Wallace picked up his notebook and tapped it once on the bar, then slipped it back into his pocket. He put his jacket on, wrapped his scarf around his neck, then put three dollars on the bar.

“For the coffee, and the tip,” he said. “I’ll leave the books with you. Take a look at them. They’re better than you think they are. I’ll call again in a day or two, see if you’ve reconsidered.”

He nodded in farewell, then left. I swept his books into the trash can under the bar. Jackie Garner, who had been listening to the whole exchange, climbed from his stool and walked around to face me.

“You want me to, I can take care of this,” he said. “That asshole’s probably still in the parking lot.”

I shook my head. “Let him go.”

“I ain’t going to talk to him,” said Jackie. “And if he tries to talk to Paulie and Tony, they’ll drop his body in Casco Bay.”

“Thanks, Jackie.”

“Yeah, well…”

A car started up in the Bear’s lot. Jackie walked to the door and watched as Wallace departed.

“Blue Taurus,” he said. “Mass plates. Old, though. Not a rental. Not the kind of car a big-shot writer would drive.” He returned to the bar. “You think you can make him stop?”

“I don’t know. I can try.”

“He looks like the persistent type.”

“Yeah, he does.”

“Well, you remember: that offer still stands. Tony and Paulie and me, we’re good with persistence. We see it as a challenge.”

Jackie hung around after the bar had closed, but it was clear that it wasn’t out of any concern for me. He only had eyes for the woman, whose name, he whispered to me, was Lisa Goodwin. I was tempted to tell her to run and never look back if she was seriously considering dating Jackie, but that didn’t seem fair to either of them. According to Dave, who knew a little about her from previous visits she’d paid to the Bear, she was a nice woman who had made some bad choices in the past when it came to men. By comparison with most of her former lovers, Jackie was practically Cary Grant. He was loyal, and good-hearted, and unlike some of this woman’s exes, he would never resort to violence against her. True, he lived with his mother and had a fondness for homemade munitions, and the munitions were less volatile than his mother, but Lisa could deal with those issues if and when they arose.

I filled a mug with the last of the coffee from the pot and wandered out to the back office. There I turned on the computer and found out all that I could about Michael Wallace. I visited his website, then read some of his newspaper stories, which came to an end after 2005, and reviews of his first two books. After an hour, I had hi B hiI cs home address, his employment history, details of his divorce in 2002, and a DUI that he’d incurred in 2006. I’d have to talk to Aimee Price in the morning. I wasn’t sure what action, if any, I could legally take to prevent Wallace from writing about me, but I just knew that I didn’t want my name on the cover of a book. If Aimee couldn’t help, I’d be forced to lean on Wallace, and something told me that he wouldn’t respond well to that kind of pressure. Reporters rarely did.

Gary entered as I was finishing up.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

“Well, we’re all done out here.”

“Thanks. Go home, get some sleep. I’ll lock up.”

“Good night, then.” He lingered at the door.

“What is it?”

“If that guy comes back, the writer, what should I do?”

“Poison his drink. Be careful where you dump the body, though.”

Gary looked confused, as if uncertain whether or not I was being serious. I recognized the look. Most of the people who worked at the Bear knew something about my past, especially the locals who’d been there for a few years. Who could guess what kind of stories they’d been telling Gary when I wasn’t around?

“Just let me know if you see him,” I said. “Maybe you could spread the word that I’d appreciate it if nobody spoke to him about me.”

“Sure thing,” said Gary, brightening noticeably, then left. I heard him talking to Sergei, one of the line chefs, and then a door closed behind them and all was quiet.

The coffee had gone cold. I poured it down a sink, printed out all that I had learned about Wallace, and went home.

Mickey Wallace sat in his motel room out by the Maine Mall and wrote up the notes on his encounter with Parker. It was a trick he’d learned as a reporter: write everything down while it was still fresh, because even after a couple of hours the memory began to play tricks. You could fool yourself into thinking that you were remembering only the important stuff, but that wasn’t the case. You were just remembering what you hadn’t forgotten, important or not. Mickey was in the habit of recording his material in longhand in a series of notebooks, and then transferring it to his computer, but the notebooks remained the primary record, and it was to them that he always returned during the process of writing a book.

He hadn’t been disappointed or surprised by Parker’s response to his initial overture. In fact, he regarded the man’s possible participation in the venture as something of a long shot to begin with, but it never hurt to ask. What was surprising to him was that someone hadn’t written a book about Parker already, given all that he’d done, and the cases with which he’d been involved, but that was just one of the many strange things about Charlie Parker. Somehow, despite his history and his actions, he had managed to remain just slightly off the radar. Even in the coverage of the most high-profile cases, his name usually appeared buried in the fine print somewhere. It was almost as if ther Be a mae was an element of collusion when it came to him, an unspoken understanding that his part in what had occurred should be played down.

And those were just the ones that had made it into the public arena. Wallace had already done more than a little snooping, and Parker’s name had been mentioned in connection with some business in upstate New York involving Russian mobsters, or so the story went. Mickey had managed to get a local cop in Massena to talk to him over some beers and quickly came to realize that something was being covered up in a big way, but when he tried to talk to the cop again the next day, Mickey was run out of town and warned, in no uncertain terms, never to come back. The trail had died after that, but Mickey’s curiosity had been piqued.

He could smell blood, and blood sold books.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

EMILY KINDLER LEFT THE little town in which she had been living for the past year shortly after the funeral for her deceased boyfriend’s parents. An open verdict was delivered as to the cause of their deaths, but it was understood in the town that they had taken their own lives, although Chief Dashut increasingly wondered why they had done so before they’d had a chance to bury their son properly. He couldn’t think of any parents who would not want to do right by their deceased child, no matter how traumatized they were by what had occurred. He questioned the verdict, both publicly and privately, and yoked the deaths of the parents to the murder of their son in both his mind and his own investigation.

There had been no denying that Emily Kindler’s shock at their deaths was genuine. One of the local doctors had been forced to give her a sedative to calm her down, and there were concerns for a time that she might have to be admitted to a psychiatric facility. She told the chief that she had visited the Faradays on the evening before they died, and Daniel Faraday in particular had appeared distressed, but there had been no indication that one or both of the Faradays might have been planning suicide.

The only lead so far in the killing of Bobby Faraday had come from the state police, who had discovered that Bobby had been involved in an altercation in a bar some eight miles from the town line, two weeks before his death. The bar in question was a roadside gin mill popular with bikers, and it seemed that Bobby, while intoxicated, had put the moves on a girl who was peripherally involved with the Crusaders biker gang. The Crusaders’ base was in Southern California, but their reach extended as far as Oklahoma and Georgia. Words had been exchanged, and a couple of punches thrown, before Bobby was dumped in the parking lot and given a kick in the ass to send him home. He was lucky not to have been stomped, but someone at the bar who knew Bobby had intervened on his behalf, arguing that he was just a kid who didn’t know any better, a kid, what’s more, who was hurting over the end of a relationship. Common sense had prevailed; well, common sense and the fortuitous arrival of a state police cruiser just as the Crusaders were debating the wisdom of giving Bobby some serious physical pain to distract him from his emotional distress. The Crusaders were bad, but the chief didn’t see them strangling a boy just because he’d crossed them. Still, the state police detectives seemed to feel that it was worth pursuing, and were now engaged in a game of catch-up with the Crusade Cth ”[1]ef rs, assisted by the FBI. In the meantime, Dashut had pointed out to the state police the symbol carved into the beech tree, and additional photographs had been taken, but he had heard nothing more about it.