The Unquiet

Long had the decency to look embarrassed. “We do what we can for him.”

“It’s not enough.” I was railing at him, but I knew that it wasn’t his fault. Kellog had been sentenced and imprisoned, and it wasn’t Long’s duty to question that decision.

“Maybe you think he was better off with his pal Merrick close by,” said Long.

“At least he kept the wolves at bay.”

“He wasn’t much better than an animal himself.”

“You don’t really believe that.”

He raised an eyebrow at me.

“You developing a soft spot for Frank Merrick? You better be careful, or you’re likely to find a knife in it.”

Long was both right and wrong about Merrick. I didn’t doubt that he would hurt or kill without compunction, but there was an intelligence at work there. The problem was that Merrick was also a weapon to be wielded, and someone had found a way of using him to that end. But Long’s words had struck home, just as Rachel’s had. I did feel some sympathy for Merrick. How could I not? I was a father too. I had lost a child, and I had stopped at nothing to hunt down the man responsible for her death. I knew too that I would do anything to protect Sam and her mother. How then could I judge Merrick for wanting to find out the truth behind his daughter’s disappearance?

Still, such doubts aside, I now knew more than I had an hour before. Unfortunately, Merrick shared some of the same knowledge. I wondered if he had already begun scouting around Jackman and the ruins of Gilead for traces of the men who he believed were responsible for his daughter’s disappearance, or if he had a lead on the man with the eagle tattoo. I would have to go to Gilead eventually. Each step that I took seemed to take me closer to it.

Aimee returned.

“I’ve made some calls,” she said. “I think we can find a sympathetic judge who’ll order a transfer to Riverview.” She turned her attention to Long. “I’ll be getting an independent psychiatric evaluation done on Andy Kellog over the next few days. I’d appreciate it if you could make the whole business as easy as possible.”

“It’s got to go through the usual cha

Aimee seemed reasonably satisfied and indicated that we should leave. As I moved to follow her, Long gently took my arm.

“Two things,” he said. “First of all, I meant what I said about Frank Merrick. I saw what he was capable of doing. He near killed a guy who tried to take Andy Kellog’s dessert once, left him in a coma over a plastic bowl of cheap ice cream. You’re right: I heard what Andy Kellog had to say in there. Hell, I’ve heard it before. It’s not news to me. You want to know what I think? I think Frank Merrick used Kellog. He stayed close to him so he could find out what he knew. He was always pumping him for information, trying to get him to remember all that he could about what those men did to him. In a way, he was responsible for winding Kellog up. He got him all upset, all riled up, and we had to deal with the consequences.”

That wasn’t what I had been told at the hockey game, but I knew there was a tendency among ex-cons to sentimentalize some of those they had met. Also, in a place where kindnesses were at a premium, even small acts of human decency assumed monumental proportions. The truth, as in all things, probably lay in the gray area between what Bill and Long had said. I had seen how Andy Kellog had reacted to questioning about his abuse. Perhaps Merrick had managed to talk him down sometimes, but I didn’t doubt that there were other occasions on which he had failed to do so, and Andy had suffered as a result.

“Second, about that tattoo your boy mentioned. You might be looking for a military man. That sounds like someone who could have been in the service once.”

“Any idea where I might start?”

“I’m not the detective,” said Long. “But if I was, I might be looking south. Fort Campbell, maybe. Airborne.”

Then he left us, his bulk receding into the body of the prison.

“What was that about?” asked Aimee, but I didn’t answer.

Fort Campbell, situated right on the borders of Kentucky and Te

The Screaming Eagles.

We separated in the parking lot. I thanked Aimee for her help and asked her to let me know if there was anything I could do for Andy Kellog.

“You know the answer to that,” she said. “You find those men, and you let me know when you do. I’ll recommend the worst lawyer I know.”

I tried to smile. It died somewhere between my mouth and my eyes. Aimee knew what I was thinking.

“Frank Merrick,” she said.

“Yeah, Merrick.”

“I think you’d better find them before he does.”

“I could just leave them to him.”

“You could, except it’s not just about him, or even Andy. In this case, justice has to be seen to be done. Someone has to answer publicly. Other children will have been involved. We need to find a way to help them, too, or to help the adults they’ve become. We can’t do that if these men are hunted down and killed by Frank Merrick. You still have my card?”

I checked my wallet. It was there. She tapped it with her finger.

“You get in trouble, and you call me.”

“What makes you think I’m going to get in trouble?”

“You’re a repeat offender, Mr. Parker,” she said, as she climbed into her car. “Trouble is your thing.”

Chapter XIX

Dr. Robert Christian looked distracted and ill at ease when I called unexpectedly at his office on my way back from Warren, but he still agreed to give me a few minutes of his time. There was a patrol car parked outside when I arrived, a man seated in the back, his head resting against the wire dividing the interior of the car, the position of his hands indicating that he had been restrained. A policeman was talking to a woman in her thirties whose head kept moving from one point of a triangle to the next: from the cop, to two children seated in a big Nissan 4x4 to her right, then on to the man in the back of the patrol car. Cop, kids, man. Cop, kids, man. She had clearly been crying. Her kids still were.

“It’s been a long day,” Christian said, as he closed the door of his office and collapsed into the chair behind his desk, “and I haven’t even eaten lunch yet.”

“The guy outside?”

“I can’t really comment,” said Christian, only to relent a little. “There is no easy aspect to what we do, but among the hardest, and the one that needs some of the most delicate handling, involves the moment when someone is forced to confront the accusations made against him. There was a police interview a couple of days back, and today the mother and children arrived here for a session with us only to find the father waiting for them outside. People react in different ways to allegations of abuse: disbelief, denial, rage. We don’t often have to call the police, though. That was…a particularly difficult moment for all involved.”

He began collecting papers from his desk, assembling them into piles and inserting them into folders. “So, Mr. Parker, what can I do for you? I don’t have much time, I’m afraid. I have a meeting up in Augusta in two hours with Senator Harkness to discuss the mandatory-sentencing issue, and I haven’t prepared for it as well as I might have wished.”

State Senator James Harkness was a right-wing hawk with a sledgehammer attitude to just about every issue that came his way. Recently, he had been among those whose voices were raised loudest in favor of mandatory twenty-year sentences for those found guilty of gross sexual assault of a minor, even for those who copped a plea.

“Are you for, or against?”

“In common with most prosecutors, I’m against it but, to gentlemen like the good senator, that’s a little like arguing against Christmas.”

“Can I ask why?”