“Do you want to know what I think, Mr. Eldritch?”

“What would that be, Mr. Parker?”

“I think Merrick is a dangerous man, and I think somebody has set him on my client. You know who that person is, so maybe you’ll pass on a message for me. You tell him, or her, that I’m very good at what I do, and if anything happens to the woman I’ve been hired to protect, then I’m going to come back here and someone will answer for what has taken place. Am I making myself clear?”

Eldritch’s expression did not alter. He was still smiling benignly like a little wrinkled Buddha.

“Perfectly, Mr. Parker,” he said. “This is purely an observation and nothing more, but it appears to me that you have adopted an adversarial position with regard to Mr. Merrick. Perhaps, if you were to be less confrontational, you might find that you have more in common with him than you think. It may be that you and he share certain common goals.”

“I don’t have a goal, beyond ensuring that no harm comes to the woman in my care.”

“Oh, I don’t think that’s true, Mr. Parker. You are thinking in the specific, not the general. Mr. Merrick, like you, may be interested in a form of justice.”

“For himself, or for someone else?”

“Have you tried asking him?”

“It didn’t work out so well.”

“Perhaps if you tried without a gun on your belt?”

So Merrick had spoken to him recently. Otherwise, how could Eldritch have known of my confrontation with him, and the gun?

“You know,” I said, “I don’t think I want to meet Merrick unless I have a gun close at hand.”

“That is, of course, your decision. Now, if there’s nothing else…”

He stood, walked to the door, and opened it. Clearly, our meeting was at an end. Once more, he extended his hand for me to shake.

“It’s been a pleasure,” he said gravely. In an odd way, he seemed to mean it. “I’m delighted that we’ve had a chance to meet at last. I’ve heard so much about you.”

“Would that be from your client as well?” I asked, and for an instant the smile almost slipped, fragile as a crystal glass teetering on the edge of a table. He rescued it, but it was enough. He seemed about to reply, but I answered for him.

“Let me guess,” I said. “You couldn’t possibly say.”

“Precisely,” he replied. “But if it’s any consolation, I expect that you’ll meet him again, in time.”

“Again?”

But the door had already closed, sealing me off from Thomas Eldritch and his knowledge just as surely as if a tomb door had closed upon him, leaving him with only his paper and his dust and his secrets for company.

My visit to Thomas Eldritch hadn’t contributed significantly to my sense of inner well-being, although it had at least given me Merrick ’s first name. Eldritch had also carefully avoided any denial that Merrick might have done time, which meant that somewhere in the system there was probably a closetful of bones just waiting to be rattled. But Eldritch’s hint that I knew his client made me uneasy. I had enough ghosts in my past to know that I didn’t relish the prospect of any of them being raised.

I stopped for coffee and a sandwich at the Bel Aire Diner on Route 1. (I gave Route 1 this much: at least it had no shortage of spots where a man could eat.) The Bel Aire had survived in its current spot for more than half a century, a big old diner sign outside advertising its presence from the top of a forty-foot pole, the name written beneath in the original fifties cursive. The last I heard a guy called Harry Kallas was running the Bel Aire, and Harry had taken over the place from his father. Inside it were burgundy vinyl booths and matching stools at the counter, and a gray-and-white-tiled floor that boasted the kind of wear and tear associated with generations of business. There were rumors that it was due to close for redecoration, which I supposed was necessary if kind of sad. A TV was built into the wall at one end, but nobody was watching it. The kitchen was noisy, the waitresses were noisy, and the construction workers and locals ordering blue plate specials were noisy too.

I was finishing my second cup of coffee when the call came through. It was Merrick. I recognized his voice the moment I heard it, but no number was displayed on my cell phone.

“You’re a smart sonofabitch,” he said.

“Is that meant to be a compliment? If it is, you need to work on your technique. All that time in the can must have made you rusty.”

“You’re fishing. The lawyer didn’t give you shit.”

I wasn’t surprised that Eldritch had made some calls. I just wondered who had touched base with Merrick: the lawyer, or his client?

“Are you telling me that if I go searching for you in the system, I won’t find a record?”

“Search away. I ain’t gonna make it easy for you, though.”

I waited a heartbeat before asking my next question. It was a hunch, and nothing more.

“What’s the name of the girl in the picture, Frank?”

There was no reply.

“She’s the reason why you’re here, isn’t she? Was she one of the children seen by Daniel Clay? Is she your daughter? Tell me her name, Frank. Tell me her name, and maybe I can help you.”

When Merrick spoke again, his voice had changed. It was filled with quiet yet lethal menace, and I knew with certainty that this was a man who not only was capable of killing, but who had killed already, and that a line had been crossed at the mention of the girl.

“Listen to me,” he said. “I told you once already: my business is my own. I gave you time to convince that little missy to come clean, not to go nosing around in matters that don’t concern you. You’d better get back up to where you came from and talk her around.”

“Or what? I’ll bet that whoever called you about my visit to Eldritch told you to take it down a couple of notches. You keep harassing Rebecca Clay, and your friends are going to cut you loose. You’ll end up back in the can, Frank, and what good will you be to anyone then?”

“You’re wasting time,” he said. “You seem to think I was funnin’ with you about that deadline.”

“I’m getting close,” I lied. “I’ll have something for you by tomorrow.”

“Twenty-four hours,” he said. “That’s all the time you have left, and I’m being generous with you. Let me tell you something else: you and missy better start worrying if ’n I am cut loose. Right now, that’s the only thing holding me in check, apart from my general good nature.”

He hung up. I paid the check and left my coffee to grow cold. Suddenly, it didn’t seem like I had the time to linger over it after all.

My next visit was to Jerry Legere, Rebecca Clay’s ex-husband. I contacted A-Secure and was told that Legere was out on a job in Westbrook with Raymon Lang, and after only a little cajoling the receptionist let me know the location.

I found the company van parked in an industrial wasteland of mud and seemingly deserted premises, with a rutted track leading between them. It wasn’t clear if the site was half finished or in terminal decline. Building work had ceased some time before on a couple of incomplete structures, leaving sections of the steel supports jutting from the concrete like bones from the stumps of severed limbs. Puddles of filthy water stank of gas and waste, and a small yellow cement mixer was lying on its side in a patch of weeds, slowly decaying into rust.

Only one warehouse was open, and inside I found two men on the first floor of the empty two-story interior, a blueprint spread out on the ground in front of them as they knelt over it. This building, at least, had been finished, and there was fresh wire screening to protect its windows from any stones that might have been thrown. I knocked on the steel door, and the men both looked up

“Help you?” said one. He was about five years older than I was, big and strong-looking, but balding badly on top, although he kept his hair cut short enough to disguise the worst of it. It was petty and childish, I knew, but I always felt a brief surge of warmth inside when I met someone close to my own age who had less hair than I did. You could be king of the world and own a dozen companies, but every morning when you stared in the mirror your first thought would be, Damn, I wish I still had my hair.