Page 67 of The Instruments of Darkness

“No,” said Pascal, “I just don’t want to have to believe in them, because once that starts, there’ll be no end to it. Next thing you know, I’ll have an angel bumper sticker on my car, or turn vegan.”

“I’m vegan,” said Loscarso. She sounded mildly affronted.

Pascal eased himself from the hood of the car.

“You don’t say? And I was just beginning to like you.”

3

There must have been a moment, at the beginning, where we could have said—no. But somehow we missed it.

Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

CHAPTER XXXIX

Mattia Reggio had made a few more calls since his conversation with the journalist Hazel Sloane. Some of them required him to renew old acquaintances, which Reggio generally preferred not to do, but he didn’t have any personal contacts at the Maine Bureau of Motor Vehicles who might have been able to help him trace the owner of a car. The difficulty in reaching out—or more particularly, in extending a hand into the past—was that any help came with a price attached, the bill to be paid now or in the future. You asked a favor, you owed a favor, that was how it worked. But if anyone came looking for something especially awkward in return—meaning a service that might conceivably land Reggio in trouble with the law—he would try to work around it. At worst, a couple of people still owed him, and he’d find a way to pass the debt to them. This was one of the reasons Reggio had abjured criminality: it was so damn hard to keep track of one’s obligations, and the debit and credit columns never balanced the way they should.

After a lot of how-you-doin’, Reggio was now in possession of a name and address for the owner of the vehicle that had attempted to follow him from Cumberland County Jail: Ellar Michaud, age fifty-six, a resident of Gretton, up in Piscataquis County. Reggio had never been to Gretton, and hadn’t even been aware of the town’s existence before the information came through. He located it on Google Maps, but there wasn’t much to locate: a few bars, a gas station, a diner or two, and stores that either sold only what people needed or resold what some of them no longer did. If there was anything worth seeing in the place, it was well hidden.

Michaud lived some way out of town on Private Road 7, an address that suggested holding parties for the neighborhood kids wasn’t high on the owner’s list of priorities. Reggio pulled up a satellite image of the area—nothing was secret anymore, he reflected; a man could run, but he couldn’t hide—and spotted what had to be the Michaud residence, given the absence of much else resembling a home in the vicinity. The trees were so thick that Reggio could barely make out the turnoff from the main road; then, in a clearing farther on was the roof of the house itself, so that it seemed a dwelling unreachable, unless one elected to trek through the forest on foot. But somewhere under that foliage was undoubtedly an access trail, even as its actual course was open to speculation.

Reggio zoomed in on the house and thought he could discern what might have been a figure in the yard: a blue shape with a pale blur for a face, one arm raised to shield the eyes, as though the man—Reggio was pretty sure it was a man—had somehow sensed surveillance and emerged to determine the source, before realizing it was coming from somewhere far above his head. Of course, Reggio knew better. He was just projecting oddness where he had no cause to find it. Yet he couldn’t shake the feeling that this man was looking, not at some satellite invisible to the naked eye, but at him; that it was Reggio’s interest of which he was aware, and not some high-tech lens. Abruptly, Reggio killed the screen and had the strangest premonition that, were he to return in a few minutes, the figure in the yard would be gone, as in some lost episode of The Twilight Zone, with Rod Serling promising only bad luck and misery to anyone foolish enough to trespass on “Private Road 7.”

Reggio shifted his attention to the official Piscataquis County website, where he located the link to the Maine Registry of Deeds. It required him to make a user account, which he did after first determining that it wouldn’t cost him anything. He could have logged in as a guest, but he wouldn’t have been given printing privileges, and he might as well have documentary evidence of any useful information he came across in the form of maps, plans, or land records. He hadn’t yet decided what he was going to do with whatever he collated, or so he told himself. He could pass it on to Moxie Castin, or Parker, and let one of them figure out what it all meant. Then again, he was open to taking a little road trip, because it was always good for a man to explore new vistas. And he had a point to prove: to Parker and to himself.

The county land records dated from 1948, but some of the plans came from as far back as 1812, although only those from 1970 onward included images. Michaud was a common enough name in Maine, and the region around Gretton had more than a few of them. It took Reggio some time, because he had to open and read each document, but with patience he weeded out the ones that weren’t pertinent, whether they were ultimately related to the object of his interest or not, to be left with index data from the start of the nineteenth century relating to “Michaud, Jotham T.,” registered owner of fifty acres that roughly corresponded to the relevant area off Private Road 7, then referred to only as “a certain lot or parcel of land westerly of Sullivan Creek.”

Jotham T. Michaud, already in situ at the time of the earliest records, had begun extending his family’s initial holding by purchasing tracts of adjoining territory. Reggio worked through them all, printing off each item of paperwork and making note of any new names that were mentioned, until he had amassed a pile of deeds, probates, leases, liens, wills, and death affidavits forming an official history of the Michaud family’s presence in Gretton. Among them was evidence of a second house on the land, in the form of plans lodged, but when he returned to the Google satellite image—the figure in the yard thankfully still present, so in your face, Rod Serling—he could see no trace of it. Perhaps, he thought, it had rotted away, or been demolished.

He glanced at the clock and saw that he’d been at his computer for the best part of three hours. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d spent so long staring at its screen. In the main, it was useful for looking up solutions to baffling crossword clues or watching videos of old shows and ball games on YouTube. He rarely even bothered with email. Yet he’d surprised himself by how much he’d found out, up to and including Ellar Michaud’s status as the current owner of the property on Private Road 7, having inherited it following the death of his father, Normand, in 1996.

But one pressing question remained: Why should Ellar Michaud, scion of a family that seemed to have put down roots in Piscataquis back when God was a boy, be interested in the movements of Colleen Clark, a young mother accused of abducting and killing her child?

Before switching off his computer, Reggio ensured that his browsing history was deleted. Force of habit: never leave a trail. He then went to his office closet and recovered a lockbox from the highest shelf, far beyond the reach of even the most determined grandchild. From it, he took a snub-nosed Smith & Wesson Model 10. The gun was nearly fifty years old, the same one he’d carried back when he was running with Cadillac Frank. Model 10s had more than a century of reliability behind them, were easy to carry concealed, and, unlike a pistol, would never jam. A man needed nothing more from a gun.

Reggio had never taken a life with his Model 10—he’d fired it a couple of times, but he didn’t think he’d ever hit anyone, or not that he’d heard about later. He’d whipped a few heads with the muzzle and the butt, if only when all attempts at reasoning had failed, but he’d never signed up to put someone’s lights out permanently. Every guy he knew who’d killed for the Office ended up either dead or in jail, every single one of them, but he might just have hung out with some very unlucky people. If so, he’d done his best to make sure their bad luck didn’t rub off on him, which was why he was currently at liberty, despite having secret blood on his hands. He very much intended for that state of affairs to continue, until he expired of some cause that didn’t involve a bullet. He’d take the revolver along on his road trip, though, because you never knew just how the Ellar Michauds of this world might take it into their heads to respond to an unexpected visitor.

In Reggio’s experience, every man who truly valued his privacy had something to hide.

CHAPTER XL

Sabine Drew watched the private investigator enter the Great Lost Bear: one could tell a lot from the way a man occupied a public space. (Women were different, less prone to imposing themselves, or annexing territory.) The detective held the door for the older couple walking in behind him, but she noticed that he used it as an opportunity to survey the area immediately around and then beyond him, his attention briefly alighting on customers and staff alike. She wondered if he was aware of doing it, so ingrained had the behavior become. She didn’t detect any fear in his movements, even though, from what she knew, some apprehension would have been justified. A man who has been shot once will do his best to avoid being shot again, but a man who has been shot multiple times will wake from his sleep to the fading sound of bullets fired, unable ever to be fully at ease for the rest of his days. But in the investigator’s face Sabine saw only a preparedness, an alertness. He’d grown used to danger, she thought, and his psychological processes, both conscious and unconscious, had adapted themselves to it. He was simultaneously hard prey and evolved predator.

The bar owner intercepted him near the door and they exchanged a few words. Sabine adjusted the front of her shirt, and picked food crumbs from her old jeans. She found herself wishing she’d put in more effort when selecting her outfit, before realizing that it wouldn’t have made any difference. Her entire wardrobe was uniformly functional, down to the sole nice black dress she kept for funerals. Most of the time it didn’t matter, but suddenly, in this bar, with the investigator approaching, it did.

Now here he was, his shadow and hers uniting briefly in intimacy.

“Ms. Drew?” he said, as she got to her feet. “My name is Parker.”

He extended a hand, an instinctive gesture. Sabine hadn’t shaken hands with anyone in a long time, certainly not since before the pandemic, but she accepted his—and was instantly among the dead.

CHAPTER XLI

A series of trails cut through the woods from both sides of Private Road 7, like branches growing from a tree trunk, narrowing the farther they extended from the parent limb. A few had become desire paths for deer, and Ellar Michaud could smell their spoor as he walked. The animals roamed unhindered on Michaud territory. Ellar did not hunt on this land, and no others were permitted to hunt there either. This was, in its way, sacred ground, although the Michaud prohibition on hunting had not prevented Ellar from arming himself, before leaving home, with a Tikka T3x Superlite bolt-action rifle loaded with a ten-round magazine.

He carried a flashlight, but had not turned it on. The moon was full and bright, illuminating the way, yet even without it he would not have struggled. These were his woods and he knew them well. He had walked them with his father and mother as they tested him on the names and properties of trees, bushes, leaves, and berries until there was none he could not identify. He had no respect for those unable to do likewise, even if all they owned was a single small garden. If a man was not intimately familiar with his environment and respectful of it, how could he position himself securely in the world? The answer was that he could not, and so nature would not help him when he needed help, and in time would rid itself of him. This Ellar firmly believed. One just had to look at the fires that raged each summer, the flooded subways, the proliferating viruses, to see the truth of it.

Only when he left the trail did he use the flashlight. Any paths that had once existed here had since been reclaimed by low foliage, while the tree canopy shadowed the ground by day and left it fully dark at night. After five minutes of walking, the lineaments of Kit No. 174 were revealed to him, its angles blocking out the stars in the night sky. He paused before the steel door at the front. He had always been aware of the building’s power, but sensed it more profoundly in the dark. What lay within grew sensate and active only once dusk fell.

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