The Unquiet

Or perhaps it was because of Frank Merrick. I knew what he had done. I knew he had killed, and would have killed again if he had been allowed to live. I was still bruised and sore from where he had punched me, and I was aware of a lingering resentment at the way he had humiliated me in my own home. But in his love for his daughter, and in his single-minded obsession with discovering the truth behind her disappearance, and with punishing those responsible for it, I saw something of myself reflected.

Now that Lucy Merrick’s resting place had been revealed, the rest of the men who had led her to that place remained to be found. Three of those involved-Caswell, Legere, and, it now seemed, Dubus-were dead. Andy Kellog had recalled four masks, and I had seen no tattoos on the arms of Caswell or of Legere. The man with the eagle, the one who Andy felt was the leader, the dominant one, was still alive.

I was climbing into my car when a piece fell into place. I thought of the damage to one corner of the cottage in which Lucy Merrick had died, the holes in the wall and the marks where screws had once held something in place, and recalled part of what Caswell had said to me on the phone. It had bothered me at the time, but I was too intent upon squeezing him for more information to notice it. It came back to me now-“I had a mind to check on her every few hours, but I dozed off myself. When I woke up, she was lying on the floor.”-and I found the co

Three were dead, but now I had another name.

Chapter XXXIV

Raymon Lang lived between Bath and Brunswick, on a small patch of land off Route 1, close by the northern bank of the New Meadows River. I’d taken a cursory look at Lang’s home when I got there just before nine. He hadn’t done much with his property, apart from plant a tan trailer home on it that looked, at first sight, like a strong sneeze might blow it away. The trailer sat high off the ground. In a cursory nod to aesthetics, a kind of picket fence had been erected between the bottom of the trailer and the earth, masking the dirt and pipes beneath.

I had managed only three or four hours’ sleep that night, but I was not tired. The more I thought about what Caswell had told me before he died, the more convinced I was that Raymon Lang was involved in the abduction of Lucy Merrick. Caswell had told me that he had seen Lucy lying on the floor, dying or already dead. The question was: how had Caswell known? How could he have seen her when he had woken up? After all, had he been in the cabin with her, then he too would have died. He hadn’t fallen asleep there. He was sleeping back in his own place, which meant that there was a way of watching the cabin from his home. There was a camera. The mark in the corner of the cabin wall indicated where the camera had been. And whom did we know who put cameras in places? Raymon Lang, helped by his old buddy Jerry Legere, regrettably, no longer with us. A-Secure, the firm for which Lang worked, had also installed the security system at Daniel Clay’s house, which now seemed less like a coincidence than before. I wondered how Rebecca would take the news of her ex-husband’s death. I doubted that she would be overcome by grief, but who could be certain? I had seen wives weep themselves into a stupor over the sickbeds of abusive husbands, and children cry hysterically at the funerals of fathers who had torn stripes in their thighs and buttocks with a belt. Sometimes, I didn’t think they even understood why they were in tears, but grief was as good a name as any to give to their reason.

I guessed that Lang was also the other man involved in the killing of Frank Merrick. According to eyewitnesses, a silver or gray car had been seen leaving the scene, and from where I sat I could see Lang’s silver Sierra shining through the trees. The cops hadn’t picked it up on the road to the Old Moose Lodge as they headed north, but that didn’t mean anything. In the panic after the shooting, it might have taken the cops a while to get witness statements, by which time Lang could have driven as far as the highway. Even if someone had reported seeing a car during the initial 911 call, Lang would still have had time to get at least as far as Bingham, and there he would have enjoyed the choice of three routes: 16 north, 16 south, or to continue on the 201. He would probably have kept going south, but there were enough side roads after Bingham to enable him to avoid dozens of cops if he was lucky and kept his cool.

I was parked by the side of a gas station about fifty feet west of Lang’s drive, drinking coffee and reading the Press Herald. There was a Dunkin’ Donuts attached to the gas station, with seating for only a handful of customers, which meant that it wasn’t unusual to see people eating in their cars. It meant that I wasn’t likely to stand out while I was watching Lang’s place. After an hour, Lang emerged from the trailer, and the patch of silver started to move as he turned onto the main road and headed in the direction of Bath. Seconds later, Louis and Angel followed him in the Lexus. I had my cell phone close to hand in case it turned out to be just a short trip, even though Lang had his toolbox with him when he was walking to his car. I still gave him a half hour, on the off chance that he decided to head back for some reason, then left my car where it was and cut through the trees to get to the trailer.

Lang didn’t seem to keep a dog, which was good news. It’s hard to perform a little breaking and entering while a dog is trying to rip your throat out. The trailer door didn’t look like much, but I still didn’t have Angel’s ability to pick a lock. Frankly, it’s a lot harder than it looks, and I didn’t want to spend half an hour squatting in front of Lang’s door, trying to open it with a pick and tension tool. I used to own an electric rake, which did the job just as well, but the rake got lost when my old Mustang was shot up a few years back, and I’d never bothered to replace it. Anyway, the only reason a private detective might keep a rake in his car would be in order to bust illegally into someone’s place, and if my car was searched for any reason by the cops it would look bad, and I might lose my license. I didn’t need Angel to help me break into Lang’s trailer, because I didn’t plan on leaving Lang in any doubt that his place had been searched. At the very least, it would rattle him, and I wanted him rattled. Unlike Caswell, Lang didn’t look like the kind of guy who was going to reach for a noose when things got tough. Instead, if Merrick ’s fate was any indication, he was the kind to lash out. The thought that Lang might not be guilty of anything never really crossed my mind.

For the purposes of breaking into Lang’s trailer, I had a crowbar under my coat. I forced it between the door and the frame of the trailer, then kept pushing until the lock broke. The first thing that struck me about the interior of Lang’s trailer was that it was stiflingly hot inside. The second was that it was tidy, and therefore not what I had expected from a single man’s trailer. To the left was a galley-style kitchen with a table beyond it, surrounded by a three-sided couch arrangement that took up the entire lower quarter of the trailer. To the right, just before the sleeping area, was a La-Z-Boy recliner and an expensive Sony wide-screen television, beneath which stood a matching DVD, a DVD recorder, and a twin VCR. There were tapes and DVDs on a shelf beside it: action movies, some comedies, even a couple of Bogart and Cagney classics. Under them was a selection of porn on both DVD and video. I glanced at some of the titles but they seemed like pretty average fare. There was nothing related to children, but then I supposed that most of the stuff involving children was probably packaged to look like something else anyway; that, or it was buried on other tapes or disks so that it would not be found in the event of a casual search. I turned on the TV and picked some of the porn at random, skipping forward in case anything unusual was to be seen, but it was just as advertised. I could have spent an entire day trying to go through all the movies in the hope that I might find something, but there didn’t seem to be much point. It was also kind of depressing.