I told her that I understood, and I’d talk to some people about her options and call her to go through them with her as soon as I could. She headed back to her office to collect her things. I chatted with Jackie Garner and told him about the call from Merrick.

“What happens when our time runs out?” asked Jackie. “We just gonna wait for him to make a move?”

I told him it wouldn’t come to that. I also told him that I didn’t think Rebecca Clay would keep paying for much longer and that I was going to bring in some extra help in the hope of making more progress.

“The kind of help that comes from New York?” asked Jackie.

“Maybe,” I said.

“If the woman ain’t paying you, then how come you want to keep working?”

“Because Merrick isn’t going away, whether he gets what he wants from Rebecca or not. Plus I’m going to shake his tree a whole lot over the next day or two, and he’s not going to like it.”

Jackie looked amused. “Well, you need a hand, you let me know. It’s the boring stuff you have to pay me for. The interesting stuff I do for free.”

Walter was still wet with salt water from his walk with Bob Johnson when I got home, and seemed content to sleep in his basket away from the cold. I had a couple of hours to kill before I was to meet June Fitzpatrick for dinner, so I went onto the Press-Herald ’s Web site and browsed its archive for anything I could find on Daniel Clay’s disappearance. According to the reports, allegations of abuse had been received from a number of children who had been patients of Dr. Clay. At no point was there any implication that he was involved, but questions were clearly being asked about how he could have failed to notice that children whom he was assisting, each of whom had been abused before, were being abused again. Clay had declined to comment, other than to say that he was “very distressed” by the allegations, that he would make a full statement in due course, and that his main priority was assisting the police and social services with their own investigations with a view to finding the culprits. A couple of experts had come, somewhat reluctantly, to Clay’s defense, pointing out that sometimes it could take months or years to get an abuse victim to reveal the depth of what he or she had endured. Even the police were careful not to apportion blame on Clay, but reading between the lines of the story it seemed clear that Clay was taking some of that blame on himself anyway. There was such a scandal brewing that it was hard to see how Clay could have continued to practice, no matter what the outcome of any investigation was. One piece described him variously as “ashen-faced,” “hollow-eyed,” “gaunt,” and “close to tears.” There was a picture of Clay beside the piece, taken outside his house. He looked thin and stooped, like a wounded stork.

The detective quoted in one of the newspaper articles was Bobby O’Rourke. He was still a detective, as far as I knew, although he worked out of Internal Affairs. I got him at his desk just before he left for the day, and he agreed to meet me for a beer over in Geary’s within the hour. I parked on Commercial and found him seated in a corner, flipping through some photocopies and eating a hamburger. We had met a couple of times in the past, and I’d helped him to fill in the blanks in a case involving a Portland P.D. cop named Barron who had died under what could euphemistically be termed “mysterious circumstances” a few years before. I didn’t envy O’Rourke his job. The fact that he was with IA meant that he was good at his work. Unfortunately, it was work at which some of his fellow cops didn’t want him to be good.

He wiped his hands on a napkin, and we shook.

“You eating?” he asked.

“Nope. Going to dinner in an hour or two.”

“Anyplace flash?”

“Joel Harmon’s house.”

“I’m impressed. We’re going to be reading about you in the society columns.”

We spoke a little about the annual IA report that was about to be published. It was the usual stuff, mainly use-of-force allegations and complaints about the operation of police vehicles. The patterns remained pretty consistent. The complainants were typically young males, and the use-of-force incidents mostly related to breaking up fights. The cops had used only their hands to subdue the combatants, and the guys involved were mostly white and under thirty, so it wasn’t like senior citizens or the Harlem Globetrotters were being rousted. Nobody had been suspended for longer than two days as a result of complaints. All told, it wasn’t a bad year for IA. Meanwhile, the Portland P.D. had a new chief. The old chief had stepped down earlier in the year, and the city council had been considering two candidates, one who was white and local, and one who was black and from the South. Had the council gone for the black candidate, it would have increased by 100 percent the number of black cops in Portland, but instead it had opted for local experience. It wasn’t a bad decision, but some minority leaders were still sore. The old chief, meanwhile, was rumored to be considering a run for governor.

O’Rourke finished his burger and took a sip of his IPA. He was a slim, fit guy who didn’t look like burgers and beer usually accounted for too many of his calories.

“So, Daniel Clay,” he said.

“You remember him?”

“I remember the case, and what I didn’t recall I checked before I came over here. I only met Clay twice before he went missing, so there’s a limit to what I can tell you.”

“What did you think of him?”

“He seemed genuinely upset by what had happened. He looked to be in shock. He kept referring to them as his ‘kids.’ We started investigating, along with the state police, the sheriffs, the local cops, social services. The rest you probably know already: some points of correspondence came up in other cases over a period of time, and a number of those cases could be traced back to Clay.”

“You think it was a coincidence that Clay had worked with the kids?”

“There’s nothing to indicate that it wasn’t. Some of the children were particularly vulnerable. They’d been abused before, and most of them were in the very early stages of therapy and intervention. They hadn’t even got around to talking about the first series of abuses before the next began to happen.”

“Ever come close to an arrest?”

“No. A girl, thirteen years old, was found wandering in fields outside of Skowhegan at three in the morning. Barefoot, clothes torn, bleeding, no underwear. She was hysterical, babbling about men and birds. She was disoriented and didn’t seem to know where she’d been held or what direction she’d walked from, but she was clear on the details: three men, all masked, taking turns with her in what seemed to be an unfurnished room in a house. We got some DNA samples from her, but most of them were pretty messed up. Only a couple were clean, and they didn’t match anything on the databases. About a year ago we tried again as part of a cold case review, but still zip. It’s bad. We should have done better on it, but I don’t see how.”

“What about the kids?”

“I haven’t kept track of all of them. Some have come back on the radar. They were screwed-up kids, and they became screwed-up adults. I always felt sorry for them when I saw their names come up. What the hell kind of chance did they have after what was done to them?”

“And Clay?”

“He literally vanished. His daughter called us, said she was worried about him, that he hadn’t been home in two days. They found his car outside Jackman, up by the Canadian border. We thought he might have fled the jurisdiction, but there was no reason for him to do that, apart from shame, maybe. He’s never been seen again.”

I leaned back in my chair. I wasn’t much wiser than before I’d sat down. O’Rourke recognized my dissatisfaction.

“Sorry,” he said. “Bet you were hoping for a revelation.”