The Burning Soul: A Charlie Parker Thriller

AUTHOR INTRODUCTION

A novel is often a reaction, either consciously or unconsciously, to the book that preceded it, as I think I’ve mentioned in one of the other introductions to this series. A big, sprawling, action-packed novel may well inspire a writer to adopt a more intimate tone in his next effort, and vice versa. Such is the case with The Burning Soul, which followed The Whisperers, a novel inspired by the poor treatment of U.S. veterans returning from the conflict in Iraq.

With The Burning Soul, I wanted to write a book about identity, and whether we are defined by our sins. (It’s a theme that I’ve returned to in A Song of Shadows, the Parker novel completed just before I began writing this introduction.) Part of the inspiration came from a series of newspaper stories that appeared shortly before I started work on the book, stories that brought back to public attention one of the most horrific murders in recent British history.

On February 12, 1993, a two-year-old boy named James Bulger was abducted from a shopping center in Bootle, near Liverpool. His body, brutalized and mutilated, was discovered on a railway line two days later. On February 20, two ten-year-old boys, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, were charged with his abduction and murder. These two children, both troubled in their own ways, had brought out the worst in each other: alone, neither one might ever have acted as they did together.

In November 1993, Thompson and Venables were sentenced to be imprisoned until they reached the age of eighteen, after which they would be released on a lifelong licence, meaning that, if they offended again, they could be returned to jail.

The two young men were given their freedom in 2001. Under the terms of their release, they were to be provided with new identities and new locations in which to base themselves. A worldwide injunction was placed upon publishing any details of their lives.

Subsequently, Jon Venables was recalled to prison for accessing images of child abuse, although he has since been granted parole. Venables’s imprisonment came as a surprise to those familiar with the two men, as it had always been considered that Thompson would be more likely to come to police attention again.

I suppose I was struck by a number of elements of the case. The first was that a deeply unfortunate set of circumstances had brought Thompson and Venables together, creating a kind of perfect storm of preadolescent rage that would ultimately be unleashed on poor James Bulger. The second was to wonder just how any person could begin a new life after being convicted of committing such a crime.

It’s almost impossible to explain to anyone who isn’t familiar with events as they unfolded just how deep the hatred of Thompson and Venables ran in Britain. Had they been handed over to the public, it’s hard to believe that they wouldn’t have been torn apart. They were labeled as evil, and tabloid newspapers took a particular pleasure in exposing aspects of their lives behind bars. Even when they were released, and despite the injunctions on publicizing their new identities, there was, I think, a belief that they were fair game.

Let’s say that you have, as a child, committed a crime of undeniable awfulness: a murder that makes of you an object of intense hatred to society. You’re imprisoned, albeit in a system that is trying to rehabilitate you. Nevertheless, upon your release you will no longer bear the name of the child who committed that crime. That person will, on one level, cease to exist. You will begin again with a new identity. It’s a mask that you will have to wear for the rest of your life, but underneath, won’t you still be the person who committed that crime? Even as an adult, won’t you carry something of the child that you were inside you?

It’s possible that we’ll never know a great deal about the adult Venables and Thompson unless they come to the attention of the police again for a serious offence, and even then it’s unlikely that much will be revealed for fear of what might happen to them in prison. But that idea of the fracturing of identity, of that enforced denial—in public, at least—of a past life, fascinated me.

I also wondered if we are to be defined only by the wrongs we have done in life, and if there are some crimes so terrible that we can never escape their shadow. Where does that leave concepts of rehabilitation, of forgiveness, even of salvation if one believes in a life beyond this one? When Hodder & Stoughton asked me for a shout line for the book—the shout line being that attention-grabbing statement or question that usually appears on the cover—the one that came to mind was What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?

So in The Burning Soul we learn very quickly that Randall Haight killed a young girl when he was a teenager and has since built a new life in Maine, a life that is now threatened by the fact that someone has apparently uncovered the details of his past. But everyone in The Burning Soul is hiding something, for all identities are fluid. Even the best of us present different versions of ourselves to others depending upon the situation, or our levels of intimacy with them, or our desire—even need—to be liked, to be appreciated, to be understood. We are all experts at concealment, and there are aspects of our personality about which we don’t want others to know, aspects that we may even be hiding from ourselves. In that sense, we are all living secret lives.

1

PUT THE CASE, PIP, THAT HERE WAS ONE PRETTY LITTLE CHILD OUT OF THE HEAP, WHO COULD BE SAVED; . . . THE LEGAL ADVISER HAD THIS POWER: I KNOW WHAT YOU DID, AND HOW YOU DID IT. YOU CAME SO AND SO, THIS WAS YOUR MANNER OF ATTACK AND THIS THE MANNER OF RESISTANCE, YOU WENT SO AND SO, YOU DID SUCH AND SUCH THINGS TO DIVERT SUSPICION. I HAVE TRACKED YOU THROUGH IT ALL, AND I TELL IT YOU ALL. PART WITH THE CHILD. . . . GIVE THE CHILD INTO MY HANDS.

—Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

CHAPTER

I

Gray sea, gray sky, but fire in the woods and the trees aflame. No heat, no smoke, but still the forests burned, crowning with red and yellow and orange; a cold conflagration with the coming of fall, and the leaves resignedly descending. There was mortality in the air, borne on the first hint of winter breezes, the threatening chill of them, and the animals prepared for the coming snows. The foraging had begun, the filling of bellies for leaner times. Hunger would make the more vulnerable creatures take risks in order to feed, and the predators would be waiting. Black spiders squatted at the corners of their webs, not yet slumbering. There were still stray insects to be had, and further trophies to be added to their collections of withered husks. Winter coats grew thick, and fur began to lighten, the better to blend in against the snow. Contrails of geese arrowed the skies like refugees fleeing a coming conflict, abandoning those forced to stay and face what was to come.

The ravens were motionless. Many of their far-northern brethren had headed south to escape the worst of the winter, but not these birds. They were huge yet sleek, their eyes bright with an alien intelligence. Some on this remote road had noticed them already, and if they had company on their walks, or in their automobiles, they commented on the presence of the birds. Yes, it was agreed, they were larger than the usual ravens, and perhaps, too, they brought with them a sense of discomfort, these hunched beings, these patient, treacherous scouts. They were perched deep among the branches of an ancient oak, an organism approaching the end of its days, its leaves falling earlier each year, so that by the end of every September it was already bare, a charred thing amid the flames, as though the all-consuming fire had already had its way with it, leaving behind only the smoke smudges of long-abandoned nests. The tree stood at the edge of a small copse that jutted slightly at this place to follow the curvature of the road, with the oak as its farthest point. Once there were others like it, but the men who built the road had cut them down many years before. It was now alone of its kind, and soon it too would be gone.

But the ravens had come to it, for the ravens liked dying things.

The smaller birds fled their company, and regarded the intruders warily from the cover of evergreen foliage. They had silenced the woods behind them. They radiated threat: the stillness of them, their claws curled upon the branches, the bladelike sharpness of their beaks. They were stalkers, watchers, waiting for the hunt to begin. The ravens were so statuesque, so immobile, that they might have been mistaken for misshapen outcroppings of the tree itself, tumorous growths upon its bark. It was unusual to see so many together, for ravens are not social birds; a pair, yes, but not six, not like this, not without food in sight.

Walk on, walk on. Leave them behind, but not before casting one last anxious glance at them, for to see them was to be reminded of what it is to be pursued, to be tracked from above while the hunters follow remorselessly. That is what ravens do; they lead the wolves to their prey, and take a portion of the spoils as payment for their labors. You want them to move. You want them to leave. Even the common raven was somehow disturbing, but these were not common ravens. No, these were most uncommon birds. Darkness was approaching, and still they waited. They might almost have been slumbering were it not for the way the fading light caught the blackness of their eyes, and how they captured the early moon when the clouds broke, imprisoning its image within themselves.

A short-tailed weasel emerged from the rotted stump that was her home and tested the air. Its brown fur was already altering, the darkness growing out of it, the mammal becoming a ghost of itself. She had been aware of the birds for some time, but she was hungry and anxious to feed. Her litter had dispersed, and she would not breed again until the new year. Her nest was lined with mouse fur for insulation, but the little larder in which she had stored her surplus of slain rodents was now empty. The weasel had to eat forty percent of her own body weight each day in order to survive. That was about four mice a day, but the animals had been scarce on her regular routes.

The ravens seemed to ignore her appearance, but the weasel was too shrewd to risk her life on the absence of movement. She turned herself so that she was facing into her nest, and used her black-tipped tail as bait to see if the birds were tempted to strike. If they did, they would miss her body in aiming for her tail and she would retreat to the safety of the stump, but the ravens did not react. The weasel’s nose twitched. Suddenly there was sound, and light. Headlights bathed the ravens, and now their heads moved, following the beams. The weasel, torn between fright and hunger, allowed her belly to choose. She disappeared into the woods while the ravens were distracted, and was soon lost from sight.

The car wound its way along the road, traveling faster than was wise and taking the bends more widely than it should, for it was hard to see vehicles approaching from the opposite direction, and a traveler unfamiliar with this route might easily have found himself in a head-on collision, or tearing a path through the bushes that lined the road. He might, were this the kind of road that travelers took, but few visitors came here. The town absorbed their impact, the apparent dullness of it dissuading further investigation, then spat them back the way they came, over the bridge and toward Route 1, there to continue north to the border, or south to the highway and on to Augusta and Portland, the big cities, the places that the peninsula’s residents strove so hard to avoid. So no tourists, but strangers sometimes paused here on their life’s journey, and after a time, if they proved suitable, the peninsula would find a place for them, and they would become part of a community with its back to the land and its face set hard against the sea.

There were many such communities in this state; they attracted those who wished to escape, those who sought the protection of the frontier, for this was still an edge state with boundaries of wood and sea. Some chose the anonymity of the forests, where the wind in the trees made a sound like the breaking of waves upon the shore, an echo of the ocean’s song to the east. But here, in this place, there were forest and sea; there were rocks ringing the inlet, and a narrow causeway that paralleled the bridge linking the mainland and those who had chosen to set themselves apart from it; there was a town with a single main street, and enough money to fund a small police department. The peninsula was large, with a scattered population beyond the cluster of buildings around Main Street. Also, for administrative and geographic reasons long forgotten, the township of Pastor’s Bay stretched across the causeway and west to the mainland. For years the county sheriff policed Pastor’s Bay until the town looked at its budget and decided that not only could it afford its own force, it might actually save money in the process, and so the Pastor’s Bay Police Department was born.

But when locals spoke of Pastor’s Bay it was the peninsula to which they were referring, and the police were their police. Outsiders often referred to it as the island, even though it was not an island because of the natural connector to the mainland, although it was the bridge that received the most traffic. It was wide enough to take a decent two-lane road, and high enough to avoid any risk of the community being entirely cut off in foul weather, although there were times when the waves rose and washed over the road, and a stone cross on the mainland side attested to the former presence on this earth of one Maylock Wheeler, who was washed away in 1997 while walking his dog, Kaya. The dog survived, and was adopted by a couple on the mainland, for Maylock Wheeler had been a bachelor of the most pronounced sort. But the dog kept trying to return to the island, as those who are born of such places often will, and eventually the couple gave up trying to hold on to it, and it was taken in by Grover Corneau, who was the chief of police at the time. It remained with Grover until his retirement, and a week separated the deaths of the dog and its owner. A photograph of them together remained on the wall of the Pastor’s Bay Police Department. It made Kurt Allan, Grover’s replacement, wonder if he also should acquire a dog, but Allan lived alone, and was not used to animals.

It was Allan’s car that now passed beneath the old oak and pulled up before the house across the road. He looked to the west and shielded his eyes against the last of the setting sun, bisected by the horizon. There were more cars coming. He had told the others to follow. The woman would need them. Detectives from the Maine State Police were also on their way following the confirmation of the AMBER Alert, and the National Crime Information Center had automatically been notified of a missing child. A decision would be made within the coming hours on whether to seek further assistance from the FBI.

The house was a ranch-style dwelling, neatly kept and freshly painted. The fallen leaves had been raked and added to a compost pile at the sheltered side of the building. For a woman without a man to help her, a woman not of this place, she had managed well, he thought.

And the ravens watched as Allan knocked on the door, and the door opened, and words were spoken, and he stepped inside, and there was no sound or movement from within for a time. Two more cars arrived. From the first vehicle stepped an elderly man with a worn leather physician’s bag. The other was driven by a woman of late middle age wearing a blue overcoat that caught in the car door as she rushed to the house. It tore, but she did not stop to examine the damage after wrenching it free. There were more important matters to which to attend.

The new arrivals had come together and were halfway across the yard when the front door opened wide and a woman ran toward them. She was in her late thirties, carrying a little weight on her waist and her thighs, her hair flying loose behind her. They stopped suddenly at the sight of her, and the middle-aged woman raised her arms as though expecting the other to fall into her embrace, but instead the younger woman pushed her way past them, jostling the doctor, one of her shoes falling from her foot, and the white stones on the drive tore at her skin so that she left smears of blood across them. She stumbled and landed heavily, and when she rose again her jeans were ripped, and her knees were scratched, and one of her fingernails was broken. Kurt Allan appeared in the doorway, but the woman was already on the road and her hands were at her mouth and she screamed a name over and over and over . . .

Anna! Anna! Anna!

She was crying now, and she wanted to run, but the road curved to the right and to the left, and she did not know which way to turn. The middle-aged woman came to her and wrapped her in her arms at last, even as her charge fought against her, and the doctor and Allan were approaching as she screamed the name again. Birds took flight from the surrounding trees, and unseen creatures burst from brush and scrub as though to carry the message.

The girl is gone, the girl is gone.

Only the ravens remained. The sun was at last swallowed by the horizon, and true darkness began to fall. The ravens became part of it, absorbed by it and absorbing it in turn, for their blackness was deeper than any night.

Eventually the weasel returned. The fat corpse of a field mouse hung limply in her jaws, and she could taste its blood in her mouth. It was all that she could do not to tear it apart as soon as she had killed it, but her instincts told her to control her urges. Her self-restraint was rewarded, though, for a smaller mouse had crossed her path as she returned to her home, and she fed on that instead before hiding its remains. Perhaps she would retrieve them later, once her larger prize was safely stored away.

She did not hear the raven’s approach. Her first awareness of it came with the impact of its talons upon her back, tearing through her coat and into her flesh. It pinned her to the ground, then slowly began to peck at her, its long beak carving neat holes in her body. The raven did not feed upon her. It simply tortured her to death, taking its time over her agonies. When it had reduced her to a mess of blood and fur, it left the corpse for the scavengers and rejoined its companions. They were waiting for the hunt to begin, and they were curious about the hunter who was to come.

No, the one who had sent them was curious about him, and they watched on his behalf.

For he was the greatest predator of them all.

CHAPTER

II

There are some truths so terrible that they should not be spoken aloud, so appalling that even to acknowledge them is to risk sacrificing a crucial part of one’s humanity, to exist in a colder, crueller world than before. The paradox is that, if this realm is not to be turned into a charnel house, there are those who must accept these truths while always holding fast in their hearts, in their souls, to the possibility that once, just once, the world might give them the lie, that, on this occasion, God will not have blinked.

Here is one of those truths: after three hours, the abduction of a child is routinely treated as a homicide.

THE FIRST PROBLEM ENCOUNTERED by those investigating Anna Kore’s disappearance arose out of the delay in activating the AMBER Alert. She had disappeared from a small but busy strip mall on the mainland, where she had gone with a school friend, Helen Dubuque, and Helen’s mother to do some Saturday shopping, and particularly to pick up a copy of The Great Gatsby for schoolwork. She left the Dubuques to go to the new-and-used bookstore while they went into Sears to buy school shoes for Helen. They were not excessively worried when twenty minutes went by and Anna still had not joined them; she was a bookstore child, and they felt sure that she had simply curled up in a corner with a novel and started reading, losing herself entirely in the narrative.

But she was not in the bookstore. The clerk remembered Anna and said that she had not stayed long, barely browsing the shelves before collecting her book and leaving. Helen and her mother returned to their car, but Anna was not there. They tried her cell phone, but it went straight to voice mail. They searched the mall, which did not take long, then called Anna’s home, just in case she had caught a ride back with someone else and neglected to inform them, although this would have been out of character for her. Valerie Kore, Anna’s mother, was not at home. Later, it would emerge that she was having her hair done by Louise Doucet, who ran a small hairdressing business from the back of her home off Main Street. Valerie’s phone rang while she was having her hair washed, and she could not hear it above the sound of the water.

Finally, Mrs. Dubuque called not 911 but the Pastor’s Bay Police Department itself. This was force of habit and nothing more, a consequence of living in a small town with its own police force, but it created a further delay while Chief Allan debated whether to alert the sheriff’s department and the state police, who would, in turn, inform their Criminal Investigation Division. By the time the AMBER Alert was issued, more than an hour and a quarter had gone by, or more than a third of the three-hour period regarded as crucial in any potential abduction of a minor, after which the child would be presumed dead for the purposes of the investigation.

But once the alarm was raised the authorities reacted quickly. The state had set procedures for such disappearances, and they were immediately activated, coordinated by IMAT, the joint organizational incident-management team. Police patrols converged on the area and began riding the routes. An evidence response team was sent to Pastor’s Bay, and plans were made to forensically examine Anna Kore’s computer, and to seek a signed waiver from her mother granting them access to Anna’s cell-phone records without subpoena. Her service provider was alerted, and efforts were made to triangulate the location of Anna’s phone, but whoever had taken her had not only turned off her phone but also removed its battery, making it impossible to trace it by pinging the towers.

The victim’s details were passed to the National Crime Information Center, whereupon Anna Kore officially became a missing or endangered person. This in turn triggered an automatic notification to the Center for Missing & Exploited Children, and to the FBI. Team Adam, the NCMEC’s specialized missing children’s squad, was prepped, and the FBI’s regional Child Abduction Response Team in Boston (CART) was put on alert pending a formal request for assistance from the Maine State Police. The game wardens began preparations for a full search of the natural areas surrounding the scene of the presumed abduction.

When the three-hour marker was passed, and Anna Kore had still not been found, a ripple ran through the law-enforcement officials. It was a silent acknowledgment that the nature of the investigation must now inevitably change. A list was assembled of family members and close associates, the first suspects when any harm comes to a child. All agreed to be questioned, backed up by polygraph tests. Valerie Kore was questioned first.

Five minutes into her interview, a new call was made to the FBI.

ANNA KORE HAD BEEN missing for more than seventy-two hours, but it was a strange disappearance, if it can be said that the circumstances of the abduction of one child are stranger than those of another. It might be more correct to say that the aftermath was proving stranger, for Valerie Kore, the bereft mother, did not behave in the way that might have been expected of one in her circumstances. She seemed reluctant to appear before the cameras at first. There were no quotes from her, or from relatives speaking on her behalf, in the TV reports or the newspapers, not initially. The vanishing of her daughter only gradually became part of a public spectacle, the latest act in an ongoing performance that played upon the general fascination with rape, murder, and assorted human tragedies. It was left to the police, both state and local, to farm out information about the girl to the media, and in the first twelve hours following the AMBER Alert those details were given out sparingly. Veteran reporters felt that there were mixed signals coming from the authorities, and they scented another story behind the bare facts of the girl’s disappearance, but any attempts to work their police sources were rebuffed. Even the local population of Pastor’s Bay seemed to have closed ranks, and the reporters had difficulty finding anyone who was prepared to comment on the case in even the most general of terms, although this was attributed to the characteristic oddness of the population rather than to any great conspiracy of silence.

After her daughter had been missing for three days, Valerie Kore consented to, or was permitted to give, her first public interview, in which she would appeal for anyone with information about her daughter to come forward. Such appeals had both advantages and disadvantages. They attracted more attention from the general public, and thus could lead potential witnesses to offer help. On the other hand, it was often the case that the more emotional the pressure applied to the culprit in these cases, the greater the walls he or she might put up, so a public appeal risked antagonizing the abductor. Nevertheless, it was decided that Valerie should face the cameras.

The press conference took place in the town hall of Pastor’s Bay, a simple wood-frame building just off what was called Main Street but might just as well have been termed Only Street, since Main Street implied that there were other thoroughfares worthy of note when, in fact, the town of Pastor’s Bay pretty much vanished if you stepped more than a stone’s throw in any direction from the bright lights of Main. There was a drugstore and a general store, both owned by the same family and situated adjacent to each other; two bars, one of which doubled as a pizzeria; a gas station; a bed-and-breakfast establishment that didn’t advertise its presence, as the owners were anxious to avoid attracting the wrong kind of clientele, and so relied entirely on word of mouth and, it was sometimes suggested, psychic emanations in order to secure custom; two small houses of worship, one Baptist and one Catholic, that didn’t unduly advertise their presence either; and a small library that opened mornings only, and not at all if the librarian was otherwise occupied. When the media circus was given strictly controlled access to the town, it was the most significant influx of strangers that Pastor’s Bay had known since the town was properly established in 1787.

Pastor’s Bay took its name from a lay preacher named James Weston Harris, who arrived in the area in 1755 during the war between the English and the French. One year previously, Harris had been among the small group of forty men led by William Trent who were given the responsibility of building a fortification at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers in the Ohio Country. The Frenchman Contrecoeur arrived with five hundred men before the stockade could be completed, but he allowed Trent’s party to depart unmolested, and even purchased their construction tools to continue building what would subsequently become Fort Duquesne.

Harris, who had believed himself to be in mortal danger, and had become resigned to death at the hands of the French, took his salvation as a sign that he should commit himself more fully to spreading the word of God, and so he led his family to the tip of a peninsula in New England with the intention of establishing a settlement. The Penobscot Indians, who had sided with the French against the English, in part because of their natural antipathy toward the English’s Mohawk allies, were unimpressed by Harris’s renewed sense of vocation and hacked him to pieces within a month of his arrival. His family was spared, though, and following the cessation of hostilities they returned to the area and created the community that would ultimately become known as Pastor’s Bay. The family’s luck did not improve, however, and the twin forces of mortality and disillusionment eventually cleansed Pastor’s Bay of any lingering Harris presence. Still, they left a town behind them, although there were those who said that Pastor’s Bay had been blighted by the original killing, for it never truly thrived. It survived, and that was about the best that could be said for it.

Now, after the passage of centuries, Pastor’s Bay found itself the focus of serious attention for the first time since the seeds of its foundation were sown and sprinkled with James Weston Harris’s blood. News vehicles were parked on Main Street, and reporters stood before cameras, the thoroughfare to their backs, and spoke of the agonies being experienced by this small Maine town. They thrust microphones into the faces of those who had no desire to see themselves on television, or to speak with strangers about the misfortunes of one of their own. Valerie Kore and her daughter might have been from away, but they had made their home in Pastor’s Bay, and its people protectively closed ranks around them. In this they were not discouraged by their police chief, a turn of events that caused some citizens of Pastor’s Bay to whisper, just like the reporters, that there might be more to the disappearance of Anna Kore than met the eye.

A table had been set up at one side of the town hall, with coffee and cookies available for the visitors. The table was staffed by Ellie and Erin Houghton, twin spinsters of uncertain vintage, one of whom, Erin, was also the town librarian, while her sister managed the mysterious, elitist bed-and-breakfast, although it was not unknown for them to swap roles when the mood struck them. Since they were identical, this made little difference to the smooth running of the community. They served coffee in the same manner in which they performed all their tasks, voluntary or otherwise: with a politeness that did not invite undue intimacy, and a sternness that brooked no disobedience. When the first reporters began jostling for space at the table, and some creamer was spilled as a consequence, the sisters made clear from the way they held the coffeepots that such nonsense would not be tolerated, and the hardened journalists accepted the rebuke like meek schoolchildren.

All questions were directed to Lieutenant Stephen Logan, the head of the Maine State Police’s Criminal Investigation Division for the southern region of the state, although he occasionally deferred to the Pastor’s Bay chief of police, Kurt Allan, on local matters. If the question merited it, Allan in turn would look to the pale woman beside him to see if she had a reply, and then only if it was not possible for him to provide the answer himself. When she did not wish to respond, she would simply shake her head once. When she did respond, it was with as few words as possible. No, she had no idea why someone would want to take her daughter. No, there had been no argument between them, or nothing unfamiliar to any mother of a strong-willed fourteen-year-old girl. She appeared composed, but anyone examining her more closely would have seen that Valerie Kore was holding herself together through sheer force of will. It was like looking at a dam that was on the verge of breaking, where a keen eye could discern the cracks in the façade that threatened to unleash the forces building behind it. Only when she was asked about the girl’s father did those cracks become readily apparent to all. Valerie tried to speak, but the words choked her, and for the first time tears fell. It was left to Logan to intervene and announce that law-enforcement officers were searching for the father, one Alekos Alex Kore, now estranged from his wife, in the hope that he might be able to help them with their inquiries. When asked if Kore was a suspect in his daughter’s disappearance, Logan would say only that the police were not ruling out any possibilities, but were anxious simply to eliminate Alekos Kore from their inquiries. Then a reporter from one of the Boston newspapers complained about the difficulties of getting information and comments from the police, and there were some murmurs of agreement. Allan fudged the answer, talking about what he termed familial sensitivities, but half of Maine could have given a better answer to the question, and one that would have satisfied those with anything more than a passing knowledge of that part of the world.

It was Pastor’s Bay. They were just different up there.

But that wasn’t the entire truth.

It wasn’t even close.

I WATCHED THE PRESS conference on the early evening news, standing in the living room of my house as my daughter, Sam, finished her milk and sandwich in the kitchen. Rachel, Sam’s mother and my ex-girlfriend, sat on the edge of an armchair, her eyes fixed on the screen. She and Sam were on their way to Boston to catch a flight to LA, where Rachel was due to address a symposium on clinical advances in cognitive psychotherapy. She had tried to explain the substance of these advances to me earlier, but I could only assume that the attendees at the symposium were smarter than I was, and had longer attention spans. Rachel had friends in Orange County with whom she planned to stay, and their daughter was a few months older than Sam. The symposium would take up only one day, and the rest of their time in California was to be devoted to long-promised trips to Disneyland and Universal Studios.

Sam and Rachel lived on Rachel’s parents’ property in Burlington, Vermont. I spent time with Sam as often as I could, but not as often as I should, a situation complicated, or so I told myself, by the fact that Rachel had been seeing someone else for more than a year now. Jeff Reid was an older man, a former executive with the capital-markets division of a major bank who had retired early, thereby nicely avoiding the fallout of the various scandals and collapses to which he had probably contributed. I didn’t know that for sure, but I was petty enough to envy him his place in Rachel and Sam’s life. I’d bumped into him once when I was visiting Sam for her birthday, and he’d tried to overwhelm me with bonhomie. He had all the moves of one who has spent a large portion of his life and career making others trust him, justifiably or not: the wide smile, the firm handshake, the left hand on my upper arm to make me feel valued. Seconds after meeting him, I was checking to make sure that I still had my wallet and my watch.

I studied Rachel as she took in the details of the conference. She had allowed a little gray to creep into her red hair, and there were lines around her eyes and mouth that I could not recall from before, but she was still very beautiful. I felt an ache in my heart for her, and I salved it with the knowledge that all was as it should be, however much I missed them both.

What do you think? I said.

Her body language is wrong, said Rachel. She doesn’t want to be there, and not just because she’s trapped in every mother’s nightmare. She looks frightened, and I don’t think it’s because of the reporters. I’d hazard a guess that she’s hiding something. Have you heard anything about the case?

No, but then I haven’t been asking.

The coverage of the news conference ended, and the anchorwoman moved on to foreign wars. I heard a noise behind me, and saw that Sam had been watching the news from the hall. She was tall for her age, with a lighter version of her mother’s hair, and serious brown eyes.

What happened to the girl? she asked, as she entered the room. She had what was left of her sandwich in her right hand, and was chewing on a mouthful of it. There were crumbs on her sweater, and I brushed them off. She looked unhappy about it. Maybe she’d been planning to save them for later.

They don’t know, I said. She disappeared, and now they’re trying to find her.

Did she run away? Sometimes people run away.

Could be, honey.

She handed the remains of the sandwich to me. I don’t want any more.

Thanks, I said. I’ll have it framed.

Sam looked at me oddly, then asked if she could go outside.

Sure, said Rachel. But stay where we can see you.

Sam turned to go, then paused.

Daddy, she said, you find people, don’t you?

Yes, I find people.

You should go find the girl, she said, then trotted off. Moments later, the top of her head appeared at the window as she began exploring the flower beds. On her last visit she had helped me plant native perennials, for I had let the garden go a little since she and