I went into the apartment and drank another glass of water, this time with a few ibuprofen tablets, and then went into the bedroom and slept. There were no dreams.
Morning found me at the office with an extralarge cup of coffee and a continued headache, researching Ken Merriman. I spent most of an hour at it, and while everything he’d told me the previous night checked out—he was from Pittsburgh, had worked as a PI for fourteen years, was divorced, and had a fourteen-year-old daughter—there were a few details he’d chosen to omit. Namely, the unpleasant press he’d received from the Cantrell case.
James and Maria Cantrell had given an interview after their son disappeared, imploring the public to help in their quest. As a part of that interview, they let loose on Ken, claiming he’d taken thousands from them and done nothing on the case. James even suggested they would consider a lawsuit against Ken but couldn’t afford the legal fees. The reporter had contacted Ken only to be given a “no comment” response. It wasn’t necessarily a fair attack—every PI in the business knows the headaches that come from clients who believe they’re paying for a specific result, not for work that may produce no result or one contrary to the client’s wishes—but it was the sort of publicity that could damage a career, too. I was impressed that Ken had survived it, and I understood a little better why he seemed to be stuck with insurance and infidelity work now. Still, the Sanabria call lingered with me, and that odd personal revelation toward the end of the night. Had it been too much? A melodramatic sales technique?
I knew a PI in the Pittsburgh area through a group called NALI, the National Association of Legal Investigators, a generally high quality group of PIs. His name was Casey Hopper, and he was about Joe’s age; he’d been around the business a long time and knew who was worth a shit and who wasn’t. I decided it might be worth a call to see if he’d ever heard of Ken.
“Good guy,” Casey said as soon as I mentioned the name. “I’ve worked with him several times.”
“You trust him?”
“Much as I trust anyone I don’t know particularly well, sure. He’s always seemed genuine enough to me, but, you know, there’ve been some stories about him. Well, one story really.”
He then proceeded to relate the Cantrell case to me, and I let him run with it. His take seemed to jibe with every other account—and that included Ken’s.
“You thinking about giving him some work?” Casey asked.
“The other way around. He’s wanting to partner up on something. I’m not sure about it.”
“Well, I can tell you this: He’s one hell of a surveillance expert. Good as anybody I’ve worked with, in that regard. Damn near invisible, and the most patient son of a bitch I’ve ever seen.” He paused, then added, “You know I was a sniper in Vietnam, too.”
“Yeah.”
“So when I say somebody is patient . . .”
“Yeah.”
“Thing with Ken, though, is that’s really all the work he gets. He has a steady client base on the surveillance side, insurance and divorce work, shit like that, but as far as a field investigation goes, I don’t know that he has much experience at all. I gave him an interview job once when I was out of town, subbed it out to him, and he screwed that up pretty royally. Just didn’t know how to take a statement that would be worth a shit in court. So I’ve avoided giving him anything like that again, and that seems to be the general consensus about him around here. Give him any extra surveillance work you’ve got; otherwise, find somebody else. He wasn’t a cop, wasn’t mentored by a good PI, doesn’t really have any background on a full-scale investigation, but the son of a bitch can hide in your rearview mirror.”
That wasn’t exactly encouraging, since the case he wanted a piece of now was going to require the polar opposite of his skill set.
“The Cantrell thing is what he’s interested in coming back to,” I said. “I bumped into it inadvertently up here, and he looked me up and asked me to help.”
“He’s back at that? Who the hell is paying him?”
“Nobody. He claims he wants to finish now what he couldn’t then. You buy it?”
Casey was quiet for a moment. “Yeah, I probably do. It did some real damage to his career basically
I thanked him for the insight and hung up. Then I went back to search for more information and found little else. Beyond that story, there was nothing that stood out, and certainly no indicators that Ken had been telling me anything but the truth. His loyalty to the family seemed odd, considering the charges they’d levied at him, but perhaps his real motivation was in proving them wrong all these years later.
It was ten thirty by the time Ken showed up, and he looked rough. Same clothes as he’d had on the previous day, only now his face had a darker shading of beard and the whites of his eyes wore pink cobwebs. He closed the door behind him with infinite care, as if a loud slam might shatter something in his brain, then looked over at me with a pained smile.
“Maybe I should have told you this last night,” he said, “but I’m not a whiskey drinker.”
“I like a good Scotch,” I said, “but that swill wasn’t it. It occurred to me sometime around three in the morning that what the Hideaway considers a well bourbon is probably closer to leaded gasoline.”
He groaned and fell onto one of the stadium seats.
“Careful there,” I said. “Those seats watched the Cleveland Browns beat the shit out of the Steelers many, many times.”
“I’m too hungover to even rise to that argument.”
“That bad, eh?”
“Yeah. You bounced back well. Sleep it off peacefully?”
I remembered the slap of Parker Harrison’s skeleton hand, the way the bones had burst into powder, how it had looked like fine black dust by the time it settled around the spinning coin.
“Peacefully,” I echoed with a nod.
“Wish I could say the same,” he said and then held up the scuffed briefcase he’d carried in with him. “Last night you agreed to look this over with me. In fairness, though, I thought I should give you a sober chance to back out of it. You don’t owe me anything, and you’re certainly not obligated to waste your time on this.”
“I can give you a few hours.”
He put the briefcase on his lap and folded his arms over it. “Look, Lincoln, I might have gotten a bit more, uh, personal than I should have last night. I mean, shit, you don’t even know me, and I was dumping some information on you that probably made the whole thing awkward for you. All of that crap about my wife’s new husband—”
“Don’t worry about it, Ken.”
“No, it wasn’t anything you needed to hear, and to be honest, it embarrassed the hell out of me once I got back to the hotel and realized everything I’d said. So, you know, if you could just chalk that up to the booze and forget about it . . .”
“I just said not to worry about it. Okay? It’s nothing, man.”
He nodded, and an awkward pause settled into the room for a few seconds before he broke it by slapping a hand on the briefcase.
“Well, is this a good time, or you want me to come back in a bit, or—”
“Now’s good. Let’s see what you’ve got.”
He set the case on the table beside him and opened it, and I raised my eyebrows when I saw all the papers that were inside, hundreds of pages.
“I’ve got a lot here,” he said.
“No kidding.”
“I don’t want to drown you with shit you’re not interested in, so if you’ve got any idea on where to start . . .”
“I’d be most interested in what you’ve got from the people who knew them best,” I said. “Particularly the people who knew them best at the time they took off. Friends, co-workers, colleagues.”
“They didn’t work.”
I lifted an eyebrow. “Neither of them?”
