The Burning Soul

facing awkward questions about the girl’s age at the commencement of the relationship. Even if it had started when she was over eighteen, or he could persuade her to say that it had, his reputation would be destroyed, whether or not there was a moral turpitude clause in his contract with the Pastor’s Bay Police Department.

But somebody had found out about his young girlfriend, and after what I had witnessed outside the Hallowed Grounds coffee shop that morning I was prepared to guess who that might be. It would be hard to hide secrets from Mrs. Shaye, who struck me as a woman who knew the value of storing up hidden knowledge in a small town. She would want to safeguard her own job, and turning whistle-blower on her employer over a personal matter would almost certainly result in his successor’s finding an excuse to dispense with her services as soon as it was possible to do so without leaving the department open to a legal challenge. After all, nobody likes a rat. Better, then, to feed the information anonymously when the opportunity arose. The disappearance of Anna Kore had provided both that opportunity and the impetus to tell. The fact that Kurt Allan had a young girlfriend didn’t necessarily mean that he was a pedophile. Neither did it mean that he was connected to whatever had happened to Anna, but it didn’t look good.

‘What do we do now?’ asked Angel.

But I was distracted. Working from my cell phone’s Internet connection, I was trying to trace William Lagenheimer’s mother in Berlin, New Hampshire. Jerry Midas had said that Mrs. Lagenheimer had bought, not rented, a property in New Hampshire, and I assumed that property would have been near the correctional facility in Berlin. The Coos County Register of Deeds was based in Lancashire, New Hampshire, but did not accept online or telephone requests. Searches had to be done in person, and that wouldn’t be possible until the registry opened on Monday morning. I made a call to the home of a realtor I knew down in Dover, and asked him to do an owner’s search for Marybeth Lagenheimer in New Hampshire, but probably in the vicinity of Berlin. The realtor said he’d get back to me in a few minutes.

‘Hey. Again, what do we do now?’ said Angel.

‘Did you get pictures of him with the girl?’

‘What are we, idiots? Of course we did.’

‘Then stay with him when he leaves. Whatever he has or hasn’t done, I think his time as chief is about to come to an end. Once he’s safely tucked up at home, we can talk about e-mailing the photographs to Gordon Walsh at Maine CID.’ I gave them Walsh’s e-mail address from memory, just in case it became necessary to alert him sooner. ‘Once you’re done with Allan, I want you to keep an eye on Randall Haight.’

My phone beeped. The realtor had come through. I now had an address for an M. Lagenheimer in Gorham, New Hampshire, on the edge of the White Mountain National Forest. There was no phone number connected with the property.

‘I have to go,’ I told them. ‘I’ll be back in four or five hours. Remember: Allan first, then Haight.’

‘You think Haight could be in trouble?’

‘Not just that – I think he could be about to run.’

33

It was a three-hour drive to Gorham, but I did it in closer to two-and-a-half, slowing only as I passed through the towns. For the most part I encountered little traffic once I left Gray behind and went west on Route 26. The big rigs hauling logs on Sunday were heading south, and even the larger standard trucks were gone entirely once I passed South Paris.

Although its setting in the Washington Valley was dramatic, nobody was going to mistake the town of Gorham for anywhere excessively pretty. It functioned as a northern gateway to the White Mountains, so in fall it made its money from hunters, in winter from snowmobilers and winter-sports enthusiasts, and in summer from the rafting and hiking crowd, and those with camps in the woods. It had a couple of decent restaurants, some diners and pizzerias, and a clump of chain fast-food joints at its northern end, where the road continued to Berlin and the prison from which Randall Haight had emerged. In this part of the world, though, it was pronounced Ber-lin, not Ber-lin, a blue-collar town with a strong French influence, despite its name. The paper mills had once made this part of the state stink pretty badly, just as they once had the town of Lincoln in Maine, which was still routinely referred to as ‘Stinkin’ Lincoln,’ but the big Berlin pulp mill had been demolished in 2007, striking a serious blow to the local economy. Without the Northern State Correctional Facility, the town would have been swaying on its feet and waiting for the referee to stop the fight. Instead, the economics of punishment had saved Berlin and its environs. A prison might have been bad for the soul of a town, but it represented salvation for its finances.

Marybeth Wilson Lagenheimer had purchased a house on Little Pond Lane, a mile or two north of town and within easy reach of the prison by car. An online search indicated that all taxes had been paid to date, and there were no outstanding liens on the property. Just as there was no phone number linked to the address on Little Pond Lane, so too none of the online databases to which I had access listed a cell phone number billed to that address. The utility companies appeared to have no involvement with the property. There were no gas, oil, or electricity accounts. Mrs. Lagenheimer did not have a credit card, and her bank account appeared to be dormant, yet her tax obligations to the town were being met. I could find no death certificate on record for a Marybeth Wilson Lagenheimer. I tried Marybeth Wilson and Marybeth Lagenheimer and got some results on the former, but the ones that fell into the relevant post-2000 period were both in their thirties when they died, which ruled them out. It seemed that Randall Haight’s mother was quite the recluse. Maybe she was living off the grid, holed up in Gorham with a generator, a shotgun, and a grudge against the United Nations.

Randall Haight had said that he was no longer in touch with his mother. The dynamics of families never ceased to surprise me, but it struck me as odd that a woman who was so devoted to her son that she would move halfway across the country just to be near him could, in her old age, be cut off by that same son. It wasn’t impossible, though, and if Jerry Midas was right then Marybeth Lagenheimer had been damaged in unquantifiable ways by her son’s crime and his subsequent incarceration. If she really had tried to pick up their relationship once again at the point at which it had been sundered, with her as the mother and her son as a little boy, then that son, now a man, might well have found her presence stifling to the point of intolerability.

But there was another possible explanation for Mrs. Lagenheimer’s silence. Dyscalculia: that was the name for the condition Jerry Midas had described, a less well-known form of dyslexia linked to numbers. There were strategies to cope with it, and it was possible that someone could develop them given time and encouragement, even within the prison system, but to hone them to the extent that one could then go on to make a living through one’s ability with numbers seemed unlikely. As I drove west, a picture began to emerge.

The clearer skies of recent days were now under siege from masses of dark cloud as I headed north out of Gorham. There was a storm front heading down from the north, and flooding had been forecast for low-lying areas. I touched base with Louis and Angel, but Allan had not yet left his girlfriend’s house. Chief Allan is a horny dog. It was an odd turn of phrase. Each time I considered it I heard a woman’s voice speaking, and I thought of Mrs. Shaye scattering young girls like pigeons, and the look she had cast in the direction of her employer. But ‘cooze’? Would a woman like Mrs. Shaye use that word?

Somewhere out there, too, was Tommy Morris, with Engel circling him but not approaching, waiting for him to make his next move. They should have been tearing Maine apart to find him after that stunt he’d pulled at his sister’s house, but they were not. In fact, word of what had occurred had not even made it to the media. It might simply have been Engel trying to save the Bureau’s blushes, and for that he could hardly be blamed, but it fitted in with a larger pattern of concealment and gamesmanship that had underpinned all of Engel’s actions so far.

And behind it all, like the marks on a wall where a picture had once hung, or the clean space on a dusty shelf, the evidence of absence, was the fact of Anna Kore’s disappearance. Allan’s relationship with an unusually young woman, Haight’s mess of truths, half-truths and possibly outright lies, Engel’s desire to entrap Tommy Morris, and Morris’s efforts to escape his enemies and perhaps redeem himself by acting on his sister’s behalf, all were as nothing compared with the fate of the lost girl. I saw Gordon Walsh framed against the dark and the stars, and I heard him say again that he thought Anna Kore was dead. He might have wished to believe otherwise, but the tenor of his investigation was predicated on the likelihood that she was already the victim of a homicide. He found it difficult to hold two opposing possibilities in his head – one of life, the other of death. The odds favored death, and a