Chapter XXXI

Steady Freddy listened while I told him of my conversation with Stephen Clark and my interest in the woman who called herself Mara Teller. I neglected to mention my earlier meeting with Delaney Duhamel, or the material she had provided. I didn't want Steady Freddy—or, God forbid, his colleague Furnish—turning up on Duhamel's doorstep, not yet. If I was in possession of information that the police did not yet have, I wanted to remain ahead of them until it suited me to share it.

"I got to admit," said Steady Freddy, "that the Teller woman is kind of interesting—or was, until we found the blanket in Colleen Clark's car. After that, Teller, and anyone else, ceased to be of much relevance as far as Erin Becker was concerned. She didn't want anything muddying the waters. If Becker was a guy, I'd have said she had a hard-on for your client, but in the worst possible way. Out of due diligence, I did the basics on Teller. I came up with the website and not much else. She's a splinter under a fingernail for me, but I'm learning to ignore the irritation."

"What about Furnish?"

"Furnish!" said Steady Freddy, and I was surprised at just how much scorn could be poured into two syllables. "You ever read any John Sandford novels?"

"I've read all of them," I said. "Sandford's as good as they come."

"Yeah, I save them for my vacation. You know how in the books they call Virgil ‘that Fuckin Flowers'? Well, you can't spend more than a day at Middle Street without someone talking about ‘Fuckin Furnish,' and not with any affection, not like Virgil. I bet Furnish is already writing up the chapter about Colleen Clark for his memoirs, and hoping Becker will remember him when she comes into her kingdom. For him, the case is done and dusted."

"And for you?"

"I'm just trying to go along to get along, that splinter excepted."

"Which is why you're here, obviously, eating a hamburger on my dime."

"A very good hamburger, too, though I remain troubled by that avocado business and may have to remonstrate with the management about it."

He finished his beer before peering into the glass to trace the hole in the bottom. I ordered another round.

"Where were we?" he asked, once a server had been dispatched in the direction of the bar.

"We were talking about how you were inclined to go along to get along, splinters notwithstanding."

"Which I am, but I do like neatness, and in a fundamentally uncertain world, I crave surety. Unlike you, I think Clark probably did harm her son. She may have been depressed, or driven crazy by not getting enough sleep, but sometimes the simplest answer is the right one. At the same time, I don't want to be dragged from my retirement in a few years to explain how I fucked up a case through negligence, or because of pressure from suits in Augusta, thus helping to put the wrong woman behind bars—and worse, leaving whoever took her boy free to do the same to another child. So ask your questions, and I'll do my best to answer them."

"Straightforward ones first. Do you have any camera footage from the night Henry Clark disappeared?"

"We have a window of almost nine hours, so that's a lot of traffic going through the area," said Steady Freddy. "Also, the residents have an association, and together they decided to discourage the use of security cameras with a range beyond the edge of anyone's yard. Even then, a few of the homes, including the Clarks', lack any kind of camera at all. We appealed for dashcam footage early in the investigation, and checked on business premises with external cameras. What we got didn't amount to much—or amounted to too much, depending on your point of view—and hasn't resulted in any useful leads. Moxie can ask for what we have during discovery, but I think you'll be wasting your time unless you already know what it is you're looking for, which I'm guessing you don't.

"Now, with Colleen Clark being charged, we'll be searching closer to her home. The working assumption is that she killed the boy in the house and immediately got rid of the body by burying it nearby; that, or she held on to it to dispose of later. Either way, trawling through license plates from the night in question won't help us. We have her phone, and that's under forensic examination. She says she kept it with her at all times. If true, we'll soon know everywhere she went, and how long she stayed there. But unless she's dumb, she'd have left the phone elsewhere when she was interring her son's remains."

I let it go. We were back to assumptions of guilt and innocence. If Colleen was innocent, the police weren't going to find anything on the phone to prove otherwise. I was operating on the basis that she wasn't responsible for Henry's disappearance. Nevertheless, he had been removed from the area somehow. Unless he was taken away on foot, which would be risky, a vehicle must have been used, as the neighbor, Mrs. Gammett, had noted: a quiet one, well-maintained, so it wouldn't draw attention or break down at an inopportune moment.

"What about Stephen Clark's brother and his wife?" I asked.

"What about them?"

"Do they have an alibi for the night Henry went missing?"

"Jesus, you are clutching at straws. I may have misjudged you, and Moxie ought to cut a plea deal."

"Indulge me."

"They were out of town: tickets to a music concert in Boston, and a hotel bed to go with them."

"A gift, or their own purchase?"

"A birthday gift for the brother."

"From?"

"Stephen Clark."

"Huh."

"Don't go jumping to conclusions, though in your case that's like telling a dog not to chase a rabbit."

"It's just curious, that's all."

"An alibi for when they needed one, you mean? Alternatively, it's what's known to regular people as living life. Take your pick, but they're off the hook."

"And Stephen Clark was in New York. Do we know if he was alone?"

"Hotel security footage has him entering his room unaccompanied shortly after ten p.m. Nobody joined him subsequently, so the answer is probably yes. No hookers, and no mistress."

"No Mara Teller."

"Not unless she climbed in through a tenth-story window."

"When did Stephen Clark tell you about the affair?"

"He didn't, not at first. His wife did. It was during the second interview on the day the boy went missing. We had trouble getting anything out of her during the first run-through because, understandably, she was distraught. A physician subsequently gave her something to take away the edge, but not so much that she wasn't coherent or able to concentrate."

"How did the subject come up?"

The fresh beers arrived, and we paused until the server was out of earshot.

"We asked about the state of the marriage," said Steady Freddy. "You know the drill. If a child disappears, you start with the parents and work outward. She told us that her husband had cheated on her, but they were getting through it."

"So he wasn't present when you spoke with Colleen?"

"No," said Steady Freddy. "The procedure in these situations is first to interview the parents separately, compare notes."

"Was this interview conducted at the house or the station?"

"The house. The husband was in the kitchen, with an officer keeping him company, and she was in the living room. Then we switched them around."

"Did you ask Stephen Clark directly about the affair?"

"He said they'd had some ups and downs, just like any married couple. Furnish then asked if it had ever been more than that, and Clark responded by demanding to know what his wife had said."

"Did you tell him?"

"I told him we were interested in what he had to say first, so he squirmed before admitting to an affair that arose out of a conference. He didn't use the word ‘affair,' though. He called it a ‘two- or three-night stand,' which I hadn't heard before, and gave us Teller's name, along with whatever contact details he had for her."

"The dormant website, and a cell phone number that no longer worked?"

"So it was hinky," conceded Steady Freddy, "but not off the scale. I've never had an affair—I find it hard enough to keep one woman happy, and the stress of trying to satisfy two might kill me—but if I got involved with someone and then thought better of it, the first thing I'd do would be to get myself a new cell phone number."

"What about the website?"

"Some business ideas never get beyond a wish and a name. Or it might be that she no longer wanted Stephen Clark in her life after spending a few nights in his company, and simultaneously decided to find alternative employment."

"Those theories might be plausible," I said, "if the website wasn't the only indication that Mara Teller was anything other than a shadow identity. It's not a particularly common name, and someone in her profession shouldn't be so hard to find."

"That's the part that itches," said Steady Freddy. "Even Furnish wasn't rushing to sign off on it. We had marked her, but then the blanket turned up, followed by word from Nowak's office that they were going to proceed against Colleen Clark with what they had. But I had intended to talk to the organizers of the forum to set my mind at rest. I might find the time when my wife and I head south tomorrow. It'll give me an excuse to do something other than drink Earl Grey tea while basking in her mother's disapproval."

I decided to play the Delaney Duhamel card. There was no point in holding on to it, not if Steady Freddy was going to contact her anyway. If I didn't mention her, it would leave bad blood between us.

"I already did," I said. "Talk to the forum people, I mean, not bask in your mother-in-law's disapproval."

"And?"

"Mara Teller paid her registration fee with a money order, so I might be able to trace that back to the post office where it was bought. She would have been asked for ID at the forum registration table. In theory, that should have required her to produce a driver's license or similar. In practice, a company ID would also have been acceptable, and she could have run one of those off on her home printer. Whatever ID she used, no copy of it was kept, so that's a dead end."

Steady Freddy took all this in, fed it through the machinery of his brain, and waited for a result. Whatever emerged didn't impress him.

"I'm still struggling to make the leap from bed-hopping to abduction and murder," he said. "Why would Teller be so angry with Stephen Clark that she'd want to harm his son? After all, Clark claimed it was Teller who cut off contact with him, not the other way round."

"He could be lying about how the affair ended. Or—"

"Is this the part in a Sherlock Holmes story where Watson looks shocked by Holmes's powers of deduction?" asked Steady Freddy.

"I think you'd have to play Lestrade, but the principle is the same."

"Happy to oblige."

"What if Mara Teller attended the forum with the express purpose of targeting someone? Suppose she wasn't looking for an affair."

"So if not for business or sex, why was she there?"

"What," I said, "if she was looking for a victim?"