“And Clay?”
“He literally vanished. His daughter called us, said she was worried about him, that he hadn’t been home in two days. They found his car outside Jackman, up by the Canadian border. We thought he might have fled the jurisdiction, but there was no reason for him to do that, apart from shame, maybe. He’s never been seen again.”
I leaned back in my chair. I wasn’t much wiser than before I’d sat down. O’Rourke recognized my dissatisfaction.
“Sorry,” he said. “Bet you were hoping for a revelation.”
“Yeah, a blinding flash of light.”
“So how did this come up?”
“Clay’s daughter hired me. Someone has been asking questions about her father. It has her rattled. You ever hear of a man named Frank Merrick?”
Bingo. O’Rourke’s face lit up like the Fourth of July.
“Frank Merrick,” he said. “Oh yeah. I know all about Frank. Fatal Frank, they used to call him. He’s the guy, the one who’s shaking up Clay’s daughter?”
I nodded.
“Makes sense, in a way,” said O’Rourke.
I asked him why.
“Because Merrick ’s daughter was also a patient of Daniel Clay’s, except she went the same way he did. Lucy Merrick, that was her name.”
“She disappeared?”
“Reported missing two days after Clay, but it looks like she was gone for longer than that. Her foster parents were animals. Told the social workers she was always running away, and they’d just gotten tired of chasing her ass down. From what they could recall, they’d last seen her four or five days earlier. She was fourteen. I don’t doubt she was a handful but, you know, she was still a kid. There was talk of pressing charges against the foster parents, but nothing ever happened.”
“And where was Merrick when all this was going on?”
“In jail. Let me tell you: Frank Merrick is an interesting guy.” He loosened his tie. “Order me another beer,” he said. “Better get something for yourself too. It’s that kind of story.”
Frank Merrick was a killer.
That word had become so devalued through overuse that every mean little kid with a knife who overstepped the line and gutted a drinking buddy in a bar fight over some girl in a too-tight dress, every jobless no-hoper who ever held up a liquor store, then shot the guy earning seven bucks an hour behind the counter, whether through panic or boredom or just because he had a gun in his hand and it seemed a shame not to see what it could do, every one of them received the title of “killer.” It was used in the newspapers to drive up sales, in the courtrooms to drive up sentences, on cell blocks to make reputations and buy some breathing space from assaults and challenges. But it didn’t mean anything, not really. Killing someone didn’t make you a killer, not in the world through which Frank Merrick walked. It wasn’t something you did once, either by accident or design. It wasn’t even a lifestyle choice, like vegetarianism or nihilism. It was something that lay in your cells, waiting for a moment of awakening, of revelation. In that way, it was possible to be a killer even before you took your first life. It was part of your nature, and it would show itself in time. All that it took was a catalyst.
Frank Merrick had lived what seemed to be a regular guy’s life for the first twenty-five years or so. He’d grown up in a rough part of Charlotte, North Carolina, and he’d run with a tough crowd, but he straightened himself out. He trained as a mechanic, and no clouds followed him through life, and no shadows trailed in his wake, although it was said that he stayed in touch with elements from his past and that he was a man who could be relied upon to supply or dispose of a car at short notice. It was only later, when his true self, his secret self, began to emerge, that people remembered men who had crossed Frank Merrick and fallen between the cracks in the sidewalk, never to be seen or heard from again. There were stories of calls made, of trips to Florida and the Carolinas, of guns used once, then disassembled and thrown into canals and levees.
But they were just stories, and people will talk…
He married an ordinary girl, and he might have stayed married to her had it not been for the accident that changed Frank Merrick beyond all recognition, or perhaps it merely allowed him to shed the veneer of a quiet, introverted man who was good with his hands and knew his way around a car and to become something altogether odder and more frightening.
Frank Merrick was struck by a motorcycle one night as he crossed a street in the suburb of Charlotte where he lived. He was carrying a carton of ice cream that he had bought for his wife. He should have waited for the signal, but he was worried that the ice cream would melt before he could get it home. The motorcyclist, who was not wearing a helmet, had been drinking, but he was not drunk. He had also been smoking a little dope, but he was not high. Peter Cash had told himself both of those things before he climbed on his bike after leaving his buddies watching porn on the Betamax.
To Cash, it seemed as if Frank Merrick had materialized out of thin air, suddenly assuming form on the empty street, assembling himself out of atoms of night. The bike hit Merrick full on, breaking bones and rending flesh, the impact catapulting the motorcyclist onto the hood of a parked car. Cash was lucky to escape with a busted pelvis, and had he hit the windshield of the car with his unprotected head instead of his ass, he would, most assuredly, have died there and then. Instead, he remained conscious for long enough to see Merrick ’s mangled body jerking like a stranded fish on the road.
Merrick was released from hospital after two months, when his broken bones had healed sufficiently and his internal organs were no longer deemed to be in imminent danger of failure or collapse. He scarcely spoke to his wife and spoke even less to his friends until those friends finally ceased to trouble him with their presence. He slept little, and rarely ventured into the marital bed, but when he did he fell upon his wife with such ferocity that she grew to fear his advances and the pain that came with them. Eventually, she fled the house and, after a year or two, filed for divorce. Merrick signed everything without comment or complaint, seemingly content to shed every aspect of his old life, something within him cocooning itself while it transformed. His wife later changed her name and remarried in California, and never told her new husband the truth about the man who had once shared her life.
And Merrick? Well, it was believed that Cash was the first victim of the transformed man, although no evidence was ever produced linking him to the crime. The motorcyclist was stabbed to death in his bed, but Merrick had an alibi, supplied by some men out of Philly who, it was said, obtained services from Merrick in return. In the years that followed he picked up a little work with various crews, mainly on the East Coast, and gradually became the go-to guy when someone needed to be taught a last, fateful lesson, and when the necessity of deniability meant that the job had to be farmed out. The tally of bodies that had fallen at his hands began to mount. He had embraced at last his natural aptitude for killing, and it served him well.
In the meantime, he had other appetites. He liked women, and one of them, a waitress in Pittsfield, Maine, found herself pregnant after a night in his company. She was in her late thirties, and had despaired of ever finding a man, or of having a child of her own. She never even considered an abortion, but had no way of contacting the man who had impregnated her, and eventually she gave birth to a seemingly ordinary child. When Frank Merrick returned to Maine and looked the waitress up, she feared how he might respond to the news that he was a father, but he had held the child in his arms and asked her name (“Lucy, after my mom,” he was told, and he had smiled and told her that Lucy was a fine name.), and he had left money in the child’s cradle. Thereafter, on a regular basis, cash would arrive, sometimes delivered in person by Merrick, at other times arriving in the form of a money order. The child’s mother recognized that there was something dangerous about this man, something that should remain unexplored, and it always surprised her to see the devotion he showed toward the little girl, although he never stayed long with her. His daughter grew into child who sometimes had bad dreams, and nothing worse than that. But the little girl’s dreams began to filter into her waking life. She became difficult, even disturbed. She hurt herself, and she tried to hurt others. When her mother died-a massive pulmonary embolism took her as she swam in the sea so that her body was taken out by the tide and found days later, bloated and half-eaten by scavengers, by a pair of fishermen-Lucy Merrick was put into care. In time, the child was sent to Daniel Clay in an effort to curb her aggression and tendency toward self-harm, and he seemed to be making some progress with her until both he, and the girl, disappeared.