I filled a mug with the last of the coffee from the pot and wandered out to the back office. There I turned on the computer and found out all that I could about Michael Wallace. I visited his website, then read some of his newspaper stories, which came to an end after 2005, and reviews of his first two books. After an hour, I had hi B hiI cs home address, his employment history, details of his divorce in 2002, and a DUI that he’d incurred in 2006. I’d have to talk to Aimee Price in the morning. I wasn’t sure what action, if any, I could legally take to prevent Wallace from writing about me, but I just knew that I didn’t want my name on the cover of a book. If Aimee couldn’t help, I’d be forced to lean on Wallace, and something told me that he wouldn’t respond well to that kind of pressure. Reporters rarely did.
Gary entered as I was finishing up.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Yeah, I’m fine.”
“Well, we’re all done out here.”
“Thanks. Go home, get some sleep. I’ll lock up.”
“Good night, then.” He lingered at the door.
“What is it?”
“If that guy comes back, the writer, what should I do?”
“Poison his drink. Be careful where you dump the body, though.”
Gary looked confused, as if uncertain whether or not I was being serious. I recognized the look. Most of the people who worked at the Bear knew something about my past, especially the locals who’d been there for a few years. Who could guess what kind of stories they’d been telling Gary when I wasn’t around?
“Just let me know if you see him,” I said. “Maybe you could spread the word that I’d appreciate it if nobody spoke to him about me.”
“Sure thing,” said Gary, brightening noticeably, then left. I heard him talking to Sergei, one of the line chefs, and then a door closed behind them and all was quiet.
The coffee had gone cold. I poured it down a sink, printed out all that I had learned about Wallace, and went home.
Mickey Wallace sat in his motel room out by the Maine Mall and wrote up the notes on his encounter with Parker. It was a trick he’d learned as a reporter: write everything down while it was still fresh, because even after a couple of hours the memory began to play tricks. You could fool yourself into thinking that you were remembering only the important stuff, but that wasn’t the case. You were just remembering what you hadn’t forgotten, important or not. Mickey was in the habit of recording his material in longhand in a series of notebooks, and then transferring it to his computer, but the notebooks remained the primary record, and it was to them that he always returned during the process of writing a book.
He hadn’t been disappointed or surprised by Parker’s response to his initial overture. In fact, he regarded the man’s possible participation in the venture as something of a long shot to begin with, but it never hurt to ask. What was surprising to him was that someone hadn’t written a book about Parker already, given all that he’d done, and the cases with which he’d been involved, but that was just one of the many strange things about Charlie Parker. Somehow, despite his history and his actions, he had managed to remain just slightly off the radar. Even in the coverage of the most high-profile cases, his name usually appeared buried in the fine print somewhere. It was almost as if ther Be a mae was an element of collusion when it came to him, an unspoken understanding that his part in what had occurred should be played down.
And those were just the ones that had made it into the public arena. Wallace had already done more than a little snooping, and Parker’s name had been mentioned in connection with some business in upstate New York involving Russian mobsters, or so the story went. Mickey had managed to get a local cop in Massena to talk to him over some beers and quickly came to realize that something was being covered up in a big way, but when he tried to talk to the cop again the next day, Mickey was run out of town and warned, in no uncertain terms, never to come back. The trail had died after that, but Mickey’s curiosity had been piqued.
He could smell blood, and blood sold books.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
EMILY KINDLER LEFT THE little town in which she had been living for the past year shortly after the funeral for her deceased boyfriend’s parents. An open verdict was delivered as to the cause of their deaths, but it was understood in the town that they had taken their own lives, although Chief Dashut increasingly wondered why they had done so before they’d had a chance to bury their son properly. He couldn’t think of any parents who would not want to do right by their deceased child, no matter how traumatized they were by what had occurred. He questioned the verdict, both publicly and privately, and yoked the deaths of the parents to the murder of their son in both his mind and his own investigation.
There had been no denying that Emily Kindler’s shock at their deaths was genuine. One of the local doctors had been forced to give her a sedative to calm her down, and there were concerns for a time that she might have to be admitted to a psychiatric facility. She told the chief that she had visited the Faradays on the evening before they died, and Daniel Faraday in particular had appeared distressed, but there had been no indication that one or both of the Faradays might have been planning suicide.
The only lead so far in the killing of Bobby Faraday had come from the state police, who had discovered that Bobby had been involved in an altercation in a bar some eight miles from the town line, two weeks before his death. The bar in question was a roadside gin mill popular with bikers, and it seemed that Bobby, while intoxicated, had put the moves on a girl who was peripherally involved with the Crusaders biker gang. The Crusaders’ base was in Southern California, but their reach extended as far as Oklahoma and Georgia. Words had been exchanged, and a couple of punches thrown, before Bobby was dumped in the parking lot and given a kick in the ass to send him home. He was lucky not to have been stomped, but someone at the bar who knew Bobby had intervened on his behalf, arguing that he was just a kid who didn’t know any better, a kid, what’s more, who was hurting over the end of a relationship. Common sense had prevailed; well, common sense and the fortuitous arrival of a state police cruiser just as the Crusaders were debating the wisdom of giving Bobby some serious physical pain to distract him from his emotional distress. The Crusaders were bad, but the chief didn’t see them strangling a boy just because he’d crossed them. Still, the state police detectives seemed to feel that it was worth pursuing, and were now engaged in a game of catch-up with the Crusade Cth ”[1]ef rs, assisted by the FBI. In the meantime, Dashut had pointed out to the state police the symbol carved into the beech tree, and additional photographs had been taken, but he had heard nothing more about it.
Emily Kindler had been home alone at the time her boyfriend was believed to have been killed, which meant that she didn’t have an alibi, but that counted for half of the town too. The gas in the Faraday house had been turned on sometime after midnight and before 2 A.M., at best reckoning. Again, most of the people in town were home in bed at that time.
But the chief didn’t really suspect the Kindler girl of any involvement in Bobby Faraday’s death and, by extension, any suspicions that he had about how Bobby’s parents had met their end did not center on her, even though he considered the possibility of her involvement out of due diligence. When the chief had quietly mentioned Emily as a suspect to Homer Lockwood, the assistant ME, who was a resident in the town and knew both Emily and the Faradays by sight, the old man had just laughed.