‘Odd?’ he said. ‘What do you mean by odd?’

‘Did you ever see trucks go in and out of Harold’s place?’ I asked. ‘Big rigs, possibly on the way down from Canada.’

‘Jeez, I wouldn’t know. If the truck came up from Portland or Augusta, maybe, but if they came through Coburn Gore then they’d get to Harold’s place before they reached Langdon.’

‘Is there someone who would know?’

‘I can ask around.’

‘I don’t have that kind of time, Mr. Stunden. Look, I’m not the police, and you have no obligation to provide me with information, but do you remember what I told you earlier today?’

Stunden nodded. ‘About the boy who killed himself.’

‘That’s right. And now Harold Proctor is dead, and it looks like another suicide.’

I could have mentioned Kramer in Quebec, and Brett Harlan and his wife, to clinch the deal, but if I did then it would become part of the bar conversation, and that, in turn, would get back to the cops eventually. There were any number of reasons why I didn’t want that to happen. I’d only just got my license back, and despite vague assurances that it was in no danger of immediate revocation again, I didn’t need to give the state police any excuse to go after me. At the very least, I’d incur the displeasure of Walsh, and I kind of liked him, although if we were ever jailed together I wouldn’t want to share a cell with him.

But, more than all of that, I recognized the old hunger. I wanted to explore what was happening, to uncover the deeper connections between the deaths of Harold Proctor, Damien Patchett, and the others. I knew now that I was a private investigator in name only, that the mundane stuff of false insurance claims, cheating spouses, and thieving employees might be enough to pay my bills, but it was no more than that. I had come to realize that my desire to join the police and my short, less than illustrious career in the NYPD were not solely about making recompense for my father’s perceived failings. He had killed two young people before taking his own life, and his actions had tainted the memory of him and marked me. I was a bad cop – not corrupt, not violent, not inept, but still bad – for I lacked the discipline and patience, and maybe the absence of ego, that the job required. The acquisition of a private investigator’s license had seemed like a compromise that I could live with, a means of fulfilling some vague sense of purpose by acquiring the trappings of legality. I knew that I could never be a cop again, but I still had the instincts required, and the sense of purpose, of vocation, that marked out the ones who didn’t do it solely for the benefits, or the camaraderie, or the promise of cashing out in twenty and opening a bar in Boca Raton.

So I could have handed over everything that I knew or suspected to Walsh and walked away. After all, his resources were greater than mine, and I had no reason to believe that his sense of purpose was inferior to my own. But I wanted this. Without it, what was I? So I would take my chances; I would trade when I had to trade, and hoard what I could. At some point, you have to trust your instincts, and yourself. I had learned something in the years since my wife and child were taken from me, and I hunted down the one responsible: I was good at what I did.

Why?

Because I had nothing else.

Now I watched Stunden as he considered the two suicides. I didn’t speak for a while. I just let the possibility of a connection dangle itself before him like a brightly colored fly while I waited for him to bite.

‘There’s a guy name of Geagan, Edward Geagan,’ said Stunden. ‘He lives up behind Harold’s place. You wouldn’t know it, not unless you were looking for him, but he’s up there all right. Like a lot of people around here, like Harold did, he keeps himself to himself, but he’s not weird or nothing. He’s just quiet. If anyone would know, Edward would.’

‘I want to talk to him before the cops do. He have a phone?’

‘Edward? I said he was quiet, I didn’t say he was a primitive. He does something with the Internet. Marketing, I think. I don’t even know what “marketing” means, but he’s got more computers up there than NASA. And a phone,’ he added.

‘Call him.’

‘Can I promise that you’ll buy him a drink?’

‘You know those old Westerns, where the hero tells the bartender to leave the bottle?’

Stunden blinked.

‘I’ll call Edward.’

Edward Geagan turned out to be from geek central casting. He was in his mid-thirties, tall and pale and thin, with long, sandy hair and rimless glasses, dressed in brown polyester pants, cheap brown shoes, and a light tan shirt. He looked like someone had put a wig on a giraffe and run it through the local Target.

‘This is Mr. Parker, the man I told you about,’ said Stunden. ‘He has some questions he’d like to ask you.’ He spoke as though he were talking to a child. Geagan cocked an eyebrow at him.

‘Stunds, why do you insist on talking to me like I’m a moron?’ he said, but there was no hint of unfriendliness to his voice, only vague amusement tinged with a little impatience.

‘Because you look like you belong in MIT, not a wood in Franklin County,’ said Stunden. ‘I feel like I should look out for you.’

Geagan grinned at him, and Stunden, for the first time that evening, grinned back.

‘Asshole.’

‘Rube.’

As it turned out, the bartender declined to leave us with the bottle, but he was prepared to keep refilling the glasses as long as Stunden and Geagan could keep ordering without slurring their words. Unfortunately for me, their tolerance for alcohol was at least as great as their tolerance for each other. The bar began to empty at about the same pace as the bottle behind the bar, until pretty soon we were the only people left. We spent some time making small talk, and Geagan told me how he’d ended up in Franklin County, having tired of city life down in Boston.

‘The first winter was hard,’ he said. ‘I thought Boston sucked when it snowed, but up here, well, you might as well be at the bottom of an avalanche.’ He grimaced. ‘I miss women too. You know, female company. These small towns, man. The ones who aren’t married have left. It’s like being in the Foreign Legion.’

‘It gets better when the tourists come,’ said Stunden. ‘Not much, but some.’

‘Damn, I might be dead of frustration by then.’

They both stared into the bottom of their glasses, as though hoping a mermaid might pop her head out of the booze and flick her tail invitingly at them.

‘About Harold Proctor,’ I said, trying to move the conversation along.

‘I was surprised when I heard,’ said Geagan. ‘He wasn’t the kind.’

That phrase was starting to recur a little too often. Bennett Patchett had used it about his son, and Carrie Saunders had said much the same thing about both Damien Patchett and Brett Harlan. If they were all correct, there were a lot of dead people who had no business being dead.

‘Why do you say that?’

‘He was hard. He had no regrets about anything that he’d done over there, and he’d done some pretty hardcore stuff, or so he said. Well, I thought it was hardcore, but then I’ve never killed anyone. Never will, I hope.’

‘You got along with him?’

‘I drank with him a couple of times during the winter, and he helped me when my generator gave out. We were neighborly without being close. That’s the way of things up here. Then Harold grew different. I talked to Stunds here about it, and he said the same. Harold started keeping his own counsel more than before, and he was never what you might call a chatterbox. I’d hear his truck starting up at odd times: after dark, sometimes well after midnight. Then the rig started arriving. A big truck – red, I think – hauling a trailer.’

A red truck, just like Joel Tobias’s.

‘Did you get a plate number?’

Geagan recited it from memory. It was Tobias all right. ‘I’ve got a photographic memory,’ he said. ‘Helps with what I do.’