I touched base with Jackie Garner when I got home. He told me that all was quiet. He sounded vaguely disappointed. Rebecca Clay said the same when I called her. There had been no sign of Merrick. He seemed to be keeping his word, and his distance, the phone call to me apart.
Rebecca was working in her office, so I drove over to speak to her, acknowledging Jackie’s presence outside with a small wave when I arrived. We ordered coffee at the little market beside the Realtor’s, and sat at the single table outside to drink it. Passing motorists looked at us curiously. It was too cold to be dining al fresco, but I wanted to talk to her while my conversation with her ex-husband was still fresh in my mind. It was time to clear the air.
“He said all that?” Rebecca Clay looked genuinely shocked when I told her of what had passed between Jerry and me. “But they’re all lies! I was never unfaithful to him, never. That wasn’t why we broke up.”
“I’m not saying he was telling the truth, but there was real bitterness behind his words.”
“He wanted money. He didn’t get it.”
“Is that why you think he married you? For money?”
“Well, it wasn’t for love.”
“And what about you? What was your reason?”
She shifted in her seat, her discomfort at discussing the subject manifesting itself physically. She looked even more tired and drawn than when I had first met her. I didn’t think she would be able to take the strain of what was happening for much longer without breaking in some way.
“I told you part of it,” she said. “After my father disappeared, I just felt completely alone. I was like a pariah because of the rumors about him. I met Jerry through Raymon, who installed the alarm system in my father’s house. They come back once a year to check that everything is working okay, and Jerry was the one who arrived to do the maintenance a few months after my father went away. I guess I was lonely, and one thing led to another. He was okay, at the start. I mean, he was never exactly a charmer, but he was good with Jenna, and he wasn’t a deadbeat. He was surprising, too, in some ways. He read a lot, and knew about music and movies. He taught me stuff.” She laughed humorlessly. “Looking back, I guess I replaced one father figure with another.”
“And then?”
“We got married kind of fast, and he moved into my father’s house with me. Things were fine for a couple of months. Jerry was hung up on money, though. It was always a big thing with him. He felt that he’d never been given an even break. He had all kinds of big plans, and no way to make them happen until he met me. He smelled cash, but there was none, or none that he could get his hands on. He started to harp on it a lot, and that caused arguments.
“Then I came home one night and he was bathing Jenna. She was six or seven at the time. He’d never done that before. It’s not like I had made it clear to him that he shouldn’t, or anything, but I just kind of assumed that he wouldn’t. She was naked in the bath, and he was kneeling beside her, outside the tub. His feet were bare. That was what freaked me out: his bare feet. Makes no sense, huh? Anyway, I screamed at him, and Jenna started crying, and Jerry stormed out and didn’t come back until late. I tried talking to him about what had happened, but he’d run up a head of steam by that point, fueled by a lot of booze, and he slapped me. It wasn’t hard or anything, but I wasn’t going to take a slap from any man. I told him to get out, and he did. He came back a day or two later, and he apologized and I guess we made up. He was real careful around me and Jenna after that, but I couldn’t shake off that image of him with my daughter naked beside him. He had a computer that he used for work sometimes, and I knew his password. I’d seen him enter it once when he was showing Jenna something on the Internet. I went into his files and, well, there was a lot of pornography. I know men look at that kind of stuff. I suppose some women do, too, but there was so much of it on Jerry’s computer, just so much.”
“Adults, or children?” I asked.
“Adults,” she replied. “All adults. I tried to stay quiet about it, but I couldn’t. I told him what I’d done and what I’d seen. I asked him if he had a problem. At first he was ashamed, then he got real angry, real, real angry. He screamed and shouted. He threw stuff. He started calling me all these names, like the ones he used when he was talking to you. He told me I was ‘soiled,’ that I was lucky anyone would want to touch me. He said other things too, things about Jenna. He said that she’d end up like me, that the apple never fell far from the tree. That was it, as far as I was concerned. He left that night, and things came to an end. He had a lawyer for a time, and he was trying to get an order made against my assets, but I didn’t really have any assets. After a while, it all dried up, and I didn’t hear from him or the lawyer again. He didn’t contest the divorce. He just seemed happy to be rid of me.”
I finished my coffee. A wind blew, sending dead leaves scurrying like children fleeing the approach of rain. I knew she hadn’t told me everything, that aspects of what had occurred would remain private, but some of what she had said explained Jerry Legere’s animosity toward his ex-wife, especially if he felt that he was not entirely to blame for what had occurred. There were truth and lies bound up together in what each of them was saying, though, and Rebecca Clay had not been entirely honest with me from the start. I pressed on.
“I mentioned the ‘Project’ that Merrick had spoken about to your ex-husband,” I said. “It looked like he had heard it referred to before.”
“It could have been something private that my father was engaged in—he was always doing research and reading journals, trying to keep up with changes in his profession—but it wouldn’t make sense for Jerry to know anything about it. I mean, they didn’t know each other, and I don’t even remember Jerry coming to check out the security system before my father died. They never met.”
But mention of the Project led me to the final question, and the one that was troubling me the most.
“Jerry told me something else,” I said. “He claimed that you hired a private investigator once before, to look into your father’s disappearance. Jerry said that the man you hired disappeared in turn. Is that true?”
Rebecca Clay bit some dry skin from her bottom lip.
“You think I lied to you, don’t you?”
“By omission. I’m not blaming you, but I’d like to know why.”
“Elwin Stark suggested that I hire someone. It was about eighteen months after my father had vanished, and the police seemed to have decided that there wasn’t anything more that they could do. I spoke to Elwin because I was worried about Jerry’s lawyer, and I didn’t know what could be done to protect my father’s estate. There was no will, so it was going to be messy anyway, but Elwin said that a first step, if my father didn’t reappear, would be to have him declared legally dead after five years. Elwin’s view was that it would be helpful to hire someone to make further inquiries, as a judge might take that into account when it came to making the declaration. I didn’t have a whole lot of money, though. I was just starting out as a junior Realtor. I guess that determined the kind of person I could afford to hire.”
“Who was he?” I asked.
“His name was Jim Poole. He was just starting out too. He had done some work for a friend of mine—it was my friend April: you met her at the house—who suspected that her husband was cheating on her. It turned out that he wasn’t. He was gambling instead, although I don’t know if that was better or worse for her, but she seemed happy with Jim’s work. So I hired him and asked him to see if he could look into things, even see if he could discover anything new. He spoke to some of the same people that you did, but he didn’t find out anything more than we already knew. Jim might have mentioned something about a project at one point, but I probably didn’t pay a whole lot of attention. My father really did always seem to have some kind of article or essay on the back burner. He was never short of ideas for things to write about and research.
“Then, after a couple of weeks, Jim called to tell me that he was heading out of town for a few days and that he might have some news for me when he got back. Well, I waited for Jim to call again, and he never did. About a week later, the police came to see me. Jim’s girlfriend had reported him missing, and they were talking to his friends and his clients, although he didn’t have very many of either. They found my name among the files in his apartment, but I couldn’t help them. Jim hadn’t told me where he was going. They weren’t happy about that, but what more could I do? Jim’s car was found down in Boston shortly after, parked in one of the long-term lots near Logan. They found some drugs in the car—a bag of coke, I think—enough to suggest that he might have been dealing on the side. I think they figured that he’d gotten into some kind of trouble over the drugs, maybe with a supplier, and that he’d either fled because of it, or been killed. His girlfriend told the police that he wasn’t that kind of guy, and he would have found a way to get in touch with her, even if he was running from something, but he never did.”
“And what do you think?”
She shook her head. “I stopped looking for my father after that,” was all she said. “Is that enough of an answer for you?”
“And you didn’t tell me about Poole because you thought it might dissuade me from helping you?”
“Yes.”
“Was your relationship with Jim Poole purely professional?”
She stood up quickly, almost knocking her cup from the table. It splashed cold coffee between us that dripped through the holes in the table and stained the ground below.
“What kind of question is that? I bet that came from Jerry too, right?”
“It did, but now isn’t the time to get self-righteous.”
“I liked Jim,” she said, as if that answered the question. “He was having problems with his girlfriend. We talked, had a drink together once or twice. Jerry saw us in a bar—he used to call me sometimes when he’d been drinking, asking for another chance—and decided that Jim was getting in the way, but Jim was younger and stronger than him. There was some shouting, and a bottle was broken, but nobody got hurt. I guess Jerry’s still sore about it, even after all this time.”
She straightened the skirt of her business suit. “Look, I’m grateful for what you’ve done, but I can’t let this go on for much longer.” She gestured toward Jackie, as if he symbolized all that was wrong in her life. “I want my daughter back home, and I want Merrick off my back. Now that you know about Jim Poole, I’m not sure that I want you to keep asking questions about my father either. I don’t need to feel guilty about any more people, and every day seems to cost me, like, two days’ pay. I’d appreciate it if we could get this whole thing wrapped up as soon as possible, even if it means going to a judge.”
I told her that I understood, and I’d talk to some people about her options and call her to go through them with her as soon as I could. She headed back to her office to collect her things. I chatted with Jackie Garner and told him about the call from Merrick.
“What happens when our time runs out?” asked Jackie. “We just gonna wait for him to make a move?”
I told him it wouldn’t come to that. I also told him that I didn’t think Rebecca Clay would keep paying for much longer and that I was going to bring in some extra help in the hope of making more progress.
“The kind of help that comes from New York?” asked Jackie.
“Maybe,” I said.
“If the woman ain’t paying you, then how come you want to keep working?”
“Because Merrick isn’t going away, whether he gets what he wants from Rebecca or not. Plus I’m going to shake his tree a whole lot over the next day or two, and he’s not going to like it.”
Jackie looked amused. “Well, you need a hand, you let me know. It’s the boring stuff you have to pay me for. The interesting stuff I do for free.”
• • •
Walter was still wet with salt water from his walk with Bob Johnson when I got home, and seemed content to sleep in his basket away from the cold. I had a couple of hours to kill before I was to meet June Fitzpatrick for dinner, so I went onto the Press-Herald’s Web site and browsed its archive for anything I could find on Daniel Clay’s disappearance. According to the reports, allegations of abuse had been received from a number of children who had been patients of Dr. Clay. At no point was there any implication that he was involved, but questions were clearly being asked about how he could have failed to notice that children whom he was assisting, each of whom had been abused before, were being abused again. Clay had declined to comment, other than to say that he was “very distressed” by the allegations, that he would make a full statement in due course, and that his main priority was assisting the police and social services with their own investigations with a view to finding the culprits. A couple of experts had come, somewhat reluctantly, to Clay’s defense, pointing out that sometimes it could take months or years to get an abuse victim to reveal the depth of what he or she had endured. Even the police were careful not to apportion blame on Clay, but reading between the lines of the story it seemed clear that Clay was taking some of that blame on himself anyway. There was such a scandal brewing that it was hard to see how Clay could have continued to practice, no matter what the outcome of any investigation was. One piece described him variously as “ashen-faced,” “hollow-eyed,” “gaunt,” and “close to tears.” There was a picture of Clay beside the piece, taken outside his house. He looked thin and stooped, like a wounded stork.
The detective quoted in one of the newspaper articles was Bobby O’Rourke. He was still a detective, as far as I knew, although he worked out of Internal Affairs. I got him at his desk just before he left for the day, and he agreed to meet me for a beer over in Geary’s within the hour. I parked on Commercial and found him seated in a corner, flipping through some photocopies and eating a hamburger. We had met a couple of times in the past, and I’d helped him to fill in the blanks in a case involving a Portland P.D. cop named Barron who had died under what could euphemistically be termed “mysterious circumstances” a few years before. I didn’t envy O’Rourke his job. The fact that he was with IA meant that he was good at his work. Unfortunately, it was work at which some of his fellow cops didn’t want him to be good.
He wiped his hands on a napkin, and we shook.
“You eating?” he asked.
“Nope. Going to dinner in an hour or two.”
“Anyplace flash?”
“Joel Harmon’s house.”
“I’m impressed. We’re going to be reading about you in the society columns.”
We spoke a little about the annual IA report that was about to be published. It was the usual stuff, mainly use-of-force allegations and complaints about the operation of police vehicles. The patterns remained pretty consistent. The complainants were typically young males, and the use-of-force incidents mostly related to breaking up fights. The cops had used only their hands to subdue the combatants, and the guys involved were mostly white and under thirty, so it wasn’t like senior citizens or the Harlem Globetrotters were being rousted. Nobody had been suspended for longer than two days as a result of complaints. All told, it wasn’t a bad year for IA. Meanwhile, the Portland P.D. had a new chief. The old chief had stepped down earlier in the year, and the city council had been considering two candidates, one who was white and local, and one who was black and from the South. Had the council gone for the black candidate, it would have increased by 100 percent the number of black cops in Portland, but instead it had opted for local experience. It wasn’t a bad decision, but some minority leaders were still sore. The old chief, meanwhile, was rumored to be considering a run for governor.
O’Rourke finished his burger and took a sip of his IPA. He was a slim, fit guy who didn’t look like burgers and beer usually accounted for too many of his calories.
“So, Daniel Clay,” he said.
“You remember him?”
“I remember the case, and what I didn’t recall I checked before I came over here. I only met Clay twice before he went missing, so there’s a limit to what I can tell you.”
“What did you think of him?”
“He seemed genuinely upset by what had happened. He looked to be in shock. He kept referring to them as his ‘kids.’ We started investigating, along with the state police, the sheriffs, the local cops, social services. The rest you probably know already: some points of correspondence came up in other cases over a period of time, and a number of those cases could be traced back to Clay.”
“You think it was a coincidence that Clay had worked with the kids?”
“There’s nothing to indicate that it wasn’t. Some of the children were particularly vulnerable. They’d been abused before, and most of them were in the very early stages of therapy and intervention. They hadn’t even got around to talking about the first series of abuses before the next began to happen.”
“Ever come close to an arrest?”
“No. A girl, thirteen years old, was found wandering in fields outside of Skowhegan at three in the morning. Barefoot, clothes torn, bleeding, no underwear. She was hysterical, babbling about men and birds. She was disoriented and didn’t seem to know where she’d been held or what direction she’d walked from, but she was clear on the details: three men, all masked, taking turns with her in what seemed to be an unfurnished room in a house. We got some DNA samples from her, but most of them were pretty messed up. Only a couple were clean, and they didn’t match anything on the databases. About a year ago we tried again as part of a cold case review, but still zip. It’s bad. We should have done better on it, but I don’t see how.”
“What about the kids?”
“I haven’t kept track of all of them. Some have come back on the radar. They were screwed-up kids, and they became screwed-up adults. I always felt sorry for them when I saw their names come up. What the hell kind of chance did they have after what was done to them?”
“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.”
• • •
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.
By then, her father had been in jail for four years. His luck ran out when he picked up five years for reckless conduct with a dangerous weapon, five years for criminal threatening with the use of a dangerous weapon, and ten years for aggravated assault, all to be served concurrently, after one of his prospective victims managed to shoot his way out of his home as Merrick was closing in on him with a knife, only for the vic to be hit by a patrol car as he was fleeing. Merrick only avoided a further forty-to-life after the state failed to prove premeditation-in-fact, and because he had no previous convictions for crimes using deadly force against the person. It was during this period that his daughter disappeared. The sentence wasn’t all served in the general population, either. A chunk of it, according to O’Rourke, was spent in Supermax, and that was real hard time right there.
After his release, he was sent for trial in Virginia for the killing of an accountant named Barton Riddick, who was shot once in the head with a .44 in 1993. Merrick was charged on the basis of bullet lead analysis by the FBI of rounds found in his car following his arrest in Maine. There was nothing to indicate that he had been at the scene of the killing in Virginia, or to link him physically to Riddick in any other way, but the chemical composition of the bullet that had passed through the victim, taking a chunk of skull and brain with it as it exited, matched bullets from the box of ammunition discovered in Merrick’s trunk. Merrick was facing the possibility of spending the rest of his life in prison, maybe even a death sentence, but his case was one of a number taken up by some law firms that believed the Bureau’s examiners had overstated the bullet lead analysis test results in a number of instances. The case against Merrick had been further weakened when the gun used in the killing was subsequently used in the murder of a lawyer in Baton Rouge. Reluctantly, the prosecutor in Virginia decided not to follow through on the charges against Merrick, and the FBI had since announced that it was abandoning bullet lead analysis. He had been released in October, and was now, to all intents and purposes, a free man, as he had served his sentence in full in the state of Maine, and no conditions had been applied to his release on the assumption that the Riddick charges would ensure he would never taste the air as a free man again.
“And now he’s back here,” concluded O’Rourke.
“Asking after the doctor who was treating his daughter,” I said.
“Sounds like a man with a grudge. What are you going to do?”
I took out my wallet and laid some bills on the table to cover our tab. “I’m going to have him picked up.”
“Will the Clay woman press charges?”
“I’ll talk to her about it. Even if she doesn’t, the threat of imprisonment might be enough to keep Merrick off her back. He won’t want to go back to jail. Who knows, the cops may even turn up something in his car.”
“Has he threatened her at all?”
“Only verbally, and just in the vaguest of ways. He broke her window, though, so he’s capable of more.”
“Any sign of a weapon?”
“None.”
“Frank’s the kind of guy who might feel a little naked without a gun.”
“When I met him he told me he wasn’t armed.”
“You believed him?”
“I think he’s too smart to carry a gun with him. As a convicted felon, he can’t be found in possession, and he’s already attracting a lot of attention to himself. He can’t find out what happened to his daughter if he’s locked up again.”
“Well, it sounds plausible, but I wouldn’t want to bet my life on it. The Clay woman still live in the city?”
“I can make some calls if you want me to.”
“Every little bit helps. It would be good if we could have a temporary order in place by the time Merrick is picked up.”
O’Rourke said that he didn’t think it would be a problem. I had almost forgotten about Jim Poole. I asked O’Rourke about him.
“I remember something about it. He was an amateur, a correspondence-college private eye. Liked using a little weed, I think. Cops down in Boston figured there might have been a drug connection to his death, and I guess people up here were happy enough to go along with that.”
“He was working for Rebecca Clay when he disappeared,” I said.
“I didn’t know that. It wasn’t my case. Sounds like she might be unlucky to be around. She vanishes more people than the Magic Circle.”
“I don’t imagine lucky people attract the interest of men like Frank Merrick.”
“If they do, they don’t stay lucky for long. I’d like to be there when they bring him in. I’ve heard a lot about him, but I’ve never met him face-to-face.”
His beer glass had left a circle of moisture on the table. He traced patterns in it with his index finger.
“What are you thinking?” I asked.
“I’m thinking it’s a shame you have a client who believes she’s at risk.”
“Why?”
“I don’t like clusters. Some of Clay’s patients were being abused. Merrick’s daughter was one of his patients.”
“Hence Merrick’s daughter was being abused? It’s possible, but it doesn’t necessarily follow.”
“Then Clay disappears and so does she.”
“And the abusers are never found.”
He shrugged. “I’m just saying: having a man like Merrick asking questions about old crimes might make some people worried.”
“Like the people who committed those old crimes.”
“Exactly. Could be useful. You never know who might decide to take offense and make themselves known along the way.”
“The problem is that Merrick isn’t like a dog on a leash. He can’t be controlled. I’ve got three men looking out for my client as things stand. My priority is to keep her safe.”
O’Rourke stood. “Well, talk to her. Explain what you intend to do. Then let’s get him picked up and see what happens.”
We shook hands again, and I thanked him for his help.
“Don’t get carried away,” he said. “I’m in this because of the kids. And, hey, forgive me for being blunt, but if this thing goes up in smoke, and I find you lit the fuse, I’ll arrest you myself.”
• • •
It was time for me to drive out to Joel Harmon’s house. Along the way, I called Rebecca and shared with her most of what O’Rourke had told me of Merrick and what I was hoping to do the next day. She seemed to have calmed down a little since we last talked, although she was still intent on wrapping up our business with each other as soon as possible.
“We’ll arrange a meeting, then have him picked up by the cops,” I said. “The state’s protection-from-harassment law says that if you’ve been intimidated or confronted three or more times by the same person, then the cops have to act. I figure that incident with the window may also fall under terrorizing, and I spotted him watching you that day at Longfellow Square, so we have him for stalking as well. Either one of those would be enough to bring us under the cover of the law.”
“Does that mean I’ll have to go to court?” she asked.
“Make the harassment report first thing tomorrow. The report has to be made before a court complaint can be filed anyway. Then we can go to the District Court and get it to issue a temporary order for emergency protection after you’ve filed the complaint. I’ve already talked to someone about this, and everything should be in place for you by tomorrow evening.” I gave her O’Rourke’s name and number. “A date and time will be set for a hearing, and the summons and complaint will have to be served on Merrick. I can do that or, if you prefer, we can get the sheriff’s department to do it instead. If he approaches you again once the order has been served, then that’s a Class D crime with a penalty of up to one year in jail and a maximum fine of a thousand dollars. Three convictions and he’s looking at five years.”
“It still doesn’t sound like enough,” she said. “Can’t they just put him away immediately?”
“It’s a delicate balance,” I said. “He’s overstepped the line, but not enough to justify serving time. The thing is, I believe that doing more time is the last thing he wants to risk. He’s a dangerous man, but he’s also had years to think about his daughter. He failed her, but he wants someone else to blame. I think he’s decided to start with your father, because he heard the rumors about him and wonders if something similar might have happened to his own child while she was in his care.”
“And because my father’s not around, he’s moved on to me.” She sighed. “Okay. Will I have to be there when they arrest him?”
“No. The police may want to talk to you later, though. Jackie will stay close to you, just in case.”
“Just in case it doesn’t go the way you’ve planned?”
“Just in case,” I repeated, not committing to anything. I felt that I’d let her down, but I couldn’t see what more I could have done. True, I could have banded together with Jackie Garner and the Fulcis to beat Merrick to a pulp, but that would have been to descend to his level. And now, after my conversation with O’Rourke, there was one more thing stopping me from using force against Frank Merrick.
In a strange way, I felt sorry for him.