A Time of Torment (19 page)

Then they had disappeared, and Killian’s folks, though hardly in line for any awards for good parenting, were sufficiently concerned about their son’s well-being to kick up a fuss, and Huff’s widowed mother had added her voice to that of her wealthier neighbors. Now here were their sons, rotting in a shallow grave.

‘This is Cut work,’ said Henkel.

‘We don’t know that for sure.’

‘Not many others around here who’d put two boys in the ground like this.’

‘Maybe these boys crossed their Mexican friends over in Columbus,’ said Bentley.

Henkel knew what the older man was doing. He might have enjoyed being chief, but like every other lawman in the county, going back to a time when they wore gun belts and handlebar mustaches, the pleasure and satisfaction that he took in his job were inversely proportional to his degree of involvement with the Cut.

‘If they crossed men back home, then they’d be buried in a hole in Ohio. There’d be no percentage in coming all the way over here to get rid of them.’

Bentley used his hat to swat at the flies, as though they represented all that was now troubling him, right down to their persistence in refusing to be dismissed.

‘The Cut’s been quiet for a long time,’ he said.

‘Or just careful.’

‘Comes back to how this might not be something to be laid at their doorstep,’ said Bentley, grabbing at another straw. ‘Habitually, when they put someone in the ground, that person has a way of staying there.’

‘Yeah, well, even Homer nods.’

‘I don’t know what that means.’

‘Means everybody makes mistakes.’

Bentley stared down at the bodies.

‘You know what Russ Dugar would have done with them?’

Dugar was the sheriff in Plassey County before Henkel, and a legendary figure in local law enforcement. Dugar hated being behind a desk, and consequently was the last lawman in Plassey to be killed in the course of duty – shot and left to die by the side of the road after stopping a man named Owen Bick on suspicion of DUI, only to discover that Bick was drenched in blood having just killed his wife, and was in no mood to explain the situation to anyone, least of all the sheriff’s department. Dugar died in the dirt, and Bick drove off having at last grasped the necessity of changing his clothes and dumping the car. He managed to remain undetected for three days, but it was his misfortune not to be found by the police but by the Cut, or so the rumor went, which had an understanding with Dugar, and was unhappy to find it threatened by Bick’s actions. Bick’s body was found hanging upside down from a tree just across the county line, suspended by wire over the remains of the fire that had been lit beneath him, scorching his head and torso black.

‘Yeah, I know what he would have done,’ said Henkel. Dugar would have taken a spade from the trunk of his car, covered his face with a handkerchief, and reburied these bodies properly, and not another word would have been said about the whole affair. In the world inhabited by Dugar and his kind, Killian and Huff were asking for trouble, and shouldn’t have been surprised when it answered their summons. Dugar’s position on the Cut had always been clear: he wouldn’t interfere with it as long as no civilians got hurt, and it went about its business without drawing too much attention to itself.

Dugar, his successor reflected, was almost certainly burning in hell.

Henkel heard a vehicle pulling up on the road above. Bentley went to see who it was, and returned accompanied by Rob Channer, who was one of Henkel’s deputies, and far from his favorite. Henkel had effectively been arm-twisted into hiring him, and although the younger man was smart and efficient, Henkel had never warmed to him, for Channer made no secret of his ambition to be Plassey County’s youngest sheriff ever.

Channer didn’t seem bothered by the smell of the bodies. If anything, Henkel might have said that it appeared to excite him, but perhaps he was allowing his antipathy to color his worldview.

‘Man, somebody sent those boys to the Lord with a vengeance,’ said Channer. ‘Woo!’

‘How’d you find us, Rob?’ asked Henkel.

‘I passed Charlie Lutter’s place, and he was having some trouble with Perry. Dummy laid his pop on his ass right on the front lawn. I thought I’d have to Taser him. Between me and Charlie we got him calmed down, and that’s when Charlie told me what happened.’

Henkel would have put Channer in the ground beside Killian and Huff if he’d dared to Taser Perry Lutter, but he said nothing about it. He took a final look at the bodies before ordering Channer to get the tarp from the trunk of his car. There were clouds forming, and he didn’t want rain to wash away any evidence.

‘Nothing more we can do for them now,’ he said. ‘Time to call it in.’

While the Lutter farm was under the jurisdiction of Mortonsville, the bodies had been discovered outside the town limits, but neither Henkel nor Bentley had the resources to undertake a murder investigation. This was a matter for the state police.

Bentley didn’t move, and Henkel saw that Channer had paused upon hearing Henkel’s words and was looking back at them.

‘Be a good idea if word got out that these bodies have been found,’ said Bentley, and Henkel knew just what he meant.

Tell the Cut, and do it before the detectives get here.

‘Everyone will know soon enough,’ Henkel replied.

‘Yeah, but—’

Henkel faced down Bentley.

‘I can’t stop you from making personal calls, or even driving away from here,’ he said, ‘but if there’s a problem, and the state police or the feds come sniffing around, you’d better be able to explain every action you took from the time this grave was found. That goes for you too, Rob. Understand?’

After a pause, Channer nodded. Bentley shrugged.

‘I didn’t mean anything by it,’ he said.

The hell you didn’t
, thought Henkel.

‘Go on, now, Rob. Get that tarp. I’ll inform the state police’ – he turned again to Bentley – ‘unless you’d prefer to do it.’

‘It’s all yours,’ said Bentley, but he had the decency not to look Henkel in the eye.

‘Yeah,’ said Henkel. ‘That’s what I figured you’d say.’

He followed Channer up the slope, leaving Bentley behind to blend in with the general stink of corruption.

P
arker was drinking coffee at Speckled Ax on Congress while reading about plans for another big development down by the Old Port and wondering how long the Portland he loved would continue to exist.

He could just about remember a time when the Old Port catered mostly to drunken lobstermen and the kind of sailors who gave the shipping business a bad name. Back in the early seventies, when he and his parents would come to Maine to visit his grandfather during the summer, they had avoided the area around Commercial Street. It wasn’t just rough: it was actively dangerous. But most of the places that had once given the city its original tough reputation were gone. Four decades earlier, the city had sourced a federal grant to improve the Old Port area, and paid men on welfare to lay paving stones and plant trees. A handful of developers began buying properties in bulk on Fore and Wharf Streets, recognizing that, if the Old Port was to thrive, it needed restaurants and bars, and not the kind of bars where tourists might get their heads busted by fishermen. A certain amount of character was sacrificed along the way, but for a time a balance was achieved between the city as it was and the developers’ transformative vision of what it might become.

But for Parker and those like him, the Old Port now had too many new hotels, and most people of his acquaintance couldn’t afford to eat in the kinds of restaurants that were opening down there. Somewhere along the way, the city had decided to transform itself into a gourmets’ paradise, with cuisine and prices to match, which was all fine as long as the economy didn’t tank again. Those outlets sat slightly uneasily alongside the noisy tourist bars on Wharf Street, whose drunken revelers attracted an unavoidable police presence. Back in the day, order in the Old Port had been maintained by a single female police sergeant mounted on a horse notorious for its meanness, but the Portland PD had dispensed with mounted patrols back in the 1990s, and now policing the Old Port required cars and multiple uniforms.

Meanwhile, the city had finally managed to close Sangillo’s Tavern on Hampshire Street, the last of the Old Port’s true dive bars. The closure had been on the cards ever since a shooting outside Sangillo’s had left a kid in his twenties paralyzed, but it was still a shame to see it go after fifty years. The Fulci brothers, who had once removed the tavern’s door to use as a battering ram in the course of a fight, were inconsolable.

Parker drank his Americano and watched the bums go by on Congress. The street still maintained its eccentricity – Strange Maine continued to sell VHS tapes, cassettes, vinyl records, and games for consoles that no longer existed, and the Green Hand, Yes Books, and Longfellow flew the flag for the printed word, alongside galleries and smoke shops and even the Video Expo adult superstore – but the encroachment of upscale restaurants had already begun even this far west of the port, and it wasn’t hard to see a time when the folks who lived in the public housing along the street would be shuffled off to the margins where they wouldn’t offend tourist sensibilities.

His phone vibrated. He’d muted the ringtone so it wouldn’t annoy the other customers around him. He had decided that when he became governor, or world ruler – whichever came first – he’d pass a law forcing people to make and take all cell phone calls outside bars and restaurants, on pain of having their phones confiscated, or fed to them. He looked at the screen and saw that it was Gordon Walsh calling. He was surprised. They’d parted on better terms than before, but that wasn’t saying much.

Parker picked up his coffee and stepped outside.

‘Good morning, Detective Walsh,’ he said.

He didn’t receive a greeting in return.

‘Jerome Burnel just went off the reservation,’ said Walsh. ‘He missed a mandatory meeting with his probation officer, and he hasn’t been seen at his apartment since yesterday.’

Parker closed his eyes.

‘Damn,’ he said.

‘He may be running,’ said Walsh. ‘He wouldn’t be the first.’

‘I need to make some calls. Who’s his probation officer?’

‘A guy named Chris Attwood. Seems okay. He waited until this morning before sounding the alarm. Said he wanted to give Burnel a chance.’

Would it have made any difference if Attwood had called it in sooner? Parker wondered. Probably not. He wasn’t entirely ruling out the possibility that Burnel had decided to take his chances elsewhere. Even if he had been telling the truth at the Great Lost Bear, and he was marked, it didn’t mean he had to sit tight and wait for them to come for him. Yet Burnel didn’t seem as though he had the energy to flee. The simple act of telling his story to Parker had used him up, leaving him exhausted. He had barely been able to walk to his cab. Simply recounting his version of events, and telling a tale that might not be believed but needed to be shared regardless, had counted as an act of rebellion for him.

‘Have they searched his apartment?’

A probation officer didn’t require a warrant to search a probationer’s place of residence, just as a warrant wasn’t required to rearrest him if he was in violation of the terms of his probation.

‘They went in an hour ago. He didn’t leave a note, if that’s what you’re asking.’

‘Any signs of a struggle?’

‘None. Still committed to taking him on as a client?’

‘Maybe.’

‘Then I hope he paid you in advance.’

‘That’s one of the calls I need to make. I’ll get back to you.’

‘Not my case. I just thought you’d be interested.’

‘Thanks. I mean it.’

‘Look, you may hear from Attwood. I gave him a call and told him Burnel had been in touch with you. Your prospective client is now officially in breach of the conditions of his probation. Unless he has a good excuse, there’s a cell waiting for him in the county jail.’

Parker didn’t care too much whether Attwood contacted him or not. He had nothing to hide, and would give Attwood whatever information Burnel had shared, or most of it. First, though, he would take a ride over to Burnel’s lawyer and find out if Burnel had left the envelope of money with him as he’d promised. It wasn’t that Parker wanted it, but someone who was hoping to hide from the law would need all the cash he could lay his hands on. If Burnel had deposited the envelope with his lawyer, then he hadn’t run.

He’d been taken.

J
erome Burnel’s lawyer was a man named Oleg Castin, otherwise known as Moxie Castin, who operated out of an office on Marginal Way. He was famous in Maine legal circles for his inability to function without a can of Maine’s favorite carbonated beverage to hand. Back in the nineteenth century, Moxie had been marketed as a patent medicine to cure paralysis, softening of the brain, and impotence. The pitch was entirely true, if Castin was anything to go by, since he ran marathons, had a genius level IQ, and was reputed to be a penile swordsman of the highest order. Not that anyone would have known this by looking at him, since Moxie was about five-six and at least sixty pounds overweight, with the face and manner of a squirrel that was about to settle into hibernation.

There was no secretary at the reception desk when Parker arrived, but he glimpsed Castin through the open office door, lying back in his chair. Castin was wearing a pink shirt and yellow suspenders, and his pinstriped legs were resting on the open bottom drawer of his desk. His hands were clasped across his belly, and the face on his watch was big enough to adorn a church steeple. He managed to keep one eye open while Parker entered and took a seat.

‘You’re disturbing my nap,’ said Castin.

‘I hope these aren’t someone’s billable hours.’

‘I do all of my best thinking when I’m at rest, which also allows me to expend huge amounts of energy elsewhere in short bursts.’

Parker had an uncomfortable image of a tumescent Moxie in situ with one of his many female conquests, expending some of that energy. Sometimes he worried about the workings of his imagination.