22

I CALLED ANGEL AND LOUIS from the Maine Medical Center, but there was no reply from their room at the inn. I then placed a call to the Scarborough PD. I told them that a couple had broken into my house, assaulted my girlfriend, and one of them was now lying dead on my kitchen floor. I also gave them a description of the Cirrus Mr. Pudd had driven away from the house, complete with smashed rear windshield and busted back light.

The Scarborough PD was equipped with QED, or computer-enabled dispatch, which meant that the nearest patrol car would be immediately assigned to the house. They would also alert neighboring departments and the state police in an effort to find Pudd before he ditched the car.

At Maine Medical they dosed Rachel with antivenin after she had replied to a barrage of questions to which I was not privy, then put her on a gurney in a curtained-off section to rest up. By then Angel and Louis had got my message, and Angel was now seated beside her, talking to her gently, while Louis waited outside in the car. There were still people with questions to ask about the events in Dark Hollow the previous winter, and Louis was considerably more conspicuous than Angel.

Rachel had not spoken during the ride to the hospital. Instead, she had simply held her hand over the area where the spider had bitten her, shaking softly. She had also suffered some cuts and bruises to the head, but there was no concussion and she was going to be okay. I was X-rayed and then given ten stitches to close up the wound in my scalp. It was already midafternoon, and I was still feeling dazed and numb when Ramos, one of the detectives out of Scarborough, arrived, accompanied by the department's detective sergeant, Wallace MacArthur, and a whole cartload of questions. Their first question was: who was the injured woman? More to the point, where was she?

“She was lying there when I left,” I said.

“Well, she wasn't lying there when the first patrol got to your place. There was a hell of a lot of blood on your kitchen floor, and more outside in the yard, but there was no dead woman.”

He was seated across from me in a small private room usually used to comfort relatives of recently deceased patients. “You sure she was dead?” he asked.

I shook my head and sipped at my lukeward coffee. “I stuck a piece of chair halfway into her body, right between numbers three and four, and I pushed up hard. I saw her die. There's no way she got up and walked away.”

“You think this guy, this Mr. Pudd, came back for her?” he asked.

“You find a suitcase full of spiders on my kitchen table?”

MacArthur shook his head.

“Then it was him.”

It was a huge risk for him to take; he probably had only a few minutes to retrieve her. “I think he's trying to keep the waters as muddy as he can,” I said. “Without the woman, there's no positive ID, nothing that can link her to him. Or to anyone else,” I added.

“You know who she is?”

I nodded. “I think her name is Torrance. She was Carter Paragon's secretary.”

“The late Carter Paragon?” MacArthur sat back, opened a fresh page in his notebook, and waited for me to begin. From across the hall, I heard Rachel calling for me.

“I'll be back,” I told MacArthur. For a second or two he looked like he might be tempted to sit on me and shake me by the throat until I gave up what I knew. Instead, he nodded reluctantly and let me leave.

Angel stood and walked discreetly to the window as I approached her. Rachel was pale, and there was sweat on her brow and upper lip, but she gripped my hand tightly as I sat on the edge of her bed.

“How are you doing?”

“I'm tougher than you think, Parker.”

“I know how tough you are.”

She nodded. “I guess you do.” She looked past me to the room where Ramos and MacArthur waited.

“What are you going to tell them?”

“Everything that I can.”

“But not everything that you know?”

“That would be unwise.”

“You're still going to see the Beckers, aren't you?” she asked softly.

“Yes.”

“I'm going with you. Maybe I can succeed in convincing them where you couldn't. You and Louis go walking in on those people in your current mood and you're likely to scare them to death. And if we do find Marcy, a friendly face will help.”

She was right. “Okay,” I said. “Rest up for a while, and then we'll leave. Nobody's going anywhere without you.”

She gave me a satisfied smile and released my hand. Angel resumed his seat beside her bed. His Glock was in an IWB holster at his waist, concealed by his long shirt.

From the room in which I had left MacArthur and Ramos came the sound of raised voices. I saw Ramos emerge from the room at a sprint. MacArthur was right behind him, but he stopped when he saw me.

“What's up?” I asked.

“Trawler spotted Jack Mercier's yacht at low revs a couple of miles out, heading into shore.” MacArthur swallowed. “Skipper says there's a body lashed to the mast.”

The cruiser, named the Revenant, had docked at the Portland marina five days earlier. It was a twenty-five-foot Grady White Sailfish 25, with twin two-hundred-horsepower Suzuki outboards, and its owner paid $175 in advance for one week's mooring at the standard rate of $1 per foot per night. The name, address, phone number, and boat registration number he gave to Portland Yacht Services, administrators of the marina, were all false.

He was a small man, cross-eyed, with a tightly shaven skull. He spent most of his time in or near his boat, sleeping in its single compartment. By day he sat on the deck with a pair of binoculars in one hand, a cell phone in the other, and a book on his lap. He didn't speak, and rarely left the boat for longer than fifteen minutes. His eyes seemed almost permanently fixed on the waters of Casco Bay.

Early on the morning of the sixth day, a group of six people-two women, four men-boarded a yacht on the bay. The boat was the Eliza May, a seventy-footer built three years earlier by Hodgdon Yachts in East Boothbay. Its deck was teak, its body epoxy, glass, and mahogany over Alaska cedar. As well as the Doyle sail on its eighty-foot mast, it had a 150-horsepower Perkins diesel engine and could sleep seven people in luxury. It was equipped with a forty-mile radar, GPS, LORAN, and WeatherFax, as well as VHF and single sideband radio and an EPIRB emergency system. It had cost Jack Mercier over $2.5 million and was too big to moor at Scarborough, so it had a permanent berth at Portland.

The Eliza May left Portland for the last time shortly after 7:30 A.M. There was a northwest wind blowing, superb weather for yachting, and the wind tossed Mercier's white hair as he steered her into Casco Bay. Deborah Mercier sat apart from her husband, head down. By then, the cross-eyed man had been joined by two other people, a woman in blue and a slim red-haired man dressed in brown, both carrying tuna rods. As the Eliza May headed out into deep waters, the Revenant left the harbor and shadowed it, unseen.

I caught up with MacArthur at the elevator.

“Mercier's involved in this,” I told him. There was no point in keeping Mercier's role secret any longer.

“The hell-?”

“Believe me. I've been working for him.”

I could see him considering his options, so I decided to preempt him. “Take me along,” I said. “I'll tell you what I know on the way.”

He paused and gave me a long, hard look, then nodded and reached out his hand. “You can come as far as Pine Point. Hand over the gun, Charlie,” he said.

Reluctantly, I gave him the Smith amp; Wesson. He ejected the magazine and checked the chamber, then handed it back to me. “You can leave it with your friend,” he said.