The Unquiet

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 go

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 di

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 di

“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 a

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.”