Page 43 of The Instruments of Darkness

“Please don’t,” she said. “It’ll give me something to do. Also, your washing dishes isn’t going to bring us any closer to finding Henry.”

I had to concede that much. I told her I’d be gone for the day, but I’d bring back something for dinner. It all felt curiously domestic.

“If you can,” I said, “I want you to reflect on the last few months, including anything odd, however trivial, that might have taken place: a conversation with a stranger in the supermarket, someone who stared at you and Henry for too long in a coffee shop, whatever you can remember.”

“The police asked Stephen and me to do all that already. I told them all I could.”

“You were under pressure, so there was no way you were thinking clearly. Start again, day by day. You may be surprised at what you can recall. Use routines to anchor your memories. I have a spare desk diary for this year in my office, every page blank. I’m going to leave it with you. Begin by writing down the things you habitually did: day care for Henry, weekly shopping, regular meetings with friends, whatever they might be. If you keep a record of appointments on your phone, add those as well. You’ll find that recording regular occurrences will bring to mind irregular ones. We’re back to patterns and grids: by detailing whatever fits, we have a chance of spotting what doesn’t. Henry’s abduction wasn’t a crime of opportunity. You were being watched, Colleen, and it may be that some primitive part of your brain was alerted to it.”

She agreed to try.

“Can I ask what you’re going to do?”

“I have one or two more interviews to conduct,” I replied. “After that, I’m going to take a sharp stick and poke the undergrowth.”

“You’re being deliberately vague.”

“I am.”

“I imagine you were a frustrating man to be married to.”

“Yes,” I said, “I imagine I was.”

CHAPTER XXVI

The National Gas and Petrochemicals Forum was the brainchild of an organization called the Gas and Petrochemical Energy Research Center, based in the Old Post Office Building in Lynn, Massachusetts. It was doubtful that asking for details of forum guests over the phone would yield results, so I decided it might be more productive to make the approach in person.

I hadn’t been in Lynn in years, not since someone had blown up the business premises of an elderly lawyer named Eldritch. Since then, Eldritch had dropped from sight. For all I knew, he might be dead. If so, it could have come as a relief to him. He’d suffered his own losses over the years, too many and too deep for an old man to bear. He’d also kept some very bad company, terrifyingly so.

As I drove south, I touched base with Moxie. He was preparing his list of depositions, but Erin Becker was playing hard to get on discovery.

“It’s because Becker knows she’s weak across the board,” said Moxie. “We’ll know more when we read the affidavit, but it’ll come down to Stephen Clark’s testimony, along with whatever corroborating expert opinions she can rustle up, backed by Colleen’s subpoenaed medical and therapy records—assuming she can gain access to them, which we’ll fight. After that, there’s just the blanket from the car. Becker has nothing else.”

I hadn’t seen the blanket, but Erin Becker, aware of its power, had been happy to share pictures with Moxie, and he’d passed them on to me. All that blood: the blanket, if displayed as evidence in court, would do Colleen no favors. It could only have been sourced from inside the house, and she and her son had been alone there on the night he disappeared. But if Colleen wasn’t involved in Henry’s abduction, how had the blanket come to be be used?

“The police have obtained a warrant to search the Clark property,” said Moxie. “They’ll be looking for any traces of Henry’s blood.”

This had been anticipated. It was only a surprise it had taken so long.

“They’ll find them, too,” I said. “He was a young boy, still getting the hang of walking, and we already know he had bumps and bruises.”

“There’s a big difference between a cut that requires a Band-Aid and wounds that drench a blanket. But that won’t stop them from adding anything that shows up to the evidence list. Have you spoken with Colleen’s doctor and therapist yet?”

I told him I had appointments to meet each of them. “I’ve also arranged to have a quiet conversation with Steady Freddy White,” I added.

Detective Frederick White was second lead on the Clark investigation. The lead was a suit called Furnish, but he and I had never seen eye to eye, and I couldn’t expect any cooperation from that direction. Nobody liked Furnish, not even within the Portland PD, and possibly not within his own family. The only reason he didn’t own a dog was because it would undoubtedly have bitten him before leaving home forever. Freddy White, by contrast, was two years away from retirement with full benefits and had rarely met a boat he wanted to rock. He wouldn’t do anything to screw up the Clark case, but neither would he object to being straight with me, especially if I was paying for the pleasure.

“Don’t give away more than you get,” warned Moxie.

“And there I was hoping to work both sides against each other for personal gain,” I replied, before hanging up.

LYNN’S OLD POST OFFICE Building was included on the National Register of Historic Places. With its copper domes, it looked like it belonged in another country, or at least another environment, but then, Lynn had long endured a bad rap from the rest of Massachusetts, although its architecture was more curious and interesting than its “city of sin” reputation suggested. Back in the day, Lynn’s hookers had worked out of some pretty nice buildings.

The Gas and Petrochemical Energy Research Center might have evoked images of men and women in white coats laboring over test tubes, but it more closely resembled an insurance office, one that was superficially slick but wouldn’t pay out on a policy until it had been dragged kicking and screaming to the courthouse steps. It occupied a suite of corner rooms, the lobby walls decorated with glossy photographs of pristine valleys and mighty flowing rivers, suggesting that the land could have asked for no better stewards than the people responsible for Louisiana’s Cancer Alley, or closer to home, violating the Clean Air Act in South Portland, where, on a bad day, the smell from the petroleum storage tanks was enough to make the eyes water.

I’d called in advance to let the center know I was on my way. Nobody had objected, or threatened to barricade the doors against me, but that might have been because I hadn’t specified the purpose of my visit. A secretary showed me straight to the office of the director of public affairs: a woman named Delaney Duhamel, with the face of one of the sadder Botticelli angels. She offered me coffee before setting her phone to record our conversation.

“Just a precaution,” she said.

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