The Wolf in Winter by John Connolly Page B

Last he heard she was up in Bangor looking for work, and seems like she found some. I think—”
    He paused.
    “Go on.”
    “I think she’d come up here because she wanted to be near him, but not so near that it would be easy for him,” said Shaky. “She wanted him to come find her. Jude had abandoned her momma and her way back, and he knew that the girl blamed him for everything that had gone wrong in her life since then. She was angry at him. She mighteven have hated him, but when there’s blood involved love and hate aren’t so different, or they get all mixed up so’s you can’t tell one from the other. I guess he was considering moving up to Bangor and having done with it. But Jude didn’t like Bangor. It’s not like here. They tore the heart out of that city when they built the mall, and it never recovered, not the way Portland did. It’s a bad place to be homeless too—worse than here. But Jude wanted to make up to the girl for what he’d done, and he couldn’t do it from Portland.”
    “How long did it take you and Jude to get the money together?”
    “A week. Would have taken him a month if he’d been working alone. I ought to get me a job as a debt collector.”
    He used the forefinger of his right hand to pull the scrap of paper back to him.
    “So my question is—” he began, but I finished it for him.
    “Why would a man who had just spent a hard week calling in his debts, and who was fixated on mending his relationship with his daughter, hang himself in a basement just when he’s managed to get some cash together?”
    “That’s right.”
    “So, what: he was going to give his daughter the money, or use it to move to Bangor?”
    “Neither,” said Shaky. “If I understood him right, I think he was hoping to hire you to find her.”
    He seemed to remember that he still had his coffee. He drank half of what remained in one go, and turned an eye to the muffin on my plate. I pushed it toward him.
    “Go ahead,” I said. “I’m not as hungry as I thought.”
    WE SPOKE FOR AN hour, sometimes about Jude, sometimes about Shaky himself. He’d served in the military, and that was how he hadcome by his bad arm; it was nerve damage of some kind, caused by a jeep tire exploding.
    “Not even a proper wound,” as Shaky told me. “I used to lie about it to make myself sound brave, but it just don’t seem worth the effort no more.”
    At the end of our conversation, two things were clear to me: Shaky knew Jude better than almost anyone else in Portland, and he still didn’t really know him at all. Jude had shared only the barest of information about his daughter with him. To Shaky, it seemed as though the more troubles his friend encountered the more reluctant he was to seek help with them, and that was how men ended up dying alone.
    I bought Shaky another maple latte before I left, and he gave me instructions for how best to reach him. As with Jude, he used the Amistad Community and the good folk at the Portland Help Center for such communications. I then drove to South Portland to meet my prospective client at her home, and she gave me details of where her husband was working, where he was living, just how much of an asshole he now was, and just how much of an asshole he didn’t used to be. For her children’s sake, she didn’t want to involve the police, and she hated her lawyer. I was the least bad of the remaining options, although she did ask if I knew someone who would break her husband’s legs once I had made it clear that this wasn’t something I was prepared to take on—or not without a better reason.
    Since I had nothing else to do, I went to visit the errant husband at his office in Back Cove, where he was a partner in some hole-in-the-wall financial advice and investment business. His name was Lane Stacey, and he didn’t look pleased when he discovered that I wasn’t there to give him money to invest. He did some hollering and grandstanding before it became clear to him that