‘If your laptop is subpoenaed, it’ll be an admission of guilt. Without it, you have deniability.’
‘Send it anyway,’ I said. ‘I lost deniability a long time ago.’
After about fifteen minutes, the record from the tag came through as a series of maps. Angel had separated each journey Allan had taken into a series of files, with the dates and timings recorded beneath. The trips themselves appeared as red lines on the maps.
If nothing else, the trip record confirmed that Allan had killed Lonny Midas and the unknown gunman. It showed him leaving the Pastor’s Bay Police Department at 9:08 p.m. and traveling to the spot at which the bodies had later been found before heading back to the outskirts of town, where he waited for the alarm to be raised.
Allan’s final trip, taken shortly before eleven a.m. that day, followed a route from the municipal building in Pastor’s Bay and west out of town, but Allan’s home lay south, across the causeway. According to the timings, his truck had remained at a point on Red Leaf Road for two hours before continuing southwest to its final resting place at Freyer’s Point.
I opened the white pages and did a reverse address search for Red Leaf Road. It came up with three names. Two of them I didn’t recognize; one of them I did. I clicked on the name, noted the number of the house, and did a Google map search for the address. When I had it, I compared its location on Google to the point on the map where Allan’s truck had stopped for an hour.
They were the same.
Allan’s last trip had included a stop at the home of Ruth and Patrick Shaye.
39
The Shaye house was set back from Red Leaf Road behind a line of maturing silver birches, now denuded by the fall winds. It was a large, three-story dwelling, and had been freshly painted with off-white paint, probably during the summer. There were planter boxes on the sills of the upper and lower windows filled with hardy green shrubs, and the garden had been planted with winter flowers and perennials: cardinal flowers and larkspur, comfrey and obedient plants. The lawn grass bore signs of patching, although the old and new growths would soon be indistinguishable, and the boundaries of the beds were marked with house bricks painted white. Fresh gravel had been laid on the drive. It was all very neat and clean, the kind of house that forces its neighbors to step up to the plate and not allow their own properties to fall into neglect.
Before leaving Pastor’s Bay, I had checked to see if Mrs. Shaye and her son were still at the municipal building. They were: Patrick I could see in the parking lot, and Mrs. Shaye was working behind the main desk. I called Walsh along the way, but his phone rang a couple of times and then went to voice mail. I figured he’d rejected the call when he saw the number. I left a message telling him what I knew – that Allan had stopped off at the Shaye house before vanishing – then turned my phone to silent. It didn’t necessarily mean much when I heard myself speak aloud what I knew for Walsh’s benefit. There were lots of reasons that Allan might have visited the Shaye house. After all that had taken place the night before, there had probably been a certain amount for everyone to discuss.
But two hours was a long time, especially when there were so many bodies on their way to the M.E.’s office in Augusta.
I parked my car on the road beneath the trees instead of driving directly onto the property. There was no response from the house when I entered the empty front yard, the gravel crunching loudly under my feet. I didn’t ring the doorbell but took a narrow path to the left that cut between a high green hedge and the side of the house. There were two windows in that wall, one at the living room and the other at the kitchen, but I could see nobody inside, and a red door blocked access from the path to the rear of the property. It was closed but not locked. I turned the handle and it opened easily.
The back yard bore no resemblance to the front. Here there was no grass; the area around the kitchen door was roughly paved with heavy concrete slabs upon which sat two iron lawn chairs and an iron table, the dark gray of the metal showing through the yellowing paint work. Beyond was an area of pitted dirt in which pools of dirty rainwater glistened, the oil on their surface like a series of polluted rainbows. Two cars and a truck stood in varying stages of cannibalization beneath the bowed roof of a long single-story garage. The contagion of filth and neglect had even infected the back of the house itself, which had not been painted when the front and sides were tackled, and from which white flakes peeled like bad skin. The windows were all masked with drapes, except at the kitchen, where the sink was stacked high with dirty crockery. A network of washing lines ran across the yard, and from them hung drying sheets, carefully positioned so that there was no danger of the sheets dragging along the filthy ground beneath. They swayed gently in the breeze. I tried the kitchen door, but it did not open. All seemed quiet within, yet I found myself reluctant to make any unnecessary sound, as though, like a character in some old fairy tale, I might wake a slumbering presence by my incaution.
I walked to the garage, avoiding the puddles along the way. It effectively formed the back wall of the property. The thick hedge at either side of the yard came to an end where the garage began, and tendrils of it had already begun to seek purchase on the walls. The two cars inside were relatively new, or at least I could see how they might yield parts of value, but the truck was a wreck. Its windshield was gone and its side windows were broken. The hood was raised, most of the exposed engine was rusted, and most of what wasn’t rusted was absent entirely. The truck had a dented cap back, and was parked so that the rear was flush with the garage wall.
And yet its tires were inflated, and there were marks on the concrete where it had recently been moved.
The garage might once have been used to house animals, for the three vehicles were separated by wooden walls, although the pens looked too wide even for cattle. I searched for indications on the back wall where pens had been removed to create the wider spaces, but could find none. I slid along the side of the truck, my jacket catching on rusted metal and splintered wood. Even before I reached the back wall, I could see that it was newer than the rest of the building. At some point it had been repaired or replaced. I went back outside and tried to gauge the distance between the inner wall and the outer walls. The angle made it hard to judge, but it seemed to me that they didn’t quite match. There was a space behind the new wall. It was narrow, probably barely wide enough for a man to turn around inside, but it was there.
I took a closer look at the truck and saw that the hand brake had been set. I was opening the door to release it when something pink caught my eye on the floor behind the front left wheel. It was a small piece of fiberglass insulation batt, used between interior walls and floors for noise control and to prevent heat from escaping. I took my little Maglite from my pocket and shined it on the floor, and then inside the cap. There were more of the batts here, still in their packaging, and all with a high R-value indicating their resistance to heat flow. The higher the R- value, the greater the insulating power, and this stuff had an R-value in the thirties, almost as high as one could go.
I released the hand brake and pushed the truck forward. It was heavy, but it moved easily on its tires. When I had pushed it about six feet, I reapplied the brake and returned to the back wall. A painted square steel door, three feet to the side, had been expertly fitted into the brickwork at the point where the back of the truck had met the wall, its lines almost as difficult to distinguish as the separation between the old and new grass on the front lawn. A smaller panel was inset midway down the left side of the door. It lifted up to reveal a handle. There was no key. There didn’t have to be. After all, who was going to move a dilapidated truck in a run-down shed for no good reason?
The first thing I saw when I opened the door was a ladder. It lay against the interior wall, and beside it was a trapdoor, similar in size to the first, but this time set into the ground. It was secured, but only with a heavy lock and hasp. Beyond it I could see a pair of small air vents. A larger vent in the roof let in sunlight and air.
‘Hello?’ I said. ‘Can anybody hear me?’
After a couple of seconds, a girl’s voice sounded faintly beneath my feet.
‘I can hear you. Please help me! Please!’
I knelt beside the first vent. ‘Anna?’
‘Yes, I’m Anna! I’m Anna!’
‘My name’s Charlie Parker. I’m a private detective. I’m going to get you out, okay?’
‘Okay. Don’t leave me. Please don’t leave me.’
‘I won’t, but I have to find something to break the lock. I’m not going to go without you, I promise. I just need
