanishing – then turned my phone to silent. It didn’t necessarily mean much when I heard myself speak aloud what I knew for Walsh’s benefit. There were lots of reasons that Allan might have visited the Shaye house. After all that had taken place the night before, there had probably been a certain amount for everyone to discuss.
But two hours was a long time, especially when there were so many bodies on their way to the M.E.’s office in Augusta.
I parked my car on the road beneath the trees instead of driving directly onto the property. There was no response from the house when I entered the empty front yard, the gravel crunching loudly under my feet. I didn’t ring the doorbell but took a narrow path to the left that cut between a high green hedge and the side of the house. There were two windows in that wall, one at the living room and the other at the kitchen, but I could see nobody inside, and a red door blocked access from the path to the rear of the property. It was closed but not locked. I turned the handle and it opened easily.
The back yard bore no resemblance to the front. Here there was no grass; the area around the kitchen door was roughly paved with heavy concrete slabs upon which sat two iron lawn chairs and an iron table, the dark gray of the metal showing through the yellowing paint work. Beyond was an area of pitted dirt in which pools of dirty rainwater glistened, the oil on their surface like a series of polluted rainbows. Two cars and a truck stood in varying stages of cannibalization beneath the bowed roof of a long single-story garage. The contagion of filth and neglect had even infected the back of the house itself, which had not been painted when the front and sides were tackled, and from which white flakes peeled like bad skin. The windows were all masked with drapes, except at the kitchen, where the sink was stacked high with dirty crockery. A network of washing lines ran across the yard, and from them hung drying sheets, carefully positioned so that there was no danger of the sheets dragging along the filthy ground beneath. They swayed gently in the breeze. I tried the kitchen door, but it did not open. All seemed quiet within, yet I found myself reluctant to make any unnecessary sound, as though, like a character in some old fairy tale, I might wake a slumbering presence by my incaution.