“Who said I had paperwork?”Berrien asked.
“Don’t you?”
“I might have paperwork,” Berrien admitted, “but the majority relates to procurement costs, renovations, and operating expenses.Teal signed off on the bids and expenses, and came up with plausible excuses for everything being at the upper end of the scale.Basically, it was down to the price of doing business in The Plains, but there were also finders’ fees—effectively a bounty for locating students—as well as mileage, overtime, and Lord knows what else.It was a dripping tap, but a dripping tap will fill a bathtub eventually.”
I found another of my business cards and gave it to her, so she’d have the email address to which to send the documents, but I wasn’t hopeful.Also, if I kept handing out cards at this rate, I’d be out of them by—well, by the end of the decade, given how many of the damn things I had.One of Moxie Castin’s guys had run the order for me, but a couple of zeroes had been added in error somewhere along the line and now I could have built a house with them.
I wished Berrien good luck with her retirement, in case I didn’t see her again.She thanked me, said she hoped our paths might cross, then added thoughtfully: “Did you see how shocked Teal was when I told him who you were?Not surprised, but really shocked, even scared.I’ve never seen him look that way before, no matter how awkward the questions we asked about Spero money.”
“Meaning?”
“I’m not a detective—”
“But if you were?”
“I’d say he was afraid you’d come about another matter.He’s not a good man, Mr Parker.”
“Not being a good man isn’t against the law, Ms Berrien.”
“It should be.”
She wasn’t about to get any argument from me.I could trace a lot of the world’s problems back to men who were worse than they had any right to be.The same could be said of some women, but they were fewer, and had less power.
“I’ll work on it when I come into my kingdom,” I told her.
“You and Jesus Christ both,” said Berrien.“And after two thousand years, we’re still waiting on him to get back to us.”
Chapter 64
Roger Teal watched the investigator walk across the parking lot to where Berrien stood waiting.He saw Berrien glance up at his window as Parker drew nearer, which caused Teal to take a step back, though he knew he couldn’t be seen from outside.Did Berrien suspect he might be standing there?She was in no hurry to hide that she was conspiring with Parker against him.Just the opposite: She wanted Teal to know.She was rubbing his face in it, nasty pussy-eating bitch that she was.Teal so wanted to teach her a lesson, the kind of lesson Nola Maddick learned at the very end, a lesson only a man could teach a woman.Berrien was no looker, but Teal could work up an appetite for her if he had to.He would hurt her, humiliate her, and finally, choke the life from her, and he’d do it in front of a mirror, from behind, so she could witness her own dying.He’d laugh her into the nextworld.
Unfortunately, that would mean stepping outside the Game, unless he could persuade the Saint or Kenney to make Berrien a target.Under ordinary circumstances, there’d be little hope, but if he were to advise the Saint that Berrien was being sly, and had the bit between her teeth when it came to Spero, to the extent that she was willing to assist a private investigator, then Teal could see the Saint coming around to his way of thinking; Kenney, not so much, but the Saint was a practical man, and he really did enjoy hurting women.Teal thought the Saint might be even more open to despoiling a woman who was in a position to damage him, and there remained the not-insignificant question of the whereabouts of Mallory Norton, the girl missing up in The Plains.If, as Kenney feared, the Saint was responsible for her death, he had another reason for silencing anyone who could aid an investigation into Spero.
The more Teal thought about it, the more he wanted to skin Berrien alive and dump what was left of her in a hole in the ground.But if she was to be taken, it would have to be by hands other than his own.He’d need a sound alibi, because he could see the private investigator returning after her disappearance, this time with the police in tow.Teal would have to go away for a day or two while Berrien was being lifted, taking his wife and daughter with him.He could frame it as a reset, a chance for them to see if a change in environment might lead to an improvement in family spirit.Even if they were skeptical, they’d agree if he picked somewhere they wanted to go, with a promise of luxury thrown in for good measure.He could use some of the Spero cash he still had squirreled away, his personal rainy day fund, and when he got back, the Saint would have Berrien waiting for him, and they could play with her together.
Teal walked away from the window, leaving Berrien and Parker to their conflab.He was no longer alarmed by the investigator, but he didn’t dismiss him either.If worse came to worst, they could deal with Parker as well.They’d grown practised at making bodies vanish, and whatever his reputation, Parker was no longer a young man.That was the thing about reputations: they were always predicated on the past, and in due course the present gave the lie to them.
Teal was flicking through his cell phone contacts to find the Saint when a text message came through.The message looked like spam and read: VEHICLETOSELL?WEBUYALLMODELSFOR$$$$$ NOT¢¢¢¢¢ INC.WRECKS, INSPECTIONFAILURES, ANDMORE!!!!!CALLNOWWITHOUTOBLIGATION!!!!!OPEN24/7!!!!!
Teal had received similar messages only twice before, each time when an urgent problem had arisen with the Game.The message, he knew, came from a burner phone, one that would not be used again, and the sender was Edward Kenney, because only Kenney used car spam as an alert.(The Saint’s alert asked for clothing donations, while Teal’s referenced antiques.) Teal had a couple of burners of his own, but was reluctant to activate them without good reason because burners cost money,and Teal was careful with his pennies so the dollars would look after themselves.He was also rightly paranoid about cell phones, burners or otherwise, and where possible preferred to use pay phones.In a notebook, he kept an updated list of pay phones between Kittery and Houlton, a list that, to his sorrow, grew shorter everyyear.
Teal set aside any thoughts of calling the Saint for the time being, packed his briefcase, and left the building.Berrien and the private investigator were nowhere to be seen.Teal got in his car and drove to the CITGO gas station on State Street, where he used its pay phone to call Edward Kenney.
“We have to meet,” said Kenney.
“When?”asked Teal.
“Now.”
Chapter 65
Iwas sitting in my car, catching up on email and missed calls, when Roger Teal came out of the building, moving like a man on a mission.Either Berrien was wrong about his home life and Teal couldn’t wait to be reunited with his wife and daughter, or he had a more pressing engagement in mind.I waited for his Toyota Highlander to pull out before starting my ignition and following him to the CITGO on State.For a moment, I feared I’d tailed him for nothing, and Teal just needed to fill up, but he got no further than the pay phone.
In this day and age, the only people who used pay phones are the very abject or the very wary, and Teal wasn’t yet among the wretched.Whoever he was calling, he didn’t want to risk leaving a record.I whistled a few bars of the theme fromColumbo, since nothing makes a detective happier than following what we in the trade call a “hunch”—stop me if I get too technical—and striking it lucky.Of course, if I continued to follow Teal and he went straight home from the CITGO, I’d have wasted my time and fifty cents’ worth of gas, but Alcock was paying for both so I wouldn’t be much poorer.
Berrien had told me that Teal lived somewhere in West Gardiner, which was south of Augusta, but instead Teal drove north, which meant that wherever he was going, it wasn’t home.I stayed with him for forty miles, listening to Classic Rewind on Sirius, until we got to Pittsfield, roughly halfway between Augusta and Bangor.Teal turned off at Somerset Avenue and drove south toward Main Street, where he entered a self-storage lot and disappeared behind the back of the single-story units, where I couldn’t follow without alerting Teal to my presence, and I preferred him to remain blissfully unaware.I drove by the lot, made a U-turn, and when Ipassed by the second time, a silver BMW X7, a fancier family vehicle than Teal’s, was pulling in.The BMW also drove straight to the back, but I wasn’t quick enough to make out the license plate.I didn’t want to head in there on foot, not only because it wouldn’t do much good unless I possessed the hearing of a bat, but also because wandering around poorly-lit storage lots is a good way to get shot or arrested.The next-best option was to pull into Frost’s Mobil across the street and get to waiting again, which is what I did.While I sat there, I called Macy.
“Where are you?”she asked.
