Merriman took a drink and shook his head. “Nah, Strollo wasn’t that tight with Dominic. Acquainted with him, sure, colleagues you might say, but not that tight.”
“What a wonderful reassurance.”
He smiled again. “You sound damn edgy about this, Lincoln.”
“You would be, too, had Dominic Sanabria paid a visit to your home.”
“By all accounts, Sanabria has settled down these days. Living on the straight and narrow. Nary a complaint.”
“Be that as it may, there were a few complaints in years past, and some of them involved car bombs.”
He acknowledged that with a nod and drank some more of his beer. “Did he threaten you?”
“Not overtly, but he also went out of his way to make sure the notion was in my head. It wasn’t a relaxing conversation.”
“How do you think he got wind of you so fast?”
“The attorney.”
“Anthony Child? That makes sense.”
“Of course it does. He called you, too.”
He wagged his finger at me. “Wrong. Nice try, but wrong.”
“Okay, then who did call you, Ken? Who sent you up from Pittsburgh to ply me with booze and get me to talk?”
“Booze was your idea. I just fell in line.”
“We’re not going to accomplish much,” I said, “if neither one of us is willing to say who we’re working for. That’s fine with me. There’s nothing that I want to accomplish. That doesn’t seem to be the case for you.”
“If I tell you who tipped me, do I get reciprocity? Will you tell me your client’s name?”
I shook my head.
“Damn,” he said. “I was afraid of that. But the good news, Lincoln, is that ultimately I’m not too worried about your client. That’s not why I’m here.”
“No? Then what is it?”
“I want you to work with me. Or, rather, I’d like to work with you. I’ve done some background research. Seems like you’re awfully good. I need help on this one.”
“By this one, you mean . . .”
“Finding out who killed Joshua Cantrell.”
I shook my head. “No thanks, Ken.”
“Sanabria scared you that much, huh?”
“It’s not just that, though I’ll admit he did a damn good job. There’s nothing in it for me. I have no interest in it.”
“Really.” His Guinness was almost gone. “I’m surprised to hear that. Because what this one has, man, is some intrigue, and most of the detectives I know, well, they go for that sort of thing. The challenge. At least the detectives who are worth a damn.”
“Then I must not qualify for that list.”
“So if I were to say I could fill you in on Cantrell’s history, tell you about the happy couple, what they did up until the time they vanished, you’d say no thanks? Prefer not to hear about it?”
“All I care to hear about is how you learned that I’d inquired about their house.”
“You want to know that, I’ll tell you,” he said, “but you’ll have to sit through the rest of it, too. Because if I start, I’m starting at the beginning.”
I didn’t answer.
He slid out of the booth and got to his feet. “You want a pass on that, I’ll walk out the door and drive back home. If you want to hear about it, though, then I think I better buy another round.”
Somebody burst into loud laughter at the bar while Ken Merriman stood above me, waiting. Then the laughter faded and it was quiet.
Merriman shifted and spread his hands. “Well?”
“Bring me another Moosehead,” I said, “and a bourbon. I think I’ll need both.”
_________
He’d been hired by Joshua Cantrell’s parents, James and Maria, about two months after their son and daughter-in-law left the house near Hinckley for places unknown. It wasn’t an especially close-knit family—the Cantrells hadn’t been on the best terms with their son in many years, too many social and ideological differences— but it was also unusual for weeks to pass without any word. When they finally called, they learned the phone was disconnected.
“Took them about another month to grow concerned enough to hire me,” Ken said. “They drove out and saw the house was empty, then went to the local police, who nosed around enough to determine that Alexandra had made arrangements for the care of the place. That implied a willing departure, not a crime. Nothing illegal about ignoring your parents.”
James and Maria Cantrell couldn’t believe their son would have made such an abrupt, unannounced departure, and as the weeks went by and still no word came, they grew certain something was terribly wrong.
“When they came to see me that first time, they were petrified,” Ken said. “It was difficult to get anything close to a fact out of them.”
What he found, once he began looking into the situation, was that there weren’t many facts. The only person who’d had any knowledge of the couple’s plans to leave was Anthony Child, and he’d been contacted by phone. Child swore that he knew Alexandra’s voice and believed without a doubt that she was the one who’d given him his instructions.
“For twelve years the police have refused to look into this because that woman’s contact with Child suggested they’d just gotten a wild hair and taken off somewhere,” Ken said when he returned from the bar with two more beers and two more bourbons. “Until the body was found, at least. That’s shaken things up.”
The problem, Ken admitted, was that the couple seemed like the type who
Ken worked the case for months and never developed a lead on the missing couple’s whereabouts or the reason for their departure. What he did learn was a great deal about their past, including one particularly interesting detail: For years, the couple had maintained a relationship with the state’s department of corrections, helping to transition violent offenders through the early stages of parole.
“They met when they were both studying offender rehabilitation in graduate school,” Ken told me. “Found some sort of mutual interest there. Academic for Joshua, personal for Alexandra. You can imagine why. Her father had been in and out of jail before being murdered, and her brothers were moving quickly down the same path. Anyhow, once they were married, she and Joshua teamed up to write a few papers, conducted some studies, and got hooked up with an alternative program that snagged a federal grant. At that time, the state was real concerned with engaging the offender’s family to help with reentry. The problem that the Cantrells raised was, what about the offender who has no family, or whose family is a cancer to him?”
I sipped my beer and kept my eyes on the table while I listened, not wanting to react in a way that suggested this was anything but new to me. I still hadn’t decided whether I’d disclose Harrison’s identity, but this twist in the conversation had me wondering if Ken would bring him up of his own accord.
“A police detective called me a few months back, after Cantrell’s body was found,” he said. “They’d heard I’d investigated in the beginning, and he wanted to know if I’d come across anyone who could work as a homicide suspect. I told him, yeah, I’ve got twenty-eight names.”
The twenty-eight names belonged to the violent offenders Alexandra and Joshua had helped transition back into the world. We had another round of drinks while Ken recited their crimes, which ranged from bank robbery to rape and murder. As of Ken’s last count, nineteen of them were still free, and two were dead.
“That means only seven of the offenders who worked with the Cantrells returned to prison,” he said. “You know anything about recidivism numbers?”
