‘Allan gave him an alibi,’ I said.
‘I know that. Do you have any reason to doubt it?’
I took out my cell phone, opened the message folder, and showed him the anonymous missives about Chief Allan. He read through them, then handed the phone back to me.
‘Why didn’t you mention this before?’
‘I tend to be careful about potential slanders. I prefer to look into the possible truth of them before I go disseminating their substance.’
‘And what did you discover?’
‘Chief Allan has a girlfriend in Lincolnville. She’s young, and she has a child. If Allan is the father, then she was either barely legal when she became pregnant, or not legal at all if he was having sex with her for any length of time before she conceived.’
‘When did you discover this?’
‘Just yesterday, but then it was a day of discoveries for all of us.’
‘You have a name for the girl?’
I gave it to him, along with the address of the apartment building and the number of her car’s license plate.
‘And your thinking is that Chief Allan is a man with a taste for young women, in a town where another young woman has gone missing?’
‘That’s the thinking of whoever has been sending these messages.’
‘You’re just full of surprises, aren’t you? We’ll talk with Allan. We’ll get a warrant to search his house as well.’
‘She’s not at his house,’ I said.
Engel raised a quizzical eyebrow.
‘Dubious angels,’ I explained. ‘If Allan does have her, then she’s someplace else.’
Engel thought for a moment.
‘All right. Anything else, while you’re unburdening yourself of secrets?’
‘One more thing: Allan made a call from a pay phone at the gas station on Main in Lincolnville at 8:34 p.m. yesterday.’
‘Just before a lot of men with guns descended on Pastor’s Bay,’ said Engel.
‘It would be interesting to know who he called.’
‘Wouldn’t it? You know, you might have made a good cop if you’d stuck with it, if you’d had the self-discipline and the ability to tame your ego. Instead you’re a mercenary who withholds information and makes bad judgment calls.’
A horse-faced woman wearing a blue FBI windbreaker entered the room, a younger, preppy-looking guy hovering behind her with a gun at his waist. Engel nodded at them and stood. His mouth formed a moue as he looked down on me.
‘You should leave while you still can, Mr. Parker, before somebody takes it into his mind to put you under arrest. You didn’t behave well here. None of us did, but you in particular have done nothing to enhance your reputation.’
I didn’t argue with him.
37
Chief Allan couldn’t be found. His cell phone rang out, and there was nobody home when Engel, accompanied by Gordon Walsh and two state troopers, paid a call to his house. His truck wasn’t in the drive either, so his license-plate details and a description of his vehicle were passed to both local and state forces, as well as to police in the contiguous states, the border patrol, and Canadian law enforcement. Walsh visited the apartment building in Lincolnville with a female state trooper named Abelena Forbes, and Mary Ellen Schrock admitted that she had been seeing Allan, but told Walsh and Forbes first that she was eighteen then, on reflection, seventeen when their sexual relationship began. Forbes asked her if she was sure of this, and she said that she was, but both Forbes and Walsh believed that she still was lying. But the girl stuck to her story: Allan had pulled over a car in which she was a passenger, and the driver, a twenty-two-year-old friend of Schrock’s, was found to be marginally over the limit. He was let off with a warning by Allan, who offered to drive Schrock home, although she could not recall the date of the alleged incident. Their relationship had begun a week later. When they asked her if she was aware of any similar relationships in which Allan might have been involved, either now or in the past, she grew agitated and said that she was not. This they also believed to be a lie. When they asked her if Allan had ever mentioned Anna Kore to her, she told them to leave.
At the door, Forbes told her to find someone to look after her child, because when they came back with an arrest warrant they’d be taking her to Gray for questioning. It was Walsh who played good cop, figuring that Schrock was a young woman who responded better to male authority figures, particularly older males. He told her that they didn’t want her to get into any trouble but they needed to talk to Allan, and if she had heard from him then she ought to tell them. He reminded her that there was a girl missing, a girl who might at this very moment be suffering grave torments, who was probably very frightened and at risk of death. All they were asking for was any help that she could offer.
Schrock began to cry. She was, in the end, little more than a child herself. She told them that Allan sometimes used her cell phone when he visited, both to make and to receive calls, but deleted the numbers before he gave the phone back to her. Schrock did not have online access to her account, as she simply topped up her phone credit when necessary. Walsh sought and received permission to access her call records from her service provider when she told him that Allan had used her phone the day before. Walsh made them coffee in the kitchen while Forbes called Engel about the cell phone records on the grounds that the feds could retrieve the relevant information faster than anyone else could. While they sat on the uncomfortable furniture, drinking cheap coffee and looking at the bare walls of Schrock’s dingy, dark apartment, the baby began to cry, and wouldn’t stop until Walsh took a turn with it, whereupon it promptly fell asleep in his arms.
At that point, Schrock admitted that she had first had intercourse with Kurt Allan when she was fifteen.
Both of the numbers called by Allan, and from which he had received calls, were traced to throwaway phones bought in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, as was the final call made from the gas station the previous night. The cell phones in question, though, had not been thrown away. One was found in the pocket of Tommy Morris, and the other in the car used by the hunters to drive to Pastor’s Bay. Allan had not only sold out the man he believed to be Randall Haight; he had also sold out Tommy Morris to his enemies. The apartment building in Lincolnville had previously been owned by a shelf operation in Boston, UIPC Strategies, Inc., and looked after by a property- management company based in Belfast. While the Belfast company still maintained the property, they informed the state police that the building in question had been sold three months earlier by a Boston bank when the company of ownership had defaulted on its loan. That company, UIPC, had been a front for Tommy Morris’s property investments. The trail became clearer: Allan had been one of Morris’s tame cops in Boston and had kept up the connection after moving to Maine, keeping an eye on Morris’s estranged sister while feeding him information that might be of use to him and facilitating the movement of drugs, weapons, and other contraband when required. In fact, it seemed likely that Morris had pointed Allan toward the job in Pastor’s Bay in the first place. In return, Morris paid him a retainer, and eventually gave his girlfriend and his child a place to live. But as Morris’s problems had mounted so Allan’s cash supply had been cut off, and his new family was no longer able to live free, or at a reduced rent, on Morris’s dime. The disappearance of Anna Kore had provided Allan with an opportunity to make some money off Tommy Morris’s scalp, and so he had lured him to Pastor’s Bay, baited his trap with Randall Haight, and then informed Oweny Farrell’s crew of where Morris could be found.
A subpoena was immediately sought for access to Allan’s own cell phone records. The previous night, shortly after nine p.m., he had received a call to his cell phone from a previously unknown number. Foster, the Pastor’s Bay officer who had officially been on duty that night, confirmed that when he returned to the station at 9:10 p.m., Allan was gone. The phone used to make the call to Allan had not been found, but through a process of triangulation the source of the call was narrowed down to the woods near Lonny Midas’s home. Attempts to trace Allan by ‘pinging’
