Night Terror (12 page)

24

BACK AT THE STATION
, Virgil confronted Evan. The big lummox fell apart, weeping like a baby and swearing that he loved Janie more than anything in the world. He’d never
meant
to hurt her or anyone else. He confessed to everything, waiving a lawyer. Birch stood outside the door to the interrogation room, shaking his head.

“Put him back in his cell,” growled Virgil. “And watch him.”

Birch nodded. “You think he might do something to himself?”

Virgil glanced back over his shoulder, seeing Evan, picturing Janie. “No such luck, but watch him anyway.”

“Right,” said Birch. “You know Mac Douglass is here?”

“Mac? What’s he up to?”

“Brought in Seth LeClerc.”

“No kidding.” Seth had run out on a warrant for driving without a license and been gone for over a year. He’d been stopped so many times without a license that he was legendary enough for the judge to award him a couple of years in Togus. Now it looked like he might really serve them.

“Tell Mac I’ll be right down.”

Birch nodded and left.

Mac Douglass was an old friend, a private detective from Lewiston. In a bigger metropolitan area, Mac might have
made a better living. He had contacts all across the U.S. from his years on the force. But Mac was happy living in relative obscurity. He made a decent living off his retirement from the Maine State Troopers, part-time work chasing down deadbeat dads, and shadowing people trying to defraud the state on their workmen’s comp. Over the years he and Virgil had scratched each other’s back any number of times.

Virgil smiled when he spotted Mac.

“Had an interesting day, looks like,” said Mac.

“I could do without interesting days.”

“Amen. Guy’s wife wouldn’t ever press charges, right?”

Virgil nodded and Mac shook his head.

“Maybe he’ll kill himself,” said Mac, his smile looking more like a grimace. “How’s Doris?”

“Not good.”

“Sorry.”

Mac’s eyes glinted and Virgil followed them to the pair of files still sitting on top of his desk. Mac read the names aloud.

“You still working on those?” he said, frowning.

“Until I die.”

Mac shook his head again. “Any new evidence?”

“Not really,” said Virgil. They had the bike, but it really told them nothing.

“Then why keep beating your head against a wall?”

Virgil shrugged. “They’re my pet cases.” He stared at Mac for a moment. “You want to do me a favor?”

“Name it.”

“Use your contacts to get me some background information on Audrey Bock.”

“The Bock boy’s mother?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“Just a hunch.”

He opened Zach’s file and pulled up all the information he had on Audrey—address, phone number, social security—and made a copy for Mac.

Mac read through it all, shaking his head. “I wish you wouldn’t do this, Virg.”

“What do you mean?”

Mac held out the papers. “Pretend I’m a D.A. Tell me why I’m doing this.”

Virgil sat down at the desk, staring out the window. “I want to know where she came from and how she got here. Most of all, I want to know if she’s ever been put away for any reason.”

“Put away?”

“Treated for mental problems.”

“And if she has?”

“I don’t know.”

“You think maybe she did something to the kids?”

“I don’t have any evidence that she did. I don’t believe she could have had anything to do with Timmy Merrill’s disappearance.”

Mac nodded. “But you don’t have any evidence that she didn’t either. Is that it?”

“Yeah.”

“As a D.A., I’d have to tell you you’re wasting my time.”

“So you won’t do it?”

“I just want a little better reason why I should. The cases are old news, Virgil. Everyone around here knows it.”

“Zach Bock disappeared just a few days over a year ago,” said Virgil, glaring at his desktop. “That’s not long for an investigation.”

“Not if you have any evidence to go on. Do you?”

“Well, we found the Merrill boy’s bike.”

“What?” Mac sounded stunned and Virgil was happy that he had at least
something
to tell him, some tidbit of new information as an excuse for his continued scrutiny of the case. Mac wasn’t stupid. He knew Virgil was fishing, clutching at straws. Virgil just hoped that he’d do what he could on the basis of their friendship and not question him too much on the whys. He certainly didn’t want to explain about Babs St. Clair or Audrey’s hallucinations about Merle Coonts’s basement.

“I found it washed up in No Name Creek. It was in such good shape you could have aired up the tires and ridden it back to town.”

“How did you know to look there?”

Virgil picked up the files and returned them to their favorite resting place in his cabinet. “I got a tip.”

“From who?”

“What difference does it make?”

“I’m playing the D.A. again. You want me to work for you. Show me what you got.”

Virgil sighed. “A woman named Babs St. Clair told me to look there.”

“How did she know it would be there?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know? What the hell does that mean? What does she say?”

“If you must know, the information came out during a séance, all right? Will you check on Audrey Bock’s background or not?”

“A séance? What were you doing at a séance?”

Virgil sighed. “Doris wanted it.” He leaned back in his chair and rubbed the bridge of his nose, hard.

“That sounds pretty crazy, Virg.”

“I know how it sounds. Will you check?”

Mac nodded. “Any ideas where I should start?”

“Start with a woman named Tara Beals.”

Mac stared at him as though he had two heads.

“What?” said Virgil. “You know her?”

Mac took a moment answering. “I know
of
her. She’s a shrink, right?”

“Yeah. Audrey Bock’s her niece. Apparently Tara took Audrey away from her mother, so there was probably abuse at home when she was a child. I want to know if it could have caused Audrey to, you know, do something crazy.”

“I don’t know,” said Mac. “I got to be careful, Virg, or they’ll pull my license.”

“I know that. Don’t get yourself over a barrel. Just see what you can find out. Okay?”

“I’ll see what I can do,” said Mac, brightening. “You want I should bump off your killer before I leave?”

Virgil smiled. “No, thank-you. The state might not be too pleased with that.”

Mac shrugged and left without saying good-bye. He was always doing that. Sometimes he just seemed to go off on a tangent. But he could lock onto a case like a bulldog. Virgil hoped something like that would happen now. He
needed
someone to lock onto something.

He watched through the window as Mac climbed into his blue sedan and drove away. Then he kicked his feet up onto his desk and tried to think of something, anything, that he’d missed over the past five years. He wanted the cases solved so bad he could taste it. So bad he was praying that Mac could speed things along, find another clue, anything to get the damned thing moving again before time ran out. But the more he cogitated about it, the less he thought he was going to live to see an end to it.

He got up from his desk like an old dog after a long nap, stretching every muscle in his body, trying to get the damned thing to work the way it should, the way it had twenty years before. Finally he shouted down the hall to Birch to tell him he had an errand to run.

There was nothing more to be found at No Name Creek, he knew that, but still Virgil was drawn back there. He pulled over on the shoulder, parking under the shade of a tall oak, sliding down the embankment and following the crushed grass trail the deputies had created during the search.

The bike was gone now, safely tucked away in the evidence locker after having been gone over by a forensic specialist from Augusta who told Virgil exactly what he’d expected to hear. Too late to find anything of any value. Still, as he trudged down the middle of the dry creekbed toward the spot where the bike had lain for five long years, he couldn’t get the idea out of his head that the
place
was trying to tell him something. It kept calling to him in ways that he wouldn’t have responded to a week before. Now he wasn’t quite so quick to ignore a hunch, if that’s what this was. Only it didn’t feel like a hunch. It felt as though he was
supposed
to be here. Like he and the creek and the woods and the sky were all waiting for something to happen.

Timmy Merrill had been here. At least he had been as close as the old bridge. And his bike had washed up on that spot right there. It was as though the boy had left a residue of himself, and Virgil kept rubbing up against it.

You’re getting too wrapped up in this again. You’ve got to ease off. Let it go.

Only he couldn’t do that. Partly because the case had been eating at him for so long. Partly because of the nature of the two cases that he knew were connected. And partly because they were his only reason to keep on breathing when he was away from home. If he didn’t focus on them, he focused on Doris, and he didn’t want to go there right now.

He walked on past the crime tape, following the winding creek through the deep hardwood forest, listening to a rustling off to his right that he knew had to be another damned porcupine from the slow way it ambled through the brush. Porkies weren’t afraid of anything. They didn’t have much reason to be. Good thing it hadn’t been here when the hounds came through. They’d have gotten a mouthful of quills for their trouble.

The sliver of water that meandered beside him was too small to be heard over the slight sound of the animal foraging, but Virgil could smell the clean dampness of it over the dusty dryness of the surrounding earth. It was good to get out of the cruiser for a while, even if it was on a wild-goose chase, and he wandered slowly another couple of hundred yards down the streambed.

He glanced over his shoulder when a twig snapped behind him. Porcupines weren’t big enough to make noises like that. More likely a deer. He stopped in his tracks, waiting to see if it would slip out of the brush for a drink.

But what was a deer doing moving around at midday? They were mostly hunkered down about now, waiting till dusk to forage. And now that he thought about it, the porcupine was up early too. He turned back up the creek, cocking his head to see around an overhanging limb just as the sound of gravel sliding over gravel carried to him. Deer didn’t make mistakes like that unless they were in one hell of a hurry.

“Anybody there?” he called.

More gravel, but no answer. He slid his hand over the butt of his pistol, unsnapping the strap. He thought he heard footsteps up the creek, but they were furtive sounds and he might have been mistaken.

“Hello!” he shouted.

Still no answer. It had to be his imagination running away with him. But just in case, he unholstered his pistol and took it off safety. Then he started—one silent step at a time—back the way he had come, staring up the creek but shooting glances to his left and right. He hadn’t really been paying too much attention to his surroundings before, walking unimpeded down the dry bed. Now the creek seemed like an open sluice with no cover at all. He felt like a lone bowling pin at the end of an alley.

Why would anyone else be out here today? The investigation of the crime scene was officially ended. There was no equipment for anyone to return for. Maybe it was a gawker come to see what all the excitement had been about and they hadn’t expected to run into him. But then why did they come out here while his cruiser was sitting big as daylight on the road? The thought that maybe someone had come out here for that very reason made him tighten his fingers around the pistol grip.

Virgil wasn’t foolish enough to believe he had no enemies. Over the years he had put a number of people away. Some were still in. Many weren’t. But it wasn’t something that he lost sleep over, or no more sleep than most cops lost. Very few criminals were stupid enough to try to take revenge on a cop and the ones he could think of were still safely in the pen. As he eased around a sharp outcrop of exposed bedrock, he heard footsteps echoing away up the creek.

“Stop!” he shouted, breaking into a run.

Even though the creek wasn’t steep here, it was still an uphill slog, and the loose gravel wasn’t the best footing. To top it off, by the time he reached the next bend he realized for the thousandth time how out of shape he was. He hadn’t run more than fifty yards and his face was already sheened with sweat and his throat burned. He slowed to a walk, clutching at a stitch in his side with his free hand. He was almost to the crime scene again when a car door slammed and a powerful engine roared off up the road. He tried to figure if he could make it out of the creek before the car disappeared, but he knew it was a hopeless race. Instead, he turned back, glancing around for footprints.

He retraced the entire length of his hike, but the dry gravel gave up nothing. On the way back out he stopped in front of the cruiser, staring off toward Arcos, the direction the car had taken, wondering what the hell had just happened.