How It Happened Page 11

  “Don’t rush,” she said.

  He spoke to Amy Kelly once, and George Kelly didn’t join the conversation. Amy gave Barrett five curt minutes, and this time she did not thank him for his time and effort.

  He called Howard Pelletier repeatedly. The phone was never answered, and none of his calls were returned. Barrett left a final message.

  “I believed her, Howard,” he said. “And I’m sorry.”

  He had questions that he was not allowed to ask, most of them for the medical examiner and some for Emily Broward, but any inquiries to those sources would boomerang back to Roxanne Donovan. He told himself to let it go, to respect the chain of command, but on one of his first days back in Boston, he found himself making a call to the only person in the Bureau he trusted to keep quiet about his interest.

  Seth Miller was the first agent Barrett had worked with in Little Rock, and he had IT expertise. He also was due to retire, which Barrett hoped would make him more cooperative. Seth had less to lose than other agents from hearing him out.

  “They sending you back to Little Rock?” Seth said, immediately removing any hope that he wasn’t aware of the mess in Maine.

  “Not just yet.”

  “Good. I’m gone in six weeks, off to the happy hunting ground otherwise known as Florida. It won’t be any fun here without me.”

  “I don’t doubt that. Listen, Seth, I’ve got a question, and it needs to stay between us.”

  “Oh boy.”

  “If you don’t want to hear it, I’ll understand.”

  “What are they gonna do, fire me? Let’s have it.”

  “How could a man in custody who has absolutely no access to a computer or a phone send an e-mail?”

  He was expecting Seth to either laugh at him or lecture him for going on a fool’s errand. He wasn’t prepared for the immediate answer.

  “Easily,” Seth said.

  “Really? How?”

  “A half a dozen ways, but the most effective would probably be a dead man’s switch. You put your message and its recipient into an automated system and instruct it to be sent if you disappear. So every day or every twelve hours, whatever you want, the system sends you a link. If you activate the link, the system knows you’re good, and the e-mail stays on the shelf. But if you fail to interact with the link within a given time frame, the e-mail goes out.”

  “Where do you find systems like that?”

  “They’re all over. I believe one is literally deadmanswitch.com or something close. Google provides the service for free. You can pick what they call your digital heirs to receive your data, or you can have it all removed. They call that the Inactive Account Manager, which is a term I’ve always loved. So polite, considering the only people who need it are either dead or in prison.”

  “In that case, though, I’d know who sent me the e-mail, right?”

  “Sure. But it’s amateur hour to reroute that. And somebody good is going to code the switch himself using the same idea. You pick a system to interact with. Could be a text message, an e-mail, or a web page. Could be your Facebook or Twitter account. Then you write a code that watches for your interaction on the site, and if that stops for a prolonged period, an alert goes out. This alert could be an e-mail to one person, or it could be a file dump. You’d better believe the big-time hackers, Snowden, guys like that, have these set up. It’s a beautiful form of protection. If I go missing, your personal e-mails will appear on Facebook, that sort of thing. Makes people think twice about trying to take you out.”

  “That sounds pretty sophisticated.”

  “Sounds harder than it is. Is your suspect up there a techie?”

  “I don’t think so. But he’s smart.”

  “Then he could have done it. Give a smart person some time on YouTube, and they can learn how to do a lot of shit that seems out of reach.”

  “It came in pretty quickly when he was arrested.”

  “Would he have smelled you guys coming for him before the arrest?”

  Don’t get your feet wet.

  “Absolutely.”

  “Then he could have set it up on a short timer, anticipating things. How much investigation have they put into that e-mail?”

  “I don’t know. I’m being boxed out.”

  “Well, all I can tell you is that the answer to your question is yes, it could have been done. But there’s another possibility too.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Someone outside of the jail walls sent that e-mail.”

  “An accomplice.”

  “Possibly,” Seth said. “But that’s not what I was suggesting. I mean the guy outside of the jail walls was the guilty party, Barrett. I’m not in the mix up there, so you tell me: Is there any evidence to suggest what you’re asking about is actually the way it went?”

  “No,” Barrett said. “Not yet.”

  He made it through the week in Boston, dodging some calls and making others. Liz gave him updates. She told him that Jackie Pelletier’s funeral would be on Saturday and was closed to the media. She was going out to take a few pictures of the headstone afterward.

  Barrett knew better than to consider trying to attend. He bought tickets to a Red Sox game and tried to scare up some colleagues willing to go along. Out of pity for him or a love of Fenway, a few agreed.

  On the morning Jackie Pelletier was to be laid in the ground beside her mother, Barrett rose early after a restless sleep and went for a run, five miles instead of his usual three, trying to purge all thoughts of Port Hope out in sweat. Afterward he showered and got in the car and turned the air-conditioning on high and angled the vents toward his face, as if he could blast prudence and good sense into his brain.

  Then he called his co-workers, said he was feeling under the weather and would have to miss the baseball game, and put the car in gear.

  It was a perfect summer weekend and people were scattering out of the city, loading up luggage and kids, throwing kayaks or bicycles onto roof racks, and heading north, some going up the coast, others into the cooler reaches of the mountains and pines. I-95 northbound to Maine was a logjam of Massachusetts plates.

  His blended right in.

  18

  The cemetery where Jackie Pelletier was buried was between Port Hope and Thomaston, and while it was nicely landscaped and lined with pine groves and rhododendrons, it offered no view of her beloved ocean. There were police in the parking lot to protect the family’s privacy, but a few members of the media waited for a glimpse of the mourners anyhow, cameras at the ready. Barrett was pleased to note that Liz wasn’t among them. You could cover the news without being a vulture; you could convey the day’s anguish without needing a photograph of Howard’s tears.

  He drove by without slowing, and then he stopped at a flower shop and bought a single bouquet and went to the forgotten graveyard by the tidal flats that Jackie Pelletier had loved so much. This cemetery was overgrown and untended, and while some thought that was a shame, Howard had once told Barrett that Jackie preferred that feel in a cemetery, that she’d always hated the idea of lawn mowers and weed trimmers buzzing above her mother’s bones.

  She liked the Orchard Cemetery, where Howard had taught her to make charcoal rubbings of the crumbling faces of faded stones. In this place, long before she’d painted her first landscape, she’d walked with her hand in Howard’s, sounding out antiquated names and wondering over the various Bible verses chosen in memory of the dead. Once, she had discovered the tiny matching headstones of infant twins, and it made her cry.

  Barrett parked on the same ground where police had found Jackie’s Subaru sitting empty. He took the bouquet and walked by the sloping, moss-covered stone walls, making his way carefully among the dead. You had to be cautious with your steps here, because some of the stones had sunk into the earth as if in pursuit of the bodies they’d been placed there to honor.

  While Barrett remembered where police had taken castings of tire imprints and samples of bloodstains, he didn’t want
to stand there. He wanted to stand someplace where he could see the water, the spot Jackie liked best. A few of the graves were always visible out of the corner of your eye, yes, but most of your focus was on the sea and the sun. That was what she’d loved about the place, Howard had told him. Juxtaposition, she’d called it, and when Howard had told her he wasn’t familiar with the word, she’d said, Balance.

  Barrett found a spot on a hill that looked reminiscent of several of Jackie Pelletier’s paintings. He laid the flowers on the grass, but the wind off the tidal flats was brisk and it pulled apart the bouquet and scattered the flowers.

  When he left, he intended to drive to Liz’s house. He certainly didn’t intend to turn south instead of north, bound for Port Hope instead of Camden.

  But he did.

  He tried to drive like a tourist, aimless and intrigued, and not like a detective, hunting and seeking. He told himself that if he found Mathias Burke’s pickup truck or his panel van with PORT HOPE CARETAKING SERVICES on the side, it would be merely an unpleasant coincidence and not the end of the search.

  When he found Mathias’s pickup parked in the crushed-stone lot outside the Harpoon, though, all pretenses faded away. He pulled his Explorer in directly behind it, pinning the truck in, and then he got out and walked toward the bar where his grandfather had held court for so many years.

  Maine was populated by more than its share of taverns, and each sent a different message. There were the waterfront bars with wide decks and brightly colored umbrellas; microbreweries with stainless-steel vats or aged wooden casks displayed in wide plate-glass windows; ramshackle joints with nets and buoys adorning the walls, promising that nostalgic Maine feel; sports bars with televisions and chicken-wing specials. And then, generally off the water, priced out of the view but never too far from a workingman’s wharf, there were bars that didn’t bother with so much as a single neon sign, bars that could have been on a street corner in Cleveland or a wind-blasted butte in Wyoming. You wouldn’t hear anybody asking what local beers were on draft, but you would hear the crack and clink of a pool game. The message these bars sent wasn’t one of vacationland or nostalgia or craft spirits or sports but something far simpler and more lasting: We’ll pour you plenty, and we’ll pour it cheap.

  That was the Harpoon.

  That had been, for a decade, Rob’s boyhood summer home. In the two-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment above the bar, separated from it by a thin floor that did nothing to dull the noise below, he’d received a more profound education than he had at any of the universities he’d attended.

  Now he pushed the heavy, dented steel door open and stepped out of the sunlit day and into the dimness of the bar, the trapped smells of spilled beer and sweat and old mop water rising toward him, and he half expected to see his grandfather towering behind the bar.

  Instead, the man facing him was Mark Millinock, a fisherman whose drug habits had washed him out of every crew he’d ever joined. He’d finally given up on the water and bought the Harpoon off Ray Barrett with an unimpressive stack of cash, the origins of which were unknown and unquestioned.

  Mark Millinock glanced up without interest when the door opened, then did a double take and straightened. At the corner of the bar, Mathias Burke noticed and turned with curiosity. Mark Millinock’s face looked hateful, but Mathias smiled.

  “Pour me another, Mark,” he said. “This man owes me a drink.”

  Barrett crossed the room, conscious of two onlookers to his left and two to his right. Everyone in the barroom was male, which wasn’t uncommon at the Harpoon. Women who came into the Harpoon either realized their mistake quickly and left or were there precisely for the sort of trouble the place invited.

  Barrett recognized only one of the other men in the room. Ronnie Lord was a heroin addict from Rockland who’d been one of the first people to report Kimberly Crepeaux’s self-implicating statements about the disappearances. He was also a part-time employee of Mathias Burke and had scoffed at Barrett’s questions about a possible intersection between Kimberly and Mathias.

  “Oh man, he came back!” Ronnie said, and Barrett could see from his bright eyes and dilated pupils that he was high. “That takes some balls!”

  Barrett ignored Ronnie and took the stool beside him as Mark Millinock cracked a can of PBR and set it down beside Mathias.

  “I’ll take one too,” Barrett said.

  “That was my last one,” Mark said.

  “Then I’ll take a Budweiser.”

  “Also out of that.”

  Barrett leaned across the bar and smacked the tap handle forward. Beer splattered down and Millinock swore and slammed the tap back off, his stubbled face darkening with anger, powerful forearms tensing as his fists clenched.

  “Pour me the beer, Mark,” Barrett said.

  “Fuck you. It ain’t your—”

  “Pour his drink,” Mathias said quietly.

  Mark glanced at him, surprised, and Mathias made an impatient gesture with his hand. “Come on. His money’s still good, and he’s buying. Aren’t you, Barrett?”

  “Sure.”

  Millinock poured the beer into a mason jar and set it on the bar. Then he took a bottle of Glenmorangie off the shelf behind the bar, poured two tall ones, gave one to Mathias and kept the other for himself. At the Harpoon, a ten-year-old Glenmorangie was top-shelf liquor.

  “So long as you’re buying, I’m drinking too,” he said. “Wouldn’t mind hurting your wallet. Ronnie, you want one?”

  “I’ll take a double,” Ronnie Lord said. He was a scrawny guy who inexplicably wore muscle shirts, and he was bouncing on the balls of his feet now, pool cue in one hand. Buzzing and high and convinced that he was hard by whatever was in his bloodstream. Barrett glanced at him and felt a strong desire to knock him to the floor.

  “We’re all buying,” he said. “My salary comes from the taxpayers. But by all means, drink up, boys.” Barrett turned to Mathias and lifted his beer. His pulse was thumping and the skin along the base of his skull felt tight, the nerve endings alive.

  “Here’s to Jackie Pelletier and Ian Kelly,” he said.

  Mathias didn’t move. His dark eyes were steady on Barrett’s.

  “No respect for the dead?” Barrett said.

  “No respect for you. But, sure, here’s to the dead.” He clinked his beer off Barrett’s and drank, never lowering his eyes. “How about another toast? To the truth.”

  “Amen.”

  They clinked glasses again.

  “And one more,” Mathias said. “The last one. Here’s to you saying, I’m so sorry, Mathias. I apologize for fucking with your life over a crack whore’s lie.”

  “Before we get to that one, I’ve got a question.”

  “You never run out of them, do you, Barrett?”

  “Well, I used to be a teacher.”

  “I hope you didn’t teach police work.”

  Ronnie Lord’s high, keening laugh came over Barrett’s shoulder and entered his brain like the sound of breaking glass, but Barrett managed to ignore him and stay focused on Mathias.

  “It was in the theories of police work, at least. I had one rule I just hammered into my students—theories are to be tested, not protected.”

  “Cute.”

  “So my theory about you, in this case, seems to be short on evidence.”

  “Just a touch.”

  “It’s my job not to protect it, then. Not to cling to a falsehood, to deny that I could have gotten it wrong. But…” He drank some of the beer, and it sat thick and flat on his tongue. “It is also my job to test it.”

  Mathias had set his beer down and both of his hands were resting on the bar.

  “How good are you with computers?” Barrett asked. “I’ve never been much of a tech guy. I was learning some new things recently. Simple stuff, but new to me. Dead man’s switch coding, for example. You ever heard of something like that?”

  Mathias didn’t blink. “No. I don’t spend much time in my cubicle.”
>
  Ronnie Lord tittered.

  “The police took my computer,” Mathias continued. “And my phone. Back when I was falsely accused and under arrest, they did that. Do you remember when that happened?”

  Barrett nodded. “I didn’t think you had much time to spend playing around on your computer. Not as hard as you work. You told me once that every dime you made was based on your reputation for hard work. You explained all the character references you could provide and all the damage I could do to your livelihood.”

  Mathias waited.

  “George and Amy Kelly were two of those references,” Barrett said. “You told me to ask George and Amy what they thought of you, of how you’d taken care of every problem they ever had and billed only for the work you’d done, never trying to skim a nickel, the definition of an honest caretaker.”

  “That’s the truth,” Mark Millinock said, but both Barrett and Mathias ignored him.

  “You got quite the memory,” Mathias said.

  “I record everything. I like to go back and listen. Keeps me from letting my instincts get the better of me.”

  “With your instincts, I can see where that would be a concern.”

  Again, Ronnie Lord’s laugh brayed. Barrett leaned toward Mathias, trying to hold his focus. “Here’s my question,” Barrett said. “How does a man who takes such meticulous care of a client’s property, with such unflagging attention to every…last…detail, miss something as simple as washing and sealing the decks?”

  Mathias didn’t speak. Behind them, Ronnie Lord shifted the pool cue in his hands, and one of the men Barrett didn’t know took a step closer to the bar. Mark Millinock had picked up a bottle opener, a massive cast-iron thing in the shape of a mermaid that had been here since Barrett’s childhood and had broken plenty of glasses and a couple of noses over the years.