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“And now we have to find out who killed him.”
“Why?”
“He was a friend of mine.” Sean leaned in closer to the officer. “And I don’t how you do things in Maine. But where I’m from, we don’t abandon our friends because someone killed them.”
Dobkin took a step back. “No sir.”
Michelle smiled. “Then I’m sure we’ll be seeing you. In the meantime.” She handed him one of their business cards. “Enough phone numbers on there to find us,” she added.
Michelle started the car and punched the gas, and the Ford hurtled off.
CHAPTER
5
THEY BOTH SLEPT.
In separate rooms.
The proprietress was a seventy-three-year-old woman named Mrs. Burke who possessed an old-fashioned idea about sleeping arrangements, in which a wedding band was required for cohabitation on the premises.
Michelle slept heavily. Sean did not. After only two fitful hours tossing in the sack, he rose and stared out the window. To the north and even closer to the coast sat Eastport. The sun’s rays would be tickling the town shortly, the first city in the United States to receive the morning light each day. He showered and dressed. An hour later he met a sleepy-eyed Michelle for breakfast.
Martha’s Inn turned out to be cozy and quaint, and close enough to the water to walk down to the shoreline in five minutes. Meals were served in a small, pine-paneled room off the kitchen. Sean and Michelle sat in ladder-back chairs with woven straw seats and had two cups of coffee each, eggs, bacon, and piping hot biscuits pre-slathered in butter by the cook.
“Okay, I’ll have to run like ten miles to burn this goop off,” said Michelle, as she poured a third cup of coffee.
He looked at her empty plate. “Nobody said you had to eat it.”
“Nobody had to. It was delicious.” She noted the local paper in his hands. “Nothing on Bergin, right? Happened too late.”
He lay the paper aside. “Right.” He tugged his sport coat closer around him. “Pretty nippy this morning. I should’ve brought warmer clothes.”
“Didn’t you check the latitude, sailor? This is Maine. It can be cold anytime.”
“No messages from our friend Dobkin?”
“None on my cell. Probably too early yet. So what’s the plan? Not hang around here?”
“We have an appointment to meet with Edgar Roy this morning. I plan on keeping it.”
“Will they let us in without Bergin?”
“I guess we’ll find out.”
“You really want to do this? I mean, how well did you know Bergin?”
Sean folded his napkin and set it down on the table. He looked around the room; there was only one other occupant. A man in his forties, dressed all in tweeds, was drinking a hot cup of tea with his pinky extended at a perfectly elegant angle.
“When I resigned from the Service, I’d hit rock bottom. Bergin was the first guy who thought I had something left in the tank.”
“Did you know him before? And did he know what had happened?”
“No to both questions. I just ran into him at Greenberry’s, a coffee shop in Charlottesville. We started talking. He was the one who encouraged me to apply to law school. He’s one of the main reasons I got my life back.” He paused. “I owe him, Michelle.”
“Then I guess I owe him too.”
The initial approach to Cutter’s Rock took them on a circuitous path toward the ocean. It was high tide, and they could see the swells slamming against the outcrops of slimy rock as they drove along. They made one hard right, then doglegged left. Another hundred feet carried them around a rise of land, and they saw the warning sign on a six-foot-wide piece of sheet metal set on long poles sunk deep into the rocky earth. It basically said that one was approaching a maximum security federal facility, and if one didn’t have legitimate business there, this was the last and only chance for one to turn around and get the hell out.
