were now. When I asked if he hadn’t been tempted to find out about them, he replied that William Lagenheimer might have been, but Randall Haight was not.
I was troubled by the Haight case, but even if there had not been the matter of Anna Kore to take into account I would still have accepted it. After all, I could do with the money, and the diversion that the job offered. Work was thin on the ground at present. Businesses and individuals didn’t have cash to spend on private investigators, not unless there were large sums or considerable reputations at risk, in which case they’d approach one of the bigger agencies anyway. Even marital work, which was usually worth a trickle of income, had dried up. Spouses suspicious of their partners, believing them to be straying, would carry out their own investigations, checking cell phone records, credit card slips, hotel bookings. They’d even follow their husbands or wives themselves, or get a friend to do so, if they could find one they trusted enough, and one they were certain wasn’t the third party in the possibly adulterous relationship. Many, though, would just live with their suspicions, because even if they found out that they were right, what were they going to do? Everybody was struggling. It was hard enough to keep one roof above their heads; they couldn’t afford two. Sometimes economics alone were enough to keep men and women from straying, or force them to live with their doubts.
So I picked up work where I could, mostly insurance stuff, and surveillance for businesses concerned about the activities of employees. I’d even begun engaging in stolen-property recovery, but that was one step above becoming a repo man, and it was cash hard earned. At best, it involved trawling pawnshops for goods that had been sold on, and then breaking the news to the pawnbroker that he’d have to take a hit on the deal, assuming the broker was reputable in the first place and I could prove that he was selling a fenced item. At worst, it meant knocking on the doors of junkies and deadbeats and professional thieves, most of whom tended to look upon cooperation as a last resort when lies, intimidation and – that old reliable – violence had failed to convince. In the end, you could slum it for only so long before you became part of the slums yourself.
Once it was agreed that I would take the Haight case, and Aimee had tried to stiff me on my rates as a matter of course, and I’d laughed and waited for her to get serious, she’d offered to see what she could find in the way of court documents related to the Selina Day killing. If they were sealed, as Randall Haight claimed they were, then there would be a limit to what would be available to her. In the meantime, Haight was on his way back to Pastor’s Bay. There he would sit in his home office and write out a list of everyone whom he knew in the area, including all of his business contacts and all of his acquaintances, however casual, with a particular emphasis on recent arrivals in the area, and new clients. I would go up there to talk to him in a day or two, and try to establish whether there was anyone in town who had begun to act differently around him, or any new arrival who might have some connection to North Dakota, either to the juvenile facility in which Haight had served the early part of his sentence or to the state penitentiary. I’d also have to seek points of possible contact between the prisons in Newport and Berlin, although it seemed less likely that they might be the weak links, assuming the transfer under his new identity had been conducted smoothly. After that, it would be a matter of going through public and private records in an effort to establish the whereabouts of such individuals, in case one of them had made his or her way to eastern Maine and there had crossed paths with Randall Haight.
As I drove, I thought about the purpose of taunting Haight. Blackmail was the obvious answer, but that would presume the individual involved was not responsible for the disappearance of Anna Kore. Why potentially draw attention to yourself if you’ve already committed a serious crime involving the abduction of a young girl?
The second possibility was sadism: Someone was enjoying watching Haight squirm, either for purely vindictive reasons or because he or she might have lost a child in similar circumstances, and tormenting a man guilty of a crime against a child is the next best thing to tormenting the person responsible for the crime against
The third option was the one that interested me most, although I tried not to favor it too heavily in case I prejudiced myself, thereby risking missing crucial evidence to the contrary. That option, as Aimee had stated, was that Randall Haight was being targeted by the person who had taken Anna Kore, probably as a prelude to making Haight the scapegoat for the crime. If that was the case, then it would require Haight to panic and run, and the information about his past to be anonymously revealed to the police and the press, diverting the course of the investigation away from the person responsible for Anna’s disappearance and toward Haight. Then again, if Haight didn’t run, the information could still be leaked, and the investigation would take a new direction anyway.
Or Haight might find himself unable to handle the pressure and, advised by his lawyer, he could approach the police and confess the truth about his past, thereby theoretically removing the only weapon that his tormentor had to use against him: the secret nature of his past crime.
But Haight didn’t have an alibi for the day that Anna Kore had disappeared, and that was a serious problem. He had told us that he was at home, going through the books of a furniture company based in Northport. The physical books and receipts were a mess, and he had intended to spend the entire day just trying to get them into some kind of order. Unfortunately, he was struck by a twenty-four-hour bug, and spent most of the time vomiting, or dozing in a nauseated state on his couch. Therefore he had not logged on to his computer, and he had not used the telephone or the Internet. Neither did he have any visitors, and what little he had eaten he had taken from his fridge at home. There was no food delivery to confirm his presence in the house. So Randall Haight, upon approaching the police, would then become a suspect, and even if he was entirely innocent his life would be altered by what followed, and Haight wanted to hold on to his current life if at all possible. He understood that nobody was likely to give him another new identity, and the power of the Internet meant that, once his past became known, the truth would follow him forever, or so he believed.
Randall Haight was a soul in torment. Aimee had tried to reassure him that she and I would do everything in our power to protect him, but I saw in his eyes that he knew better. His carefully constructed life was disintegrating, and the mask that he wore was peeling away from his skin, flaking and falling, to reveal once more the face of the killer William Lagenheimer.
6
The rain falling, the light gone, and the warmth of bars siren-calling to the men and women passing on the slick streets, although those who answered would probably have found their way to such places anyway, or at least to places like this particular dive in Woburn. The men and women who congregated there had little desire for their homes, and those who shared those homes with another knew that there was no great anticipation for their return.
It was called the Wanderer, and could best be described as having evolved, in its way, although its evolution was comparable to that of a primitive creature that had exchanged gills for lungs, clambered from sea to shore, and then progressed no farther, dispensing entirely with any further notion of advancement in favor of a barely refined primitivism. Its particular evolutionary path had proceeded as follows: A drunk passes another drunk a bottle; the two drunks find a bench upon which to rest the bottle; a third drunk, but one less drunk than the others, arrives and helps them pour their drinks; someone puts a wall around them so they have something to lean against as they poison themselves with alcohol; a roof is added so that the rain doesn’t fall into their booze; a sign is hung up outside, notifying all and sundry that the Wanderer is now open for business. The end.
It had a floor of cheap green tile reminiscent of a hospital canteen, blackened by the cigarette butts that had been crushed into it over the years. There was a jukebox in the far corner, but nobody could ever recall its having been in use. It remained lit, and ostensibly available for business, but only drunks and non-regulars ever tried to make it play a song, and then it simply swallowed their money and remained silent. Complaints about the recalcitrant nature of the jukebox were always met with a shrug by the bartender, who would inform the complainant that the jukebox was rented, and it was all to do with the rental company, and only the company’s staff was permitted to mess around with its innards, all of which were lies so barefaced it was a wonder the bartender’s tongue didn’t turn to ash and fall from his mouth before the last one could even be spoken. But if the complainant really cared that much about his fifty cents, the bartender would continue, he could write a letter, assuming the name of the company could be unearthed to begin with, which would be difficult because the company didn’t exist. The jukebox was the bar’s own, and had been ever since the original company behind its presence went out of business. It didn’t make the bartenders much from its gradual accumulation of fools’ quarters, but it garnered them a degree of amusement. Occasionally a patron might try to hit the jukebox to make it play, or
