Gone, Baby, Gone

1

Each day in this country, twenty-three hundred children are reported missing.

Of those, a large portion are abducted by one parent estranged from the other, and over fifty percent of the time the child’s whereabouts are never in question. The majority of these children are returned within a week.

Another portion of those twenty-three hundred children are runaways. Again, the majority of them are not gone long, and usually their whereabouts are either known immediately or easily ascertained-a friend’s house is the most common destination.

Another category of missing children is the throwaway-those who are cast out of their homes or who run away, and the parents decide not to give chase. These are often the children who fill shelters and bus terminals, street corners in the red-light districts, and, ultimately, prisons.

Of the more than eight hundred thousand children reported missing nationally every year, only thirty-five hundred to four thousand fall into what the Department of Justice categorizes as Non-Family Abductions, or cases in which the police soon rule out family abductions, running away, parental ejection, or the child becoming lost or injured.

Of these cases, three hundred children disappear every year and never return.

No one-not parents, friends, law enforcement, childcare organizations, or centers for missing people-knows where these children go. Into graves, possibly; into cellars or the homes of pedophiles; into voids, perhaps, holes in the fabric of the universe where they will never be heard from again.

Wherever these three hundred go, they stay gone. For a moment or two they haunt strangers who’ve heard of their cases, haunt their loved ones for far longer.

Without a body to leave behind, proof of their passing, they don’t die. They keep us aware of the void.

And they stay gone.

“My sister,” Lionel McCready said, as he paced our belfry office, “has had a very difficult life.” Lionel was a big man with a slightly houndish sag to his face and wide shoulders that slanted down hard from his collarbone, as if something we couldn’t see sat atop them. He had a shaggy, shy smile and a firm grip in a callused hand. He wore a brown UPS deliveryman’s uniform and kneaded the brim of the matching brown baseball cap in his beefy hands. “Our mom was a-well, a boozer, frankly. And our dad left when we were both little kids. When you grow up that way, you-I guess you-maybe you got a lot of anger. It takes some time to get your head straight, figure out your way in life. It’s not just Helene. I mean, I had some serious problems, took a hard bust in my twenties. I was no angel.”

“Lionel,” his wife said.

He held up a hand to her, as if he had to spit it out now or he’d never spit it out at all. “I was lucky. I met Beatrice, straightened my life out. What I’m saying, Mr. Kenzie, Miss Gennaro, is that if you’re given time, a few breaks, you grow up. You shake that crap. My sister, she’s still growing up, what I’m saying. Maybe. Because her life was hard and-”

“Lionel,” his wife said, “stop making excuses for Helene.” Beatrice McCready ran a hand through her short strawberry hair and said, “Honey, sit down. Please.”

Lionel said, “I’m just trying to explain that Helene hasn’t had an easy life.”

“Neither have you,” Beatrice said, “and you’re a good father.”

“How many kids do you have?” Angie asked.

Beatrice smiled. “One. Matt. He’s five. He’s staying with my brother and his wife until we find Amanda.”

Lionel seemed to perk up a bit at the mention of his son. “He’s a great kid,” he said, and seemed almost embarrassed by his pride.

“And Amanda?” I said.

“She’s a terrific kid, too,” Beatrice said. “And she’s way too young to be out there on her own.”

Amanda McCready had disappeared from this neighborhood three days ago. Since then, the entire city of Boston, it seemed, had become obsessed with her whereabouts. The police had put more men on the search than they had on the manhunt for John Salvi after the abortion clinic shootings four years ago. The mayor held a press conference in which he pledged no city business would take precedence over her disappearance until she was found. The press coverage was saturating: front page of both papers each morning, lead story in all three major telecasts at night, hourly updates inserted between the soaps and talk shows.

And in three days-nothing. Not a hint of her.

Amanda McCready had been on this earth four years and seven months when she vanished. Her mother had put her to bed on Sunday night, checked in on her once around eight-thirty, and the next morning, shortly after nine, had looked in at Amanda’s bed and seen nothing but sheets dented with the wrinkled impression of her daughter’s body.

The clothes Helene McCready had laid out for her daughter-a pink T-shirt, denim shorts, pink socks, and white sneakers-were gone, as was Amanda’s favorite doll, a blond-haired replica of a three-year-old that bore an eerie resemblance to its owner, and whom Amanda had named Pea. The room showed no signs of struggle.

Helene and Amanda lived on the second floor of a three-decker, and while it was possible Amanda had been abducted by someone who’d placed a ladder under her bedroom window and pushed the screen open to gain entry, it was also unlikely. The screen and windowsills had shown no signs of disturbance, and the ground at the foundation of the house bore no ladder marks.

What was far more likely, if one assumed a four-year-old didn’t suddenly decide to leave home on her own in the middle of the night, was that the abductor entered the apartment through the front door, without picking the lock or prying the hinges loose from the jamb, because such actions were unnecessary on a door that had been left unlocked.

Helene McCready had taken a hell of a beating in the press when that information came out. Twenty-four hours after her daughter’s disappearance, the News, Boston ’s tabloid answer to the New York Post, ran as its front-page headline:

COME ON IN:

Little Amanda’s Mom Left Door Unlocked

Beneath the headline were two photographs, one of Amanda, the other of the front door to the apartment. The door was propped wide open, which, police stated, was not how it was discovered the morning of Amanda McCready’s disappearance. Unlocked, yes; wide open, no.

Most of the city didn’t care much about the distinction, though. Helene McCready had left her four-year-old daughter alone in an unlocked apartment while she went next door to her friend Dottie Mahew’s house. There she and Dottie watched TV-two sitcoms and a movie of the week entitled Her Father’s Sins starring Suzanne Somers and Tony Curtis. After the news, they watched half of Entertainment Tonight Weekend Edition and then Helene returned home.

For roughly three hours and forty-five minutes, Amanda McCready had been left alone in an unlocked apartment. At some point during that time, the assumption went, she had either slipped out on her own or been abducted.

Angie and I had followed the case as closely as the rest of the city, and it baffled us as much as it seemed to baffle everyone else. Helene McCready, we knew, had submitted to a polygraph regarding her daughter’s disappearance and passed. Police were unable to find a single lead to follow; rumor had it they were consulting psychics. Neighbors on the street that night, a warm Indian summer night when most windows were open and pedestrians strolled at random, reported seeing nothing suspicious, hearing nothing that sounded like a child’s screams. No one remembered seeing a four-year-old wandering around alone or a suspicious person or persons carrying either a child or an odd-looking bundle.

Amanda McCready, as far as anyone could tell, had vanished so completely it was as if she’d never been born.

Beatrice McCready, her aunt, had called us this afternoon. I told her I didn’t think there was much we could do that a hundred cops, half the Boston press corps, and thousands of everyday people weren’t already doing on her niece’s behalf.

“Mrs. McCready,” I said, “save your money.”

“I’d rather save my niece,” she said.

Now, as the Wednesday evening rush-hour traffic dwindled to some distant beeps and engine revs on the avenue below, Angie and I sat in our office in the belfry of St. Bartholomew’s Church in Dorchester and listened to Amanda’s aunt and uncle plead her case.

“Who’s Amanda’s father?” Angie said.

The weight seemed to resettle onto Lionel’s shoulders. “We don’t know. We think it’s a guy named Todd Morgan. He left the city right after Helene got pregnant. Nobody’s heard from him since.”

“The list of possible fathers is long, though,” Beatrice said.

Lionel looked down at the floor.

“Mr. McCready,” I said.

He looked at me. “Lionel.”

“Please, Lionel,” I said. “Have a seat.”

He fitted himself into the small chair on the other side of the desk after a bit of a struggle.

“This Todd Morgan,” Angie said, as she finished writing the name on a pad of paper. “Do police know his whereabouts?”

“ Mannheim, Germany,” Beatrice said. “He’s stationed in the army over there. And he was on the base when Amanda disappeared.”

“Have they discounted him as a suspect?” I said. “There’s no way he would have hired a friend to do it?”

Lionel cleared his throat, looked at the floor again. “The police said he’s embarrassed by my sister and doesn’t think Amanda is his child anyway.” He looked up at me with those lost, gentle eyes of his. “They said his response was: ‘If I want a rug rat to shit and cry all the time, I can have a German one.’”

I could feel the wave of hurt that had washed through him when he’d had to call his niece a “rug rat,” and I nodded. “Tell me about Helene,” I said.

There wasn’t much to tell. Helene McCready was Lionel’s younger sister by four years, which put her at twenty-eight. She’d dropped out of Monsignor Ryan Memorial High School in her junior year, never got the GED she kept saying she would. At seventeen, she ran off with a guy fifteen years older, and they’d lived in a trailer park in New Hampshire for six months before Helene returned home with a face bruised purple and the first of three abortions behind her. Since then she’d worked a variety of jobs-Stop amp; Shop cashier, Chess King clerk, dry cleaner’s assistant, UPS receptionist-and never managed to hold on to any for more than eighteen months. Since the disappearance of her daughter, she’d taken leave from her part-time job running the lottery machine at Li’l Peach, and there weren’t any indications she’d be going back.

“She loved that little girl, though,” Lionel said.

Beatrice looked as if she were of a different opinion, but she kept silent.

“Where is Helene now?” Angie said.

“At our house,” Lionel said. “The lawyer we contacted said we should keep her under wraps as long as we can.”

“Why?” I said.

“Why?” Lionel said.

“Yeah. I mean, her child’s missing. Shouldn’t she be making appeals to the public? Canvassing the neighborhood at least?”

Lionel opened his mouth, then closed it. He looked down at his shoes.

“Helene is not up to that,” Beatrice said.

“Why not?” Angie said.

“Because-well, because she’s Helene,” Beatrice said.

“Are the police monitoring the phones at her place in case there’s a ransom demand?”

“Yes,” Lionel said.

“And she’s not there,” Angie said.

“It got to be too much for her,” Lionel said. “She needed her privacy.” He held out his hands, looked at us.

“Oh,” I said. “Her privacy.”

“Of course,” Angie said.

“Look”-Lionel kneaded his cap again-“I know how it seems. I do. But people show their worry in different ways. Right?”

I gave him a halfhearted nod. “If she’d had three abortions,” I said, and Lionel winced, “what made her decide to give birth to Amanda?”

“I think she decided it was time.” He leaned forward and his face brightened. “If you could have seen how excited she was during that pregnancy. I mean, her life had purpose, you know? She was sure that child would make everything better.”

“For her,” Angie said. “What about the child?”

“My point at the time,” Beatrice said.

Lionel turned to both women, his eyes wide and desperate again. “They were good for each other,” he said. “I believe that.”

Beatrice looked at her shoes. Angie looked out the window.

Lionel looked back at me. “They were.”

I nodded, and his hound dog’s face sagged with relief.

“Lionel,” Angie said, still looking out the window, “I’ve read all the newspaper reports. Nobody seems to know who would have taken Amanda. The police are stymied, and according to reports, Helene says she has no ideas on the subject either.”

“I know.” Lionel nodded.

“So, okay.” Angie turned from the window and looked at Lionel. “What do you think happened?”

“I don’t know,” he said, and gripped his hat so hard, I thought it might come apart in those big hands. “It’s like she was sucked up into the sky.”

“Has Helene been dating anybody?”

Beatrice snorted.

“Anybody regular?” I said.

“No,” Lionel said.

“The press is suggesting she hung around with some unsavory characters,” Angie said.

Lionel shrugged, as if that was a matter of course.

“She hangs out at the Filmore Tap,” Beatrice said.

“That’s the biggest dive in Dorchester,” Angie said.

“And think how many bars contend for that honor,” Beatrice said.

“It’s not that bad,” Lionel said, and looked to me for support.

I held out my hands. “I carry a gun on a regular basis, Lionel. And I get nervous going into the Filmore.”

“The Filmore’s known as a druggies’ bar,” Angie said. “Supposedly they move coke and heroin in and out of there like buffalo wings. Does your sister have a drug problem?”

“You mean, like heroin?”

“They mean like anything,” Beatrice said.

“She smokes a little weed,” Lionel said.

“A little?” I asked. “Or a lot?”

“What’s a lot?” he said.

“Does she keep a water bong and a roach clip on her nightstand?” Angie said.

Lionel squinted at her.

“She’s not addicted to any particular drug,” Beatrice said. “She dabbles.”

“Coke?” I said.

She nodded and Lionel looked at her, stunned.

“Pills?”

Beatrice shrugged.

“Needles?” I said.

“Oh, no,” Lionel said.

Beatrice said, “Not as far as I know.” She thought about it. “No. We’ve seen her in shorts and tank tops all summer. We’d have seen tracks.”

“Wait.” Lionel held up a hand. “Just wait. We’re supposed to be looking for Amanda, not talking about my sister’s bad habits.”

“We have to know everything about Helene and her habits and her friends,” Angie said. “A child goes missing, usually the reason is close to home.”

Lionel stood up and his shadow filled the top of the desk. “What’s that mean?”

“Sit down,” Beatrice said.

“No. I need to know what that means. Are you suggesting my sister could have had something to do with Amanda’s disappearance?”

Angie watched him steadily. “You tell me.”

“No,” he said loudly. “Okay? No.” He looked down at his wife. “She’s not a criminal, okay? She’s a woman who’s lost her child. You know?”

Beatrice looked up at him, her face inscrutable.

“Lionel,” I said.

He stared down at his wife, then looked at Angie again.

“Lionel,” I said again, and he turned to me. “You said yourself it’s like Amanda disappeared into thin air. Okay. Fifty cops are looking for her. Maybe more. You two have been working on it. People in the neighborhood…”

“Yeah,” he said. “Lots of them. They’ve been great.”

“Okay. So where is she?”

He stared at me as if I might suddenly pull her out of my desk drawer.

“I don’t know.” He closed his eyes.

“No one does,” I said. “And if we’re going to look into this-and I’m not saying we will…”

Beatrice sat up in her chair and looked hard at me.

“But if, we have to work under the assumption that if she has been abducted, it was by someone close to her.”

Lionel sat back down. “You think she was taken.”

“Don’t you?” Angie said. “A four-year-old who ran off on her own wouldn’t still be out there after almost three full days without having been seen.”

“Yeah,” he said, as if facing something he’d known was true but had been holding at bay until now. “Yeah. You’re probably right.”

“So what do we do now?” Beatrice said.

“You want my honest opinion?” I said.

She cocked her head slightly, her eyes holding steadily with my own. “I’m not sure.”

“You have a son who’s about to enter school. Right?”

Beatrice nodded.

“Save the money you would have spent on us and put it toward his education.”

Beatrice’s head didn’t move; it stayed cocked slightly to the right, but for a moment she looked as if she’d been slapped. “You won’t take this case, Mr. Kenzie?”

“I’m not sure there’s any point to it.”

Beatrice’s voice rose in the small office. “A child is-”

“Missing,” Angie said. “Yes. But a lot of people are looking for her. The news coverage has been extensive. Everyone in this city and probably most of the state knows what she looks like. And, trust me, most of them have their eyes peeled for her.”

Beatrice looked at Lionel. Lionel gave her a small shrug. She turned from him and locked eyes with me again. She was a small woman, no more than five foot three. Her pale face, sparkled with freckles the same color as her hair, was heart-shaped, and there was a child’s roundness to her button nose and chin, the cheekbones that resembled acorns. But there was also a furious aura of strength about her, as if she equated yielding with dying.

“I came to you both,” she said, “because you find people. That’s what you do. You found that man who killed all those people a few years ago, you saved that baby and his mother in the playground, you-”

“Mrs. McCready,” Angie said, holding up a hand.

“Nobody wanted me to come here,” she said. “Not Helene, not my husband, not the police. ‘You’d be wasting your money,’ everyone said. ‘She’s not even your child,’ they said.”

“Honey.” Lionel put his hand on hers.

She shook it off, leaned forward until her arms were propped on the desk and her sapphire eyes were holding mine.

“Mr. Kenzie, you can find her.”

“No,” I said softly. “Not if she’s hidden well enough. Not if a lot of people who are just as good at this as we are haven’t been able to find her either. We’re just two more people, Mrs. McCready. Nothing more.”

“Your point?” Her voice was low again, and icy.

“Our point,” Angie said, “is what help could two more sets of eyes be?”

“What harm, though?” Beatrice said. “Can you tell me that? What harm?”

2

From a detective’s perspective once you rule out running away or abduction by a parent, a child’s disappearance is similar to a murder case: If it’s not solved within seventy-two hours, it’s unlikely it ever will be. That doesn’t necessarily mean the child is dead, though the probability is high. But if the child is alive, she’s definitely worse off than when she went missing. Because there’s very little gray area in the motivations of adults who encounter children who aren’t their own; you either A, help that child or, B, exploit her. And while the methods of exploitation vary-ransoming children for money, using them for labor, abusing them sexually for personal and/or profit concerns, murdering them-none of them stems from benevolence. And if the child doesn’t die and is eventually found, the scars run so deep that the poison can never be removed from her blood.

In the last four years, I’d killed two men. I’d watched my oldest friend and a woman I barely knew die in front of me. I’d seen children desecrated in the worst possible ways, met men and women who killed as if it were a reflex action, watched relationships burn in the violence with which I’d actively surrounded myself.

And I was tired of it.

Amanda McCready had been missing for at least sixty hours by this point, maybe as long as seventy, and I didn’t want to find her stuffed in a Dumpster somewhere, her hair matted with blood. I didn’t want to find her six months down the road, vacant-eyed and used up by some freak with a video camera and a mailing list of pedophiles. I didn’t want to look in a four-year-old’s eyes and see the death of everything that had been pure in her.

I didn’t want to find Amanda McCready. I wanted someone else to.

But maybe because I’d become as caught up in this case over the last few days as the rest of the city, or maybe because it had happened here in my neighborhood, or maybe just because “four-year-old” and “missing” aren’t words that should go together in the same sentence, we agreed to meet Lionel and Beatrice McCready at Helene’s apartment in half an hour.

“You’ll take the case, then?” Beatrice said, as she and Lionel stood.

“That’s what we need to discuss between ourselves,” I said.

“But-”

“Mrs. McCready,” Angie said, “things are done a certain way in this business. We have to consult privately before we agree to anything.”

Beatrice didn’t like it, but she also realized there was very little she could do about it.

“We’ll drop by Helene’s in half an hour,” I said.

“Thank you,” Lionel said, and tugged his wife’s sleeve.

“Yes. Thanks,” Beatrice said, though she didn’t sound real sincere. I had a feeling that nothing less than a presidential deployment of the National Guard to search for her niece would satisfy her.

We listened to their footfalls descend the belfry stairs and then I watched from the window as they left the schoolyard beside the church and walked to a weather-beaten Dodge Aries. The sun had drifted west past my line of sight, and the early October sky was still a pale summer white, but wisps of rust had floated into the white. A child’s voice called, “Vinny, wait up! Vinny!” and from four stories above the ground there was something lonely about the sound, something unfinished. Beatrice and Lionel’s car U-turned on the avenue, and I watched the puff of its exhaust until it had pulled out of sight.

“I don’t know,” Angie said, and leaned back in her chair. She propped her sneakers up on the desk and pushed her long thick hair off her temples. “I just don’t know about this one.”

She wore black Lycra biking shorts and a loose black tank top over a tight white one. The black tank top bore the white letters NIN on the front and the words PRETTY HATE MACHINE on back. She’d owned it for about eight years and it still looked like she was wearing it for the first time. I’d lived with Angie for almost two years. As far as I could see, she didn’t take any better care of her apparel than I did mine, but I owned shirts that looked like they’d been run through a car engine half an hour after I removed the price tags, and she had socks from high school that were still as white as palace linen. Women and their clothes often astounded me this way, but I figured it was one of those mysteries I’d never solve-like what really happened to Amelia Earhart or the bell that used to occupy our office.

“Don’t know about this case?” I said. “In what way?”

“A missing child, a mother who apparently isn’t looking too hard, a pushy aunt-”

“You thought Beatrice was pushy?”

“Not any more so than a Jehovah with one foot in the door.”

“She’s worried about that kid. Tear-her-hair-out worried.”

“And I feel for that.” She shrugged. “Still don’t enjoy being pushed, though.”

“It’s not one of your stronger qualities, true.”

She flipped a pencil at my head, caught my chin. I rubbed at the spot and looked for the pencil so I could throw it back.

“It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye,” I mumbled, as I felt under my chair for the pencil.

“We’re doing real well,” she said.

“We are.” The pencil wasn’t below my chair or the desk, as far as I could see.

“Made more this year than last.”

“And it’s only October.” No pencil by the floorboard or under the mini-fridge. Maybe it was with Amelia Earhart and Amanda McCready and the bell.

“Only October,” she agreed.

“You’re saying we don’t need this case.”

“Pretty much the size of it.”

I gave up on the pencil and looked out the window for a bit. The wisps of rust had deepened to blood red, and the white sky was gradually darkening into blue. The first yellow lightbulb of the evening clicked on in a third-story apartment across the street. The smell of the air coming through the screen made me think of early adolescence and stickball, long, easy days leaking into long, easy nights.

“You don’t agree?” Angie said after a few moments.

I shrugged.

“Speak now or forever hold your peace,” she said lightly.

I turned and looked at her. The gathering dusk was gold against her window, and it swam in her dark hair. Her honeycomb skin was darker than usual from the long dry summer that had somehow continued to extend well into autumn, and the muscles in her calves and biceps were pronounced after months of daily basketball games at the Ryan playground.

In my previous experience with women, once you’ve been intimate with someone for a while, her beauty is often the first thing you overlook. Intellectually, you know it’s there, but your emotional capacity to be overwhelmed or surprised by it, to the point where it can get you drunk, diminishes. But there are still moments every day when I glance at Angie and feel a gust cleave through my chest cavity from the sweet pain of looking at her.

“What?” Her wide mouth broke into a grin.

“Nothing,” I said softly.

She held my gaze. “I love you, too.”

“Yeah?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Scary, ain’t it?”

“Sometimes, yeah.” She shrugged. “Sometimes, not at all.”

We sat there for a bit, saying nothing, and then Angie’s eyes drifted to her window.

“I’m just not sure we need this…mess right now.”

“This mess being?”

“A missing child. Worse, a completely vanished child.” She closed her eyes and inhaled the warm breeze through her nose. “I like being happy.” She opened her eyes but kept them fixed on the window. Her chin quivered slightly. “You know?”

It had been a year and a half since Angie and I had consummated what friends claimed was a love affair that had been going on for decades. And those eighteen months had also been the most profitable our detective agency had ever experienced.

A little less than two years ago, we’d closed-or maybe just merely survived-the Gerry Glynn case. Boston ’s first known serial killer in thirty years had garnered a lot of attention, as had those of us credited with catching him. The spate of publicity-national news coverage, never-ending rehashes in the tabloids, two true-crime paperbacks with a rumored third on the way-had made Angie and me two of the better-known private investigators in the city.

For five months after Gerry Glynn’s death, we’d refused to take cases, and this seemed only to whet the appetites of prospective clients. After we completed an investigation into the disappearance of a woman named Desiree Stone, we returned to publicly accepting cases again, and for the first few weeks the staircase leading up to the belfry was jammed with people.

Without ever acknowledging it to each other, we refused out-of-hand any cases that smelled of violence or glimpses into the darker caverns of human nature. Both of us, I think, felt we’d earned a break, so we stuck to insurance fraud, corporate malfeasance, simple divorces.

In February, we’d even accepted an elderly woman’s plea that we locate her missing iguana. The hideous beast’s name was Puffy, and he was a seventeen-inch-long iridescent green monstrosity with, as his owner put it, “a negative disposition toward humanity.” We found Puffy in the wilds of suburban Boston as he made a dash across the soggy plains of the fourteenth green at Belmont Hills Country Club, his spiky tail wagging like mad as he lunged for the hint of sunlight he spied on the fairway of the fifteenth. He was cold. He didn’t put up a fight. He did almost get turned into a belt, though, when he relieved himself in the backseat of our company car, but his owner paid for the cleaning and gave us a generous reward for her beloved Puffy’s return.

It had been that kind of year. Not the best for war stories down at the local bar but exceptional for the bank account. And as potentially embarrassing as it was to chase a pampered lizard around a frozen golf course, it beat getting shot at. Beat the hell out of it, actually.

“You think we’ve lost our nerve?” Angie asked me recently.

“Absolutely,” I’d said. And smiled.

“What if she’s dead?” Angie said, as we descended the belfry steps.

“That would be bad,” I said.

“It would be worse than bad, depending on how deep we got into it.”

“You want to tell them no, then.” I opened the door that led out to the rear schoolyard.

She looked at me, her mouth half open, as if afraid to put it into words, hear them hit the air, and know that it made her someone who refused to help a child in need.

“I don’t want to tell them yes quite yet,” she managed, as we reached our car.

I nodded. I knew the feeling.

“Everything about this disappearance smells bad,” Angie said, as we drove down Dorchester Avenue toward Helene and Amanda’s apartment.

“I know.”

“Four-year-olds don’t vanish without help.”

“Definitely not.”

Along the avenue, people were beginning to come out of their homes now that dinner was over. Some placed lawn chairs on their small front porches; others walked up the avenue toward bars or twilight ball games. I could smell sulfur in the air from a recently discharged bottle rocket, and the moist evening hung like an untaken breath in that bruised hue between deep blue and sudden black.

Angie pulled her legs up to her chest and rested her chin on her knees. “Maybe I’ve become a coward, but I don’t mind chasing iguanas across golf courses.”

I looked through the windshield as we turned off Dorchester Avenue onto Savin Hill Avenue.

“Neither do I,” I said.

When a child disappears, the space she’d occupied is immediately filled with dozens of people. And these people-relatives, friends, police officers, reporters from both TV and print-create a lot of energy and noise, a sense of communal intensity, of fierce and shared dedication to a task.

But amid all that noise, nothing is louder than the silence of the missing child. It’s a silence that’s two and a half to three feet tall, and you feel it at your hip and hear it rising up from the floorboards, shouting to you from corners and crevices and the emotionless face of a doll left on the floor by the bed. It’s a silence that’s different from the one left at funerals and wakes. The silence of the dead carries with it a sense of finality; it’s a silence you know you must get used to. But the silence of a missing child is not something you want to get used to; you refuse to accept it, and so it screams at you.

The silence of the dead says, Goodbye.

The silence of the missing says, Find me.

It seemed like half the neighborhood and a quarter of the Boston Police Department were inside Helene McCready’s two-bedroom apartment. The living room stretched through an open portico into the dining room, and these two rooms were the center of most of the activity. The police had set up banks of phones on the floor of the dining room, and all were in use; several people used their personal cell phones as well. A burly man in a PROUD TO BE A DOT RAT T-shirt looked up from a stack of flyers on the coffee table in front of him and said, “Beatrice, Channel Four wants Helene at six tomorrow night.”

A woman put her hand over the receiver of her cell phone. “The producers of Annie in the AM called. They want Helene to go on the show in the morning.”

“Mrs. McCready,” a cop called from the dining room, “we need you in here a sec.”

Beatrice nodded at the burly man and the woman with the cell phone and said to us, “Amanda’s bedroom is the first on the right.”

I nodded, and she cut off into the crowd and headed for the dining room.

Amanda’s bedroom door was open, and the room itself was still and dark, as if the sounds from the street below couldn’t penetrate up here. A toilet flushed, and a patrolman came out of the bathroom and looked at us as his right hand finished zipping up his fly.

“Friends of the family?” he asked.

“Yes.”

He nodded. “Don’t touch anything, please.”

“We won’t,” Angie said.

He nodded and went up the hall into the kitchen.

I used my car key to turn on the light switch in Amanda’s room. I knew that every item in the room had been dusted and analyzed for fingerprints by now, but I also knew how perturbed cops get when you touch anything with bare hands at a crime scene.

A bare lightbulb hung from a cord above Amanda’s bed, the copper housing plate gone and the exposed wires dusty. The ceiling was badly in need of a paint job, and the summer heat had done its work on the posters that had hung from the walls. There were three that I could see, and they lay curled and rumpled by the baseboards. Squares of tape were spaced in uneven rectangle formations on the wall where the posters had been. I had no idea how long they’d lain there, wrinkling, growing hairline creases like veins.

The apartment was identical in layout to my own, and to that of apartments in most three-deckers in the neighborhood, and Amanda’s bedroom was the smaller of the two by about half. Helene’s bedroom, I assumed, was the master and would be past the bathroom on the right, directly across from the kitchen and looking out on the rear porch and small yard below. Amanda’s bedroom looked out on the three-decker next door and was probably as deprived of light at noon as it was now, at eight o’clock in the evening.

The room was musty, the furniture sparse. The dresser across from the bed looked as if it had been picked up at a yard sale, and the bed itself had no frame. It was a single mattress and box spring placed on the floor, covered in a top sheet that didn’t match the bottom and a Lion King comforter that had been pushed aside in the heat.

A doll lay at the foot of the bed, looking up at the ceiling with flat doll’s eyes; a stuffed bunny turned on its side against the foot of the dresser. An old black-and-white TV sat up on the dresser, and there was a small radio on the bedside table, but I couldn’t see any books in the room, not even coloring books.

I tried to picture the girl who’d slept in this room. I’d seen enough photos of Amanda in the last few days to know what she looked like, but a physical likeness couldn’t tell me what set her face had taken when she walked into this room at the end of a day or woke to it first thing in the morning.

Had she tried to put those posters back up on the wall? Had she asked for the bright blue and yellow pop-up books she’d seen in malls? In the dark and quiet of this room late at night, when she was awake and alone, did she fixate on the lone nail sticking out from the wall across from the bed or the sallow brown water mark that puddled down from the ceiling at the east corner?

I looked at the doll’s shiny, ugly eyes, and I wanted to close them with my foot.

“Mr. Kenzie, Miss Gennaro.” It was Beatrice’s voice, calling from the kitchen.

Angie and I took one last look at the bedroom, and then I used my key to switch the light off and we walked down the hall into the kitchen.

There was a man leaning against the oven, hands stuffed in his pockets. By the way he watched us as we approached, I knew he was waiting for us. He was a few inches shorter than I am, wide and round as an oil drum with a boyish, jolly face, slightly ruddy, as if he spent a lot of time outdoors. His throat had that paradoxically pinched and flabby look of someone nearing retirement age, and there was a hardness to him, an implacability that seemed a hundred years old, seemed to have judged you and your entire life in a glance.

“Lieutenant Jack Doyle,” he said, as he fired his hand into my own.

I shook the hand. “Patrick Kenzie.”

Angie introduced herself and shook his hand, too, and we stood before him in the small kitchen as he peered intently into our faces. His own face was unreadable, but the intensity of his gaze had a magnet’s pull, something in there you wanted to look into even when you knew you should look away.

I’d seen him on TV a few times over the last few days. He ran the BPD’s Crimes Against Children squad, and when he stared into the camera and spoke of how he’d find Amanda McCready no matter what it took, you felt a momentary pity for whoever had abducted her.

“Lieutenant Doyle was interested in meeting you,” Beatrice said.

“Now we’ve met,” I said.

Doyle smiled. “You got a minute?”

Without waiting for an answer, he crossed to the door leading out to the porch, opened it, and looked back over his shoulder at us.

“Apparently we do,” Angie said.

The porch railing needed a paint job even more than the ceiling in Amanda’s bedroom. Every time one of us leaned on it, the chipped, sun-baked paint crackled under our forearms like logs in a fire.

On the porch I could smell the odor of barbecue a few houses away, and from somewhere on the next block came the sounds of a backyard gathering-a woman’s loud voice complaining about a sunburn, a radio playing the Mighty Mighty Bosstones, laughter as sharp and sudden as ice cubes shifting in a glass. Hard to believe it was October. Hard to believe winter was near.

Hard to believe Amanda McCready floated farther and farther away out there, and the world continued turning.

“So,” Doyle said, as he leaned over the railing. “You solve the case yet?”

Angie looked at me and rolled her eyes.

“No,” I said, “but we’re close.”

Doyle chuckled softly, his eyes on the patch of concrete and dead grass below the porch.

Angie said, “We assume you advised the McCreadys not to contact us.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Same reason I would if I were in your position,” Angie said, as he turned his head to look at her. “Too many cooks.”

Doyle nodded. “That’s part of it.”

“What’s the other part?” I said.

He laced his fingers together, then pushed the hands out until the knuckles cracked. “These people look like they’re rolling in dough? Like they got cigarette boats, diamond-studded candelabras I don’t know about?”

“No.”

“And ever since the Gerry Glynn thing, I hear you two charge pretty steep rates.”

Angie nodded. “Pretty steep retainers, too.”

Doyle gave her a small smile and turned back to the railing. He gripped it lightly with both hands and leaned back on his heels. “Time this little girl is found, Lionel and Beatrice could be a hundred grand in the hole. At least. They’re only the aunt and uncle, but they’ll buy spots on TV to find her, take out full-page ads in every national paper, plaster her picture on highway billboards, hire psychics, shamans, and PIs.” He looked back at us. “They’ll go broke. You know?”

“Which is one of the reasons we’ve been trying not to take this case,” I said.

“Really?” He raised an eyebrow. “Then why are you here?”

“Beatrice is persistent,” Angie said.

He looked back at the kitchen window. “She is that, isn’t she?”

“We’re a little confused why Amanda’s mother isn’t as well.”

Doyle shrugged. “Last time I saw her, she was doped up on tranquilizers, Prozac, whatever they give the parents of missing kids these days.” He turned back from the railing, his hands out by his side. “Whatever. Lookit, I don’t want to get off on the wrong foot with two people might help me find this kid. No shit. I just want to make sure that, A, you don’t get in my way; B, you don’t tell the press how you were brought on board because the police are such boneheads they couldn’t find water from a boat; or, C, you don’t exploit the worry of those people in there for money. Because I happen to like Lionel and Beatrice. They’re good people.”

“What was B again?” I smiled.

Angie said, “Lieutenant, as we said, we’re trying hard not to take this case. It’s doubtful we’ll be around long enough to get in your way.”

He looked at her a long time with that hard, open gaze of his. “Then why are you standing on this porch talking to me?”

“So far Beatrice refuses to take no for an answer.”

“And you think that’s somehow going to change?” He smiled softly and shook his head.

“We can hope,” I said.

He nodded, then turned back to the railing. “Long time.”

“What?” Angie said.

His eyes remained on the backyard and the one just beyond it. “For a four-year-old to be missing.” He sighed. “Long time,” he repeated.

“And you have no leads?” Angie asked.

He shrugged. “Nothing I’d bet the house on.”

“Anything you’d bet a second-rate condo on?” she said.

He smiled again and shrugged.

“I take that as a ‘not really,’” Angie said.

He nodded. “Not really.” The dry paint sounded like brittle leaves under his clenched hands. “Tell you how I got into the kid-finding racket. ’Bout twenty years ago, my daughter, Shannon? She disappears. For one day.” He turned to us, held up his index finger. “Not even one day, really. Actually, it was from like four o’clock one afternoon till about eight the next morning, but she was six. And I’ll tell you, you have no clue how long a night can be until your child goes missing in one. The last time Shannon ’s friends had seen her she was heading home on her bicycle, and a couple of them said they saw a car following her real slow.” He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hand and blew a rush of air out of his mouth at the memory. “We found her the next morning in a drainage ditch near a park. She’d cracked up the bike and broken both ankles, passed out from the pain.”

He noticed the looks on our faces and held up his hand.

“She was fine,” he said. “Two broken ankles hurt like hell and she was one scared kid for a while, but that was the worst trauma her or my wife and me suffered through her whole childhood. That’s good luck. Hell, that’s amazing luck.” He blessed himself quickly. “My point, though? When Shannon was missing and the whole neighborhood and all my cop buddies are looking for her, and me and Tricia are driving or walking everywhere and tearing our hair out, we stopped for a cup of coffee. To go, believe me. But for two minutes, while we’re standing in this Dunkin’ Donuts waiting for our coffee, I look at Tricia and she looks at me and both of us, without saying a word, know that if Shannon is dead, we’re dead, too. Our marriage-over. Our happiness-over. Our lives would be one long road of pain. Nothing else, really. Everything good and hopeful, everything we lived for, really, would die with our daughter.”

“And that’s why you joined Crimes Against Children?” I said.

“That’s why I built Crimes Against Children,” he said. “It’s my baby. I created it. Took me fifteen years, but I did it. CAC exists because I looked at my wife in that doughnut shop and I knew, right then and beyond any doubt, that no one can survive the loss of a child. No one. Not you, not me, not even a loser like Helene McCready.”

“Helene’s a loser?” Angie said.

He cocked an eyebrow. “Know why she went to her friend Dottie’s instead of vice versa?”

We shook our heads.

“The picture tube was going on her TV. The color went in and out, and Helene didn’t like that. So she left her kid behind and went next door.”

“For TV.”

He nodded. “For TV.”

“Wow,” Angie said.

He looked at us steadily for a full minute, then hitched his pants and said, “Two of my best guys, Poole and Broussard, will contact you. They’ll be your liaisons. If you can help, I’m not going to stand in your way.” He rubbed his face with his hands again, shook his head. “Shit, I’m tired.”

“When’s the last time you slept?” Angie said.

“Beyond a catnap?” He chuckled softly. “Few days at least.”

“You must have someone who relieves you,” Angie said.

“Don’t want relief,” he said. “I want this child. And I want her in one piece. And I want her yesterday.”

3

Helene McCready was watching herself on TV when we entered Lionel’s house with Lionel and Beatrice.

The on-screen Helene wore a light blue dress and matching jacket with the bulb of a white rose pinned to the lapel. Her hair flowed down to her shoulders. Her face carried just a hint of excessive makeup, hastily applied around the eyes perhaps.

The real Helene McCready wore a pink T-shirt with the words BORN TO SHOP on the front and a pair of white sweatpants that had been shorn just above the knees. Her hair, tied in a loose ponytail, looked like it had been through so many dye jobs it had forgotten its original color and was stuck somewhere between platinum and greasy wheat.

Another woman sat on the couch beside the real Helene McCready, about the same age but thicker and paler, dimples of cellulite pocking the white flesh under her upper arms as she raised a cigarette to her lips and leaned forward to concentrate on the TV.

“Look, Dottie, look,” Helene said. “There’s Gregor and Head Sparks.”

“Oh, yeah!” Dottie pointed at the screen as two men walked behind the reporter interviewing Helene. The men waved at the camera.

“Look at ’ em waving.” Helene smiled. “The punks.”

“Smart-asses,” Dottie said.

Helene raised a can of Miller to her lips with the same hand that held her cigarette, and the long ash curled down toward her chin as she drank.

“Helene,” Lionel said.

“One sec, one sec.” Helene waved her beer can at him, her eyes fixed on the screen. “This is the best part.”

Beatrice caught our eyes and rolled her own.

On TV, the reporter asked Helene who she thought could be responsible for the abduction of her child.

“How do you answer a question like that?” the TV Helene said. “I mean, like, who would take my little girl? What’s the point? She never did nothing to nobody. She was just a little girl with a beautiful smile. That’s what she did all the time, she smiled.”

“She did have a beautiful smile,” Dottie said.

“Does,” Beatrice said.

The women on the couch seemed not to have heard her.

“Oh, it was,” Helene said. “It was perfect. Just perfect. Break your heart.” Helene’s voice cracked, and she put down her beer long enough to grab a Kleenex from a box on the coffee table.

Dottie patted her knee and clucked. “There, there,” Dottie said. “There, there.”

“Helene,” Lionel said.

TV coverage of Helene had given way to footage of O.J. playing golf somewhere in Florida.

“I still can’t believe he got away with it,” Helene said.

Dottie turned to her. “I know,” she said, as if she’d been unburdened of a great secret.

“If he wasn’t black,” Helene said, “he’d be in jail now.”

“If he wasn’t black,” Dottie said, “he’d have gotten the chair.”

“If he wasn’t black,” Angie said, “you two wouldn’t care.”

They turned their heads and looked back at us. They seemed mildly surprised by the four people standing behind them, as if we’d suddenly appeared there like Magi.

“What?” Dottie said, her brown eyes darting across our chests.

“Helene,” Lionel said.

Helene looked up into his face, her mascara smudged under puffy eyes. “Yeah?”

“This is Patrick and Angie, the two detectives we talked about.”

Helene gave us a limp wave with her sodden Kleenex. “Hi-ya.”

“Hi,” Angie said.

“Hi-ya,” I said.

“I ’member you,” Dottie said to Angie. “You ’member me?”

Angie smiled kindly and shook her head.

“MRM High,” Dottie said. “I was, like, a freshman. You were a senior.”

Angie gave it some thought, shook her head again.

“Oh, yeah,” Dottie said. “I ’member you. Prom Queen. That’s what we called you.” She swigged some beer. “You still like that?”

“Like what?” Angie said.

“Like you think you’re better than everyone else.” She peered at Angie with eyes so tiny it was hard to tell if they were bleary or not. “That was you all over. Miss Perfect. Miss-”

“Helene.” Angie turned her head to concentrate on Helene McCready. “We need to speak to you about Amanda.”

But Helene had her eyes on me, her cigarette frozen a quarter inch from her lips. “You look like someone. Dottie, doesn’t he?”

“What?” Dottie said.

“Look like someone.” Helene took two quick hits from her cigarette.

“Who?” Dottie stared at me now.

“You know,” Helene said. “That guy. That guy on that show, you know the one.”

“No,” Dottie said, and gave me a hesitant smile. “What show?”

“That show,” Helene said. “You gotta know the one I’m talking about.”

“No, I don’t.”

“You gotta.”

“What show?” Dottie turned her head to look at Helene. “What show?”

Helene blinked at her and frowned. Then she looked back at me. “You look just like him,” she assured me.

“Okay,” I said.

Beatrice leaned against the hallway doorjamb and closed her eyes.

“Helene,” Lionel said, “Patrick and Angie have to talk to you about Amanda. Alone.”

“What,” Dottie said, “I’m some kind of freak?”

“No, Dottie,” Lionel said carefully. “I didn’t say that.”

“I’m some kind of fucking loser, Lionel? Not good enough to be with my best friend when she needs me most?”

“He’s not saying that,” Beatrice said in a tired voice, her eyes still closed.

“Then again…” I said.

Dottie screwed up her blotchy face, looked at me.

“Helene,” Angie said hurriedly, “it would go a lot faster if we could just ask you some questions alone and be out of your hair.”

Helene looked at Angie. Then at Lionel. Then at the TV. Finally she focused on the back of Dottie’s head.

Dottie was still looking at me, confused, trying to decide if the confusion should mutate into anger or not.

“Dottie,” Helene said, with the air of someone about to deliver a state address, “is my best friend. My best friend. That means something. You want to talk to me, you talk to her.”

Dottie’s eyes left mine and she turned to look at her best friend, and Helene nudged her knee with her elbow.

I glanced at Angie. We’ve been working together so long, I could sum up the look on Angie’s face in two words:

Screw this.

I met her eyes and nodded. Life was too short to spend another quarter second with either Helene or Dottie.

I looked at Lionel and he shrugged, his body puddled with resignation.

We would have walked out right then-in fact, we were starting to-but Beatrice opened her eyes and blocked our path and said, “Please.”

“No,” Angie said quietly.

“An hour,” Beatrice said. “Just give us an hour. We’ll pay.”

“It’s not the money,” Angie said.

“Please,” Beatrice said. She looked past Angie, locked eyes with me. She shifted her weight from her left foot to her right and her shoulders sagged.

“One more hour,” I said. “That’s it.”

She smiled and nodded.

“Patrick, right?” Helene looked up at me. “That’s your name?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Think you could move a little to your left, Patrick?” Helene said. “You’re blocking the TV.”

Half an hour later, we’d learned nothing new.

Lionel, after a lot of wheedling, had convinced his sister to turn off the TV while we talked, but a lack of TV seemed only to further diminish Helene’s attention span. Several times during our conversation, her eyes darted past me to the blank screen as if hoping it would turn back on through divine intervention.

Dottie, after all her bitching about sticking by her best friend, left the room as soon as we turned off the TV. We heard her knocking around the kitchen, opening the refrigerator for another beer, rattling through the cupboards for an ashtray.

Lionel sat beside his sister on the couch, and Angie and I sat on the floor against the entertainment center. Beatrice took the end of the couch as far away from Helene as possible, stretched one leg out in front of her, held the other by the ankle between both hands.

We asked Helene to tell us everything regarding the day of her daughter’s disappearance, asked if there’d been any sort of argument between the two of them, if Helene had angered anyone who’d have a reason to abduct her daughter as an act of vengeance.

Helene’s voice bore what seemed a constant tone of exasperation as she explained that she never argued with her daughter. How could you argue with someone who smiled all the time? In between the smiling, it seemed, Amanda had only loved her mother and been loved by her, and they’d spent their time loving and smiling and smiling some more. Helene could think of no one she’d angered, and as she’d told the police, even if she had, who would abduct her child to get back at her? Children took work, Helene said. You had to feed them, she assured us. You had to tuck them in. You had to play with them sometimes.

Hence, all that smiling.

In the end, she told us nothing we hadn’t learned already from either news reports or Lionel and Beatrice.

As for Helene herself-the more time I spent with her, the less I wanted to be in the same room. As we discussed her child’s disappearance, she let us in on the fact that she hated her life. She was lonely; there were no good men left; they needed to put a fence up around Mexico to keep out all those Mexicans who were apparently stealing jobs up here in Boston. She was sure there was a liberal agenda to corrupt every decent American but she couldn’t articulate what that agenda was, only that it affected her ability to be happy and it was determined to keep blacks on welfare. Sure, she was on welfare herself, but she’d been trying hard these last seven years to get off.

She spoke of Amanda as one would speak of a stolen car or an errant pet-she seemed more annoyed than anything else. Her child had disappeared and, boy, had that fucked up her life.

God, it appeared, had anointed Helene McCready Life’s Great Victim. The rest of us could step out of line now. The competition was over.

“Helene,” I said, near the end of our conversation, “is there anything you could tell us that you might have forgotten to tell the police?”

Helene looked at the remote control on the coffee table. “What?” she said.

I repeated my question.

“It’s hard,” she said. “You know?”

“What?” I said.

“Raising a kid.” She looked up at me and her dull eyes widened, as if she were about to impart great wisdom. “It’s hard. It’s not like in the commercials.”

When we left the living room, Helene turned on the TV and Dottie swept past us, two beers in hand, as if she’d been given her cue.

“She’s got some emotional problems,” Lionel told us, once we’d settled in the kitchen.

“Yeah,” Beatrice said. “She’s a cunt.” She poured coffee into her mug.

“Don’t say that word,” Lionel said. “For God’s sake.”

Beatrice poured some coffee into Angie’s cup, looked at me.

I held up my can of Coke.

“Lionel,” Angie said, “your sister doesn’t seem too concerned that Amanda’s missing.”

“Oh, she’s concerned,” Lionel said. “Last night? She cried all night. I think she’s just cried out at the moment. Trying to get a handle on her…grief. You know.”

“Lionel,” I said, “with all due respect, I see self-pity. I don’t see grief.”

“It’s there,” Lionel blinked, looked at his wife. “It’s there. Really.”

Angie said, “I know I’ve said this before, but I really don’t see what we can do that the police aren’t already doing.”

“I know.” Lionel sighed. “I know.”

“Maybe later,” I said.

“Sure,” he agreed.

“If the police get completely stumped and pull off the case,” Angie said. “Maybe then.”

“Yeah.” Lionel came off the wall and held out his hand. “Look, thanks for dropping by. Thanks for…everything.”

“Any time.” I went to shake his hand.

Beatrice’s voice, jagged but clear, stopped me. “She’s four.”

I looked at her.

“Four years old,” she said, her eyes on the ceiling. “And she’s out there somewhere. Maybe lost. Maybe worse.”

“Honey,” Lionel said.

Beatrice gave a small shake of her head. She looked at her drink, then tilted her head and slugged it back, her eyes closed. When it was empty, she tossed her mug on the table and bent over, her hands clasped together.

“Mrs. McCready,” I said, but she cut me off with a wave of her hand.

“Every second people aren’t trying to find her is a second she feels.” She raised her head and opened her eyes.

“Honey,” Lionel said.

“Don’t ‘honey’ me.” She looked at Angie. “Amanda is afraid. She is missing. And Lionel’s bitch sister sits out in my living room with her fat friend sucking down beers and watching herself on TV. And who speaks for Amanda? Huh?” She looked at her husband. She looked at Angie and me, her eyes red. She looked at the floor. “Who shows that little girl that someone gives a shit whether she lives or dies?”

For a full minute, the only sound in that kitchen came from the hum of the refrigerator motor.

Then, very softly, Angie said, “I guess we do.”

I looked at her and raised my eyebrows. She shrugged.

An odd hybrid of laugh and sob escaped Beatrice’s mouth, and she placed a fist to her lips and stared at Angie as tears filled her eyes but refused to fall.

4

The section of Dorchester Avenue that runs through my neighborhood used to have more Irish bars on it than any other street outside Dublin. When I was younger, my father used to participate in a marathon pub crawl to raise money for local charities. Two beers and one shot per bar, and the men would move onto the next one. They’d begin in Fields Corner, the next neighborhood over, and move north up the avenue. The idea was to see which man could remain standing long enough to cross the border into South Boston, less than two miles north.

My father was a hell of a drinker, as were most of the men who signed up for the pub crawl, but in all the years of its existence, not one man ever made it to Southie.

Most of those bars are gone now, replaced by Vietnamese restaurants and corner stores. Now known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail, this four-block section of the avenue is actually a lot more charming than many of my white neighbors seem to find it. You drive it early in the morning, and you often find old men leading fellow senior citizens in tai chi exercises along the sidewalks, see people wearing their native dress of dark silk pajamas and wide straw hats. I’ve heard about the alleged gangs, or tongs, working down here, but I’ve never encountered them; mostly I’ve seen young Vietnamese kids with spiked, gel-saturated hair and Gargoyle sunglasses, standing around trying to look cool, trying to look hard, and I find them no different than I was at their age.

Of the old bars that have survived the latest flux of immigration into our neighborhood, the three that front the avenue itself are very good bars. The owners and their clientele have a laissez-faire attitude toward the Vietnamese, and the Vietnamese treat them in kind. Neither culture seems particularly curious about the other, and that suits both just fine.

The only other bar near the Ho Chi Minh Trail was off the avenue, at the end of a dirt road that was stunted when the town ran out of funds to complete it in the mid-forties. The alley that remained never saw the sunlight. A trucking company’s hangar-sized depot loomed over it from the south. A dense thicket of three-deckers blocked it from the north. At the end of this alley sat the Filmore Tap, as dusty and seemingly forgotten as the aborted road it sat on.

Back in the days of the Dot Ave pub crawl, even men of my father’s ilk-brawlers and boozers all-didn’t go in the Filmore. It was stricken from the pub crawl map as if it didn’t exist, and in my entire life I never knew anyone who frequented the place on a regular basis.

There’s a difference between a tough working-class bar and a sleazy white-trash bar, and the Filmore epitomized the latter. Fights in working-class bars break out frequently enough but usually involve fists, maybe a beer bottle over someone’s head at worst. Fights broke out in the Filmore about every second beer and usually involved switchblades. Something about the place attracted men who’d lost anything worth caring about a long, long time ago. They came in here to nurse their drug habits and their alcoholism and their hate. And while you wouldn’t think there were a lot of people clamoring to get in their club, they didn’t look kindly upon potential applicants.

The bartender glanced at us as we came in from the sunlight Thursday afternoon and adjusted our eyes to the sallow dark green ambience of the place. Four guys huddled around the corner of the bar closest to the door, and they turned slowly, one by one, and looked at us.

“Where’s Lee Marvin when you need him?” I said to Angie.

“Or Eastwood,” Angie said. “I’d take Clint about now.”

Two guys shot pool in the back. Well, they were shooting pool. And then we came in and somehow messed up their game, and one of them looked up from the table and frowned.

The bartender turned his back to us. He stared at the TV above him, intently focused on an episode of Gilligan’s Island. The Skipper was hitting Gilligan on the head with his cap. The Professor was trying to break it up. The Howells laughed. Maryann and Ginger were nowhere to be found. Maybe that had something to do with the plot.

Angie and I took stools at the far corner of the bar, near the bartender, and waited for him to acknowledge us.

The Skipper kept hitting Gilligan. He was apparently mad about something involving a monkey.

“This is a great one,” I said to Angie. “They almost get off the island.”

“Really?” Angie lit a cigarette. “Pray tell, what stops them?”

“Skipper professes his love for his little buddy and they get all caught up in the wedding arrangements and the monkey steals the boat and all their coconuts.”

“Right,” Angie said. “I remember this one now.”

The bartender turned and looked down at us. “What?” he said.

“A pint of your finest ale,” I said.

“Two,” Angie said.

“Fine,” the bartender said. “But then you shut up until the show’s over. Some of us haven’t seen this one.”

After Gilligan, the bar TV was tuned to an episode of Public Enemies, a fact-based crime show in which the exploits of wanted felons were reenacted by actors so inept they made Van Damme and Seagal look like Olivier and Gielgud. This particular episode concerned a man who’d sexually molested and then carved up his children in Montana, shot a state trooper in North Dakota, and seemed to have spent his entire life making sure everyone he encountered had one bad fucking day.

“You ask me,” Big Dave Strand said to Angie and me, as they flashed the felon’s face onscreen, “that’s the guy you should be talking to. Not bothering my people.”

Big Dave Strand was the owner and chief bartender of the Filmore Tap. He was, true to his name, big-at least six four, with a wide body that seemed as if the thick flesh had wrapped itself in layers over the bone as opposed to expanding organically as the body grew. Big Dave had a bushel of beard and mustache around his lips and dark green jailhouse tattoos on both biceps. The one on the left arm depicted a revolver and bore the word FUCK below it. The one on the right seemed to be of a bullet impacting with a skull and said YOU below it.

Oddly, I’d never run into Big Dave in church.

“Knew guys like him in the joint,” Big Dave said. He drew himself another pint of Piel’s from the tap. “Freaks. They’d keep ’em out of general population ’cause they knew what we’d do to them. They knew.” He downed half his pint, looked up at the TV again, and belched.

The bar smelled of sour milk for some reason. And sweat. And beer. And buttered popcorn from the baskets spaced out along the bar at every fourth stool. The floor was rubber tile, and Big Dave kept a hose behind the bar. By the looks of the floor, it had been a few days since he’d used it. Cigarette butts and popcorn were ground into the rubber, and I was pretty sure the small movements I saw coming from the shadows under one of the tables were those of mice nibbling on something along the baseboard.

We’d questioned all four men at the bar about Helene McCready, and none of them had been much help. They were older men, the youngest in his mid-thirties but looking a decade older. They all looked Angie up and down as if she were hanging naked in a butcher’s window. They weren’t particularly hostile, but they weren’t helpful either. They all knew Helene but didn’t seem to feel one way or another about her. They all knew her daughter was missing and didn’t seem to feel one way or another about that either. One of them, a busted heap of red veins and yellowing skin named Lenny, said, “The kid’s missing. So? She’ll turn up. They always do.”

“You’ve misplaced children before?” Angie said.

Lenny nodded. “They showed back up.”

“Where are they now?” I said.

“One’s in prison, one’s in Alaska or someplace.” He whacked the shoulder of the man nodding off beside him. “This here’s the youngest.”

Lenny’s son, a pale skinny guy with two brightly blackened eyes, said, “You’re fucking A,” and dropped his head into his arms on the bar.

“We already been through this with the cops,” Big Dave told us. “We told ’em, Yeah, Helene comes in here; no, she don’t bring the kid with her; yeah, she likes her beer; no, she didn’t sell the kid to pay off a drug debt.” He narrowed his eyes at us. “Least not to anyone in here.”

One of the pool players came to the bar. He was a skinny guy with a shaved head, cheap jailhouse tats on his arms, but none done with the attention to detail and fine aesthetic sense of Big Dave’s. He leaned in between Angie and me, even though there were a few car lengths of space to our right. He ordered two more beers from Dave and stared at Angie’s breasts.

“You got a problem?” Angie said.

“No problem,” the guy said. “I don’t have a problem.”

“He’s problem-free,” I said.

The guy continued staring at Angie’s breasts with eyes that looked as if they’d been zapped with a lightning bolt and seared of life.

Dave brought his beers, and the guy picked them up.

“These two are asking about Helene,” Dave said.

“Yeah?” The guy’s voice was so flat it was hard to tell if he had a pulse. He pulled his two beers in between our heads and tilted the mug in his left hand so that some beer spilled on my shoe.

I looked down at my shoe, then back up into his eyes. His breath smelled like an athlete’s sock. He waited for me to respond. When I didn’t, he looked at the mugs in his hands and his fingers tightened around the handles. He looked back up at me, and those stunted eyes were black holes.

“I don’t have a problem,” he said. “Maybe you do.”

I shifted my weight slightly in my chair so that my elbow had more leverage on the bar in case I had to bob or weave suddenly and waited for the guy to make whatever move was floating through his head like a cancer cell.

He looked down at his hands again. “Maybe you do,” he repeated loudly, and then stepped out from in between us.

We watched him walk back to his friend by the pool table. His friend took his beer, and the guy with the shaved head gestured in our direction.

“Did Helene have a big drug problem?” Angie asked Big Dave.

“The fuck would I know?” Big Dave said. “You implying something?”

“Dave,” I said.

“Big Dave,” he corrected me.

“Big Dave,” I said. “I don’t care if you keep kilos under the bar. And I don’t care if you sell them to Helene McCready on a daily basis. We just want to know if she had enough of a drug problem that she was in deep to somebody.”

He held my gaze for about thirty seconds, long enough for me to see how much of a badass he was. Then he watched some more TV.

“Big Dave,” Angie said.

He turned his bison’s head.

“Is Helene an addict?”

“You know,” Big Dave said, “you’re pretty hot. You ever want to go a few rounds with a real man, give a call.”

Angie said, “You know some?”

Big Dave looked back up at the TV.

Angie and I glanced at each other. She shrugged. I shrugged. The attention-deficit afflicting Helene and her friends was apparently widespread enough to fill a psych ward.

“She didn’t have no big debts,” Big Dave said. “She’s into me for maybe sixty bucks. If she was into anybody else for…party favors, I’d have heard about it.”

“Hey, Big Dave,” one of the men down the end of the bar called, “you ask her yet if she blows?”

Big Dave held out his arms to them and shrugged. “Ask her yourself.”

“Hey, honey,” the man called. “Hey, honey.”

“What about guys?” Angie kept her eyes on Dave, her voice clear, as if whatever these assholes were talking about had nothing to do with her. “Was she seeing anybody who might be pissed off at her?”

“Hey, honey,” the man called. “Look at me. Look over here. Hey, honey.”

Big Dave chuckled and turned away from the four guys long enough to put a fresh head on his beer. “There’s chicks who can make you crazy, and chicks you’d fight over.” He smiled over his pint glass at Angie. “You, for instance.”

“And Helene?” I said.

Big Dave smiled at me as if he thought his come-ons to Angie had me worried. He glanced down the bar at the four men. He winked.

“And Helene?” I repeated.

“You saw her. She’s all-right looking. She’d do, I guess. But one look at her, you know she ain’t worth much in the sack.” He leaned on the bar in front of Angie. “Now, you, I bet you’ve fucked guys in half. Right, honey?”

She shook her head and chuckled softly.

All four guys at the bar were fully awake now. They watched us with high beams in their pupils.

Lenny’s son came off his stool and walked over to the door.

Angie looked down at the bar top, fingered her grimy coaster.

“Don’t look away when I’m talking to you,” Big Dave said. His voice was thicker now, as if his throat were clogged with phlegm.

Angie raised her head, looked at him.

“That’s better.” Big Dave leaned in closer. His left arm slid off the bar and reached for something below.

There was a loud snap in the still bar as Lenny’s son turned the bolt on the front door.

So this is how it happens. A woman with intelligence, pride, and beauty enters a place like this and the men get a glimpse of all they’ve been missing, all they can never have. They’re forced to confront the deficiencies of character that drove them to a dump like this in the first place. Hate, envy, and regret all smash through their stunted brains at once. And they decide to make the woman regret, too-regret her intelligence, her beauty, and, especially, her pride. They decide to smash back, pin the woman to the bar, spew and gorge.

I looked at the glass front of the cigarette machine, saw my reflection and the reflection of two men behind me. They approached from the pool table, sticks in hand, the bald one in the lead.

“Helene McCready,” Big Dave said, his eyes still locked on Angie, “is a nothing. A loser. Means her kid woulda been a loser. So whatever happened to the kid, she’s better off. What I don’t like is people coming in my bar, implying I’m a dealer, running their mouths like they’re better than me.”

Lenny’s son leaned against the door and crossed his arms over his chest.

“Dave,” I said.

“Big Dave,” he said through gritted teeth, his eyes never leaving Angie.

“Dave,” I said, “don’t be a fuckup here.”

“Did you hear him, Big Dave?” Angie said, a hint of tremor in her voice. “Don’t be stupid.”

I said, “Look at me, Dave.”

Dave glanced in my direction, more to check on the progress of the two pool players coming up behind me than because of what I’d said, and his head froze as he spotted the.45 Colt Commander in my waistband.

I’d moved it there from the holster at the small of my back the moment Lenny’s son had walked over to block the door, and Dave raised his eyes from my waist to my face and quickly recognized the difference between someone who exposes a gun for show and someone who does so to use it.

“Either of those guys behind me takes another step,” I told Big Dave, “and this situation’s going nuclear.”

Dave glanced over my shoulder and shook his head quickly.

“Tell that asshole to move away from the door,” Angie said.

“Ray,” Big Dave called, “sit back down.”

“Why?” Ray said. “The fuck for, Big Dave? Free country and shit.”

I tapped the butt of the.45 with my index finger.

“Ray,” Big Dave said, his eyes locked on me now, “get away from the door or I’ll fucking put your head through it.”

“Okay,” Ray said. “Okay, okay. Jeez, Big Dave. I mean, jeez and shit.” Ray shook his head, but instead of returning to his seat, he unlocked the door and walked out of the bar.

“Quite the orator, our Ray,” I said.

“Let’s go,” Angie said.

“Sure.” I pushed my bar stool away with my leg.

The two pool players stood just off to my right as I turned toward the door. I glanced at the one who’d spilled beer on my shoe. He held his pool stick upside down in both hands, the hilt resting on his shoulder. He was stupid enough to still be standing there, but not so stupid he was going to move any closer.

“Now,” I told him, “you have a problem.”

He glanced at the stick in his hands, at the sweat darkening the wood below his hands.

I said, “Drop the stick.”

He considered the distance between us. He considered the butt of the.45 and my right hand resting a half inch away from it. He looked into my face. Then he bent and placed the stick by his feet. He stepped back from it as his friend’s stick clattered loudly to the floor.

I turned away and took five steps down the bar and then stopped. I looked back at Big Dave. “What?” I said.

“Excuse me?” Dave watched my hands.

“I thought you said something.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“I thought you said that maybe you hadn’t told us everything you could have about Helene McCready.”

“I didn’t,” Big Dave said, and held up his hands. “I didn’t say anything.”

“Angie,” I said, “you think Big Dave told us everything?”

She had stopped by the door, her.38 held loosely in her left hand as she leaned against the doorjamb. “Nope.”

“We think you’re holding out, Dave.” I shrugged. “Just an opinion.”

“I told you everything. Now I think you both should just-”

“Come back when you’re closing up tonight?” I said. “That’s a great idea, Big Dave. You got it. We’ll come back then.”

Big Dave shook his head several times. “No, no.”

“Say about two, two-fifteen?” I nodded. “See you then, Dave.”

I turned and walked down the rest of the bar. Nobody would meet my eyes. Everyone looked at their beers.

“She wasn’t over at her friend Dottie’s house,” Big Dave said.

We turned and looked back at him. He leaned over the bar sink and fired a spurt of water into his face from the dispenser hose.

“Hands up on the bar, Dave,” Angie said.

He raised his head and blinked against the liquid. He placed his palms flat on the bar top. “Helene,” he said. “She wasn’t over at Dottie’s. She was here.”

“With who?” I said.

“With Dottie,” he said. “And Lenny’s kid, Ray.”

Lenny raised his head from his beer and said, “Shut the fuck up, Dave.”

“The skeevy guy who manned the door?” Angie said. “That’s Ray?”

Big Dave nodded.

“What were they doing in here?” I said.

“Don’t you say another word,” Lenny said.

Big Dave glanced at him desperately, then back at Angie and me. “Just drinking. Helene knew it looked bad enough she left her kid alone in the first place. If the press or the cops knew she was actually ten blocks away at a bar and not next door, it would look even worse.”

“What’s her relationship with Ray?”

“They do each other sometimes, I think.” He shrugged.

“What’s Ray’s last name?”

“David!” Lenny said. “David, you shut the-”

“Likanski,” Big Dave said. “He lives on Harvest.” He took a gulp of air.

“You are shit,” Lenny told him. “That’s what you are, and it’s all you’ll ever be, and all your retarded fucking offspring will be and everything you touch. Shit.”

“Lenny,” I said.

Lenny kept his back to me. “You think I’m going to say a word to you, boy, you are on fucking angel dust. I might be watching my beer, but I know you got a gun, and I know that girl has one too. And so fucking what? Shoot me or leave.”

Outside, I could hear the sound of a siren approaching.

Lenny turned his head, and a smile broke across his face. “Sounds like they’re coming for you, don’t it?” His smile broke into a hard, bitter laugh that exposed a red sore of a mouth with almost no teeth.

He waved at me as the siren grew so close I knew they were in the alley. “Bye-bye now. Smoke ’em if you got ’em.”

His bitter laugh came out even harder this time and sounded more like the coughing of ravaged lungs. After a few seconds, his cronies joined in, nervously at first but then openly, as we heard the doors of the cop car opening outside.

By the time we walked out the door, it sounded like a party in there.

5

When we stepped out of the bar into the alley, we met the grille of a black Ford Taurus parked a matter of inches from the front door. The younger of the two detectives, a big guy beaming a little boy’s smile, leaned in through the open driver’s window and turned off the siren.

His partner sat cross-legged on the hood, a colder smile on his round face, and said, “Woo, woo, woo.” He held an index finger aloft and rotated his wrist and made the sound again. “Woo, woo, woo.”

“Frighteningly realistic,” I said.

“Ain’t it?” He clapped his hands together and slid down the car hood until his feet rested on the grille and his knees were almost touching my legs.

“You’d be Pat Kenzie.” His hand shot out toward my chest. “Glad to make your acquaintance.”

“Patrick,” I said, and shook the hand.

He gave it two vigorous pumps. “Detective Sergeant Nick Raftopoulos. Call me Poole. Everyone does.” His sharp elfin face tilted toward Angie. “You’d be Angela.”

She shook his hand. “Angie.”

“Pleasure to meet you, Angie. Anyone ever tell you that you have your father’s eyes?”

Angie placed a hand over her eyebrows, took a step toward Nick Raftopoulos. “You knew my father?”

Poole held his palms up on his knees. “In passing. In a member-of-opposing-teams capacity. I liked the man, miss. He had genuine class. To tell you the truth, I mourned his…passing, if that’s the word. He was a rarity.”

Angie gave him a soft smile. “That’s nice of you to say.”

The bar door opened behind us and I could smell stale whiskey again.

The younger cop looked up at whoever stood behind us. “Back inside, mutt. I know someone holding paper on your ass.”

The stale whiskey stench dissipated and the door closed behind us.

Poole jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “That young man there with the sweet disposition is my partner, Detective Remy Broussard.”

We nodded at Broussard, and he nodded back. At closer glance, he was older than he’d first appeared. I put him at forty-three or forty-four. When I’d first come outside I’d pegged him for my age because of the Tom Sawyer innocence in that grin of his, but the crow’s-feet around his eyes, the lines etched in the hollows of his cheeks, and the deep pewter-gray streaked through his curly dirty-blond hair added a decade upon a second look. He had the build of a man who worked out at least four times a week, a physique of solid bulked-up muscle mass that was softened by the double-breasted olive Italian suit he wore over a loosened blue-and-gold Bill Blass tie and subtly pinstriped shirt unbuttoned at the collar.

A clotheshorse, I decided, as he brushed some dust from the edge of his left Florsheim, the kind of man who probably never passed a mirror without casting a lingering glance into it. But as he leaned over the open driver’s door and stared at us, I sensed a piercing calculation in him, a prodigious intelligence. He might pause at mirrors, but I doubted he ever missed anything going on behind him when he did.

“Our dear Lieutenant Jack-the-impassioned Doyle said we should look you up,” Poole said. “So here we are.”

“Here you are,” I said.

“We’re driving up the avenue toward your office,” Poole said, “and we see Skinny Ray Likanski come running out of this alley. Ray’s father, you see, a snitch of snitches in the old days, goes way back with me. Detective Broussard wouldn’t know Skinny Ray from Sugar Ray, but I say, ‘Stop the chariot, Remy. That plebeian is none other than Skinny Ray Likanski and he looks a might distressed.’” Poole smiled and drummed his fingers on his kneecaps. “Ray is screaming about someone waving a gun inside this fine establishment.” He cocked his eyebrow at me. “‘A gun?’ I say to Detective Broussard. ‘In a gentleman’s club like the Filmore Tap? Why, I never.’”

I looked at Broussard. He leaned against the driver’s door, arms folded across his chest. He shrugged as if to say, My partner, what a character.

Poole did a fast drumbeat on the hood of the Taurus to get my attention. I looked back at him, and he smiled up at me with his weathered elf’s face. He was in his late fifties probably, squat, and the hair cropped tight to his head was the color of cigarette ash. He rubbed the bristles and squinted into the midafternoon sunlight. “Would said alleged gun be that Colt Commander I see by your alleged right hip, Mr. Kenzie?”

“Allegedly,” I said.

Poole smiled, looked up at the Filmore Tap. “Our Mr. Big Dave Strand-is he still in one piece in there?”

“Last I checked,” I said.

“Should we be arresting you two for assault?” Broussard pulled a stick of gum from a pack of Wrigley’s popped it in his mouth.

“He’d have to press charges.”

“And you don’t think he will?” Poole said.

“We’re pretty sure he won’t.” Angie said.

Poole looked at us, his eyebrows raised. He turned his head, looked back at his partner. Broussard shrugged and then both of them broke out in wide grins.

“Well, ain’t that terrific,” Poole said.

“Big Dave tried his brand of charm on you, I assume?” Broussard asked Angie.

“‘Tried’ being the operative word,” Angie said.

Broussard chewed his gum, smiling around it, and then straightened to his full height, his eyes locked on Angie as if reconsidering her.

“In all seriousness,” Poole said, though his voice was still light, “did either of you discharge your firearms in there?”

“No,” I said.

Poole held out his hand and snapped his fingers.

I removed my gun from my waistband and handed it to him.

He dropped the clip from the gun butt into his hand. He racked the slide, then peered into the chamber to make sure it was clear before he sniffed the barrel. He nodded to himself. He passed the clip to my left hand, placed the gun in my right.

I placed the gun back in the holster at the small of my back, slid the clip into the pocket of my jacket.

“And your permits?” Broussard said.

“Up-to-date and in our wallets,” Angie said.

Poole and Broussard grinned at each other again. Then they stared at us until we figured out what they were waiting for.

We each produced our permits and handed them over the car hood to Poole. Poole gave them a cursory glance and handed them back.

“Should we interview the patrons, Poole?”

Poole looked back at Broussard. “I’m hungry.”

“I could eat, too,” Broussard said.

Poole raised his eyebrows at us again. “How about you two? You hungry?”

“Not particularly,” I said.

“That’s okay. The place I’m thinking of,” Poole said, and placed his hand gently under my elbow, “the food’s awful anyway. But they got water you wouldn’t believe. Best around. Straight out of the tap.”

The Victoria Diner was in Roxbury, just over the dividing line from my neighborhood, and actually served great food. Nick Raftopoulos had pork chops. Remy Broussard had a turkey club.

Angie and I drank coffee. “So you’re getting nowhere,” Angie said.

Poole dipped a chunk of pork in applesauce. “In truth, no.”

Broussard wiped his mouth with his napkin. “Neither of us has ever worked a case with this much publicity that went on for so long and didn’t turn out bad.”

“You don’t think Helene’s involved?” I said.

“We did at first,” Poole said. “My operating theory was that she sold the kid or else some dealer she owed kidnapped the little girl.”

“What changed your mind?” Angie said.

Poole chewed some food, nudged Broussard to answer.

“Polygraph. She passed with flying colors. Also, this guy wolfing pork chops and me? It’s pretty hard to lie to us when we’re working on you together. Helene lies, don’t get me wrong, but not about her daughter’s disappearance. She honestly doesn’t know what happened to her.”

“What about Helene’s whereabouts the night Amanda disappeared?”

Broussard’s sandwich stalled halfway to his mouth. “What about them?”

“You believe the story she told the press?” Angie said.

“Is there a reason we shouldn’t?” Poole dipped his fork in the applesauce.

“Big Dave told us a different story.”

Poole leaned back in his chair, slapped the crumbs from his hands. “And what was that?”

“Did you or did you not believe Helene’s story?” Angie asked.

“Not entirely,” Broussard said. “According to the polygraph, she was with Dottie, but maybe not in Dottie’s apartment. She’s sticking to the lie, though.”

“Where was she?” Poole said.

“According to Big Dave, she was in the Filmore.”

Poole and Broussard looked at each other, then back at us.

“So,” Broussard said slowly, “she did bullshit us.”

“Didn’t want to spoil her fifteen seconds,” Poole said.

“Her fifteen seconds?” I asked.

“In the spotlight,” Poole said. “Used to be minutes; these days it’s seconds.” He sighed. “On the TV, playing her role as the grieving mother in the pretty blue dress. You remember that Brazilian woman in Allston, her little boy went missing about eight months back?”

“And was never found.” Angie nodded.

“Right. The point is, though, that mother-she was dark-skinned, she didn’t dress well, she always looked sorta stoned on camera? After a while, the general public really didn’t give a shit about her missing boy because they disliked the mother so much.”

“But Helene McCready,” Broussard said, “she’s white. And she fixes herself up, she looks good on camera. Maybe she doesn’t come across as the brightest bulb in the box, but she’s likable.”

“No, she’s not,” Angie said.

“Oh, in person?” Broussard shook his head. “In person, she’s about as likable as a case of crabs. But on camera? When she’s speaking for all of fifteen seconds? The lens loves her, the public loves her. She leaves her kid alone for almost four hours, there’s some outrage, but mostly people are saying, ‘Cut her some slack. We all make mistakes.’”

“And she’s probably never been loved in her life like that,” Poole said. “And as soon as Amanda is found, or let’s say something happens to knock the case off the front page-and that something always happens-then Helene goes back to being who she was. But for now, what I’m saying, she’s grabbing her fifteen seconds.”

“And that’s all you think her lying about her whereabouts amounts to?” I said.

“Probably,” Broussard said. He wiped the corners of his mouth with his napkin, pushed his plate away. “Don’t get us wrong. We’re going over to her brother’s place in a few minutes, and we’re going to tear her a new asshole for lying to us. And if there is more to it, we’ll find out.” He tipped his hand toward us. “Thanks to you two.”

“How long have you been on this case?” Poole asked.

Angie looked at her watch. “Since late last night.”

“And you already uncovered something we missed?” Poole chuckled. “You two might be as capable as we’ve heard.”

Angie batted her eyelashes. “Gee, gosh.”

Broussard smiled. “I hang out with Oscar Lee sometimes. We both came up through the Housing Police about a million years ago. After Gerry Glynn got put down in that playground a couple years back, I asked Oscar about you two. Want to know what he said?”

I shrugged. “Knowing Oscar, it was probably profane.”

Broussard nodded. “He said you two were major fuckups in most aspects of your lives.”

“Sounds like Oscar,” Angie said.

“But he also said once you both got it into your heads that you were going to close a case, not even God himself could call you off.”

“That Oscar,” I said, “he’s a peach.”

“So now you’re on the same case we are.” Poole folded his napkin delicately and placed it on top of his plate.

“That bother you?” Angie said.

Poole looked at Broussard. Broussard shrugged.

“It doesn’t bother us in principle,” Poole said.

“But,” Broussard said, “there should be some ground rules.”

“Such as?”

“Such as…” Poole removed a pack of cigarettes. He pulled off the cellophane slowly, then removed the tinfoil and pulled out an unfiltered Camel. He sniffed it, inhaling the tobacco scent deep into his nostrils as he leaned his head back and closed his eyes. Then he leaned forward and ground the unlit cigarette into the ashtray until it snapped in half. He placed the pack back in his pocket.

Broussard smiled at us, his left eyebrow cocked.

Poole noticed us staring at him. “I beg your pardon. I quit.”

“When?” Angie said.

“Two years ago. But I still need the rituals.” He smiled. “Rituals are important.”

Angie reached into her purse. “Do you mind if I smoke?”

“Oh, God, would you?” Poole said.

He watched Angie light her cigarette; then his head shifted slightly and his eyes cleared and found mine, seemed capable of gaining entrance to the core of my brain or my soul with a blink.

“Ground rules,” he said. “We can’t have any press leaks. You’re friends with Richie Colgan of the Trib.”

I nodded.

“Colgan’s no friend of the police,” Broussard said.

Angie said, “It’s not his job to be a friend. It’s his job to be a reporter.”

“And I have no argument with that,” Poole said. “But I can’t have anyone in the press knowing anything we don’t want him to regarding this investigation. Agreed?”

I looked at Angie. She studied Poole through her cigarette smoke. Eventually, she nodded. I said, “Agreed.”

“Magic!” Poole said with a Scottish accent.

“Where did you get this guy?” Angie asked Broussard.

“They pay me an extra hundred a week to work with him. Hazardous duty pay.”

Poole leaned into the current of Angie’s cigarette smoke, sniffed it. “Second,” he said. “You two are unorthodox. That’s fine. But we can’t have you associated with this case and find out you’re exposing firearms and threatening information out of people, à la Mr. Big Dave Strand.”

Angie said, “Big Dave Strand was about to rape me, Sergeant Raftopoulos.”

“I understand,” Poole said.

“No, you don’t,” Angie said. “You have no idea.”

Poole nodded. “I apologize. However, you assure us that what happened to Big Dave this afternoon was an aberration? One that won’t be repeated?”

“We do,” Angie said.

“Well, I’ll take you at your word. How do you feel about our terms so far?”

“If we’re going to agree not to leak to the press, which, believe me, will strain our relationship with Richie Colgan, then you have to keep us in the loop. If we think you’re treating us like you treat the press, Colgan gets a phone call.”

Broussard nodded. “I don’t see a problem with that. Poole?”

Poole shrugged, his eyes on me.

Angie said, “I find it hard to believe a four-year-old could vanish so completely on a warm night without anyone seeing her.”

Broussard turned his wedding ring in half revolutions around his finger. “So do I.”

“So what have you got?” Angie said. “Three days, you must have something we didn’t read about in the papers.”

“We have twelve confessions,” Broussard said, “ranging from ‘I took the girl and ate her’ to ‘I took the girl and sold her to the Moonies,’ who apparently pay top dollar.” He gave us a rueful smile. “None of the twelve confessions check out. We got psychics who say she’s in Connecticut; she’s in California; no, she’s still in the state but in a wooded region. We’ve interrogated Lionel and Beatrice McCready, and their alibis are airtight. We’ve checked the sewers. We’ve interviewed every neighbor on that street inside their houses, not just to see what they might have heard or saw that night but to check their homes casually for any evidence of the girl. We now know which neighbor does coke, which has a drinking problem, which beats his wife, and which beats her husband, but we haven’t found anything to tie any of them to Amanda McCready’s disappearance.”

“Zero,” I said. “You really have nothing.”

Broussard turned his head slowly, looked at Poole.

After about a minute of staring across the table at us, his tongue rolling around and pushing against his lower lip, Poole reached into the battered attaché case on the seat beside him and removed a few glossy photographs. He handed the first one across the table to us.

It was a black-and-white close-up of a man in his late fifties with a face that looked as if the skin had been pulled back hard against the bone, bunched up, and clipped by a metal clamp at the back of his skull. His pale eyes bulged from their sockets, and his tiny mouth all but disappeared under the shadow of his curved talon of a nose. His sunken cheeks were so puckered, he could have been sucking on a lemon. Ten or twelve strands of silver hair were finger-combed across the exposed flesh at the top of his pointy head.

“Ever seen him?” Broussard asked.

We shook our heads.

“Name’s Leon Trett. Convicted child molester. He’s taken three falls. The first got him sentenced to a psych ward, the last two to the pen. He finished his last bit about two and a half years ago, walked out of Bridgewater, and disappeared.”

Poole handed us a second photo, this one a full-length color shot of a gigantic woman with the shoulders of a bank vault and the wide girth and shaggy brown mane of a Saint Bernard standing upright.

“Good God,” Angie said.

“Roberta Trett,” Poole said. “The lovely missus of the aforementioned Leon. That picture was taken ten years ago, so she could have changed some, but I doubt she’s shrunk. Roberta has a renowned green thumb. She usually supports herself and her dear heart, Leon, as a florist. Two and a half years ago, she quit her job and moved out of her apartment in Roslindale, and no one has seen either of them since.”

“But…” Angie said.

Poole handed the third and final photograph across the table. It was a mug shot of a small toffee-skinned man with a lazy right eye and scrunched, confused features. He peered into the lens as if he were looking for it in a dark room, his face a knot of helpless anger and agitated bewilderment.

“Corwin Earle,” Poole said. “Also a convicted pedophile. Released one week ago from Bridgewater. Whereabouts unknown.”

“But he’s connected to the Tretts,” I said.

Broussard nodded. “Bunked with Leon in Bridgewater. After Leon rotated back to the world, Corwin Earle’s roommate was a Dorchester mugger named Bobby Minton, who in between stomping the shit out of Corwin for being a baby-raper was privy to the retard’s musings. Corwin, according to Bobby Minton, had a favorite fantasy: When he was released from prison, he was going to look up his old bunkmate Leon and his wonderful wife, Roberta, and they were going to live together as one big happy family. But Corwin wasn’t going to show up on the door without a gift. Bad form, I guess. And, according to Bobby Minton, the gift wasn’t going to be a bottle of Cutty for Leon and a dozen roses for Roberta. It was going to be a kid. Young, Bobby told us. Corwin and Leon like ’ em young. No older than nine.”

“This Bobby Minton call you?” Angie said.

Poole nodded. “As soon as he heard about Amanda McCready’s disappearance. Mr. Minton, it seems, had consistently taunted Corwin Earle with vivid stories about what the good people of Dorchester do to baby-rapers. How Corwin wouldn’t be able to walk ten yards down Dorchester Avenue without getting his penis chopped off and stuffed in his mouth. Mr. Minton thinks Corwin Earle specifically chose Dorchester in which to pick up his homecoming present for the Tretts because he wanted to spit in Mr. Minton’s face.”

“And where’s Corwin Earle now?” I asked.

“Gone. Vanished. We’ve staked out his parents’ home in Marshfield, but so far, nothing. He left the pen in a taxi, took it to a strip club in Stoughton, and that’s the last anyone’s seen of him.”

“And this Bobby Minton’s phone call or whatever-that’s all you have to tie Earle and the Tretts to Amanda?”

“Pretty thin, huh?” Broussard said. “I told you we don’t have much. Chances are, Earle doesn’t have the balls for a straight kidnapping in an unknown neighborhood. Nothing in his sheet points toward it. The kids he molested were kids at a summer camp where he worked seven years ago. No violence, no forced captivity. He was probably just talking big for his cell mate.”

“What about the Tretts?” Angie said.

“Well, Roberta’s clean. The only felony she’s ever been convicted of was as an accessory-after-the-fact in a liquor store stickup in Lynn back in the late seventies. She did a year, completed her probation, and hasn’t spent so much as a night in county jail since.”

“But Leon?”

“ Leon.” Broussard raised his eyebrows at Poole and whistled. “ Leon ’s bad, bad, bad. Convicted three times, accused twenty. Most cases were dropped when the victims refused to testify. And I don’t know if you know the logic regarding baby-rapers, but it’s the same for rats and roaches: You see one, there’s another hundred nearby. You catch a freak molesting a kid, you can bet there’s another thirty he’s never been bagged for if he’s halfway intelligent. So Leon, by our conservative estimates, has probably raped a good fifty kids. And he was living in Randolph and later in Holbrook when kids disappeared for good, so the feds and local cops have him at the head of their lists of suspects for those kids’ murders. Let you in on another aspect of Leon ’s character-last time he was busted, Kingston P.D. found a shitload of automatic weapons buried near his house.”

“Did he take a fall for them?” Angie asked.

Broussard shook his head. “He was smart enough to bury them on his next-door neighbor’s property. Kingston P.D. knew the shit was his-his house was filled with NRA newsletters, gun manuals, The Turner Diaries, all the usual well-armed paranoid’s paraphernalia-but they couldn’t prove it. Very little sticks to Leon. He’s very careful, and he knows how to drop out of sight.”

“Apparently.” Angie said, with a bitter edge.

Poole put a hand lightly on hers. “Keep the photos. Study them. And have your eyes open for any of the three. I doubt they’re involved-nothing points to it besides a convict’s theory-but they are the most prominent child-rapers in the area these days.”

Angie smiled at Poole ’s hand. “Okay.”

Broussard lifted his silk tie and picked at some lint. “Who was Helene McCready with at the Filmore Sunday night?”

“Dottie Mahew,” Angie said.

“That all?”

Neither Angie nor I spoke for a moment.

“Remember,” Broussard said, “full disclosure.”

“Skinny Ray Likanski,” I said.

Broussard turned to Poole. “Tell me more about this guy, partner.”

“The rascal,” Poole said. “And to think we had His Skinniness in our hands not an hour ago.” He shook his head. “Well, that’s a miss.”

“How so?” I said.

“Skinny Ray’s a professional lowlife. Learned from his daddy. He probably knows we’re looking for him, so he’s gone. Least for a while. Probably the only reason he told us you two were waving weapons around in the Filmore was so we’d leave him be, give him time to get out of Dodge. The Likanskis got relatives in Allegheny, Rem. Maybe you could-”

“I’ll call the P.D. down there,” Broussard said. “Can we skip-trace him?”

Poole shook his head. “He hasn’t taken a fall in five years. No outstandings. No parole officer. He’s clean.” Poole tapped the table with his index. “He’ll surface eventually. Disease always does.”

“We done?” Broussard asked, as the waitress approached.

Poole paid the check, and the four of us walked out into the darkening afternoon.

“If you were betting men,” Angie said, “what would you bet happened to Amanda McCready?”

Broussard took out another stick of gum, popped it in his mouth, and chewed slowly. Poole straightened his tie and studied his reflection in the passenger window of his car.

“I’d say,” Poole said, “that nothing good can come when a four-year-old has been missing for eighty-plus hours.”

“Detective Broussard?” Angie said.

“I’d say she’s dead, Ms. Gennaro.” He walked around the car to the driver’s door and opened it. “It’s a nasty world out there, and it’s never been nice to children.”

6

The Astros were playing the Orioles in a sunset game at Savin Hill Park, and both teams seemed to be having some problems with their mechanics. When a slugger for the Astros hit one down the third-base line, the Orioles’ third baseman failed to field it because he was more interested in tugging at a weed by his feet. So the Astros’ base runner picked up the ball and ran toward home with it. Just before he reached the plate, he threw the ball in the general direction of the pitcher, who picked it up and threw it toward first. The first baseman caught the ball, but instead of tagging a runner, he turned and threw it into the outfield. The centerfielder and the right fielder met at the ball and tackled each other. The left fielder waved to his mom.

The North Dorchester T-ball league for ages four through six met once a week down at Savin Hill Park and played on the smaller of two fields, which was separated from the Southeast Expressway by about fifty yards and a chain-link fence. Savin Hill overlooks the expressway and a small bay known as Malibu Beach, and it’s here that the Dorchester Yacht Club moors its boats. I’ve lived in this neighborhood my entire life and have never seen an actual yacht drop anchor anywhere near here, but maybe I’m always looking on the wrong days.

When I was between four and six, we played baseball because they didn’t have T-ball back then. We had coaches, and parents who screamed and demanded concentration, kids who’d already been taught how to lay down bunts and dive under the second baseman’s tag, fathers who tested us from the mound with fast balls and curves. We had seven-inning games and bitter rivalries with other parishes, and by the time we entered Little League at seven or eight, the teams from St. Bart’s, St. William’s, and St. Anthony’s in North Dorchester were justifiably feared.

As I stood by the bleachers with Angie and watched about thirty small boys and girls run around like spastics and miss balls because they’d pulled their hats over their eyes or were busy staring up at the setting sun, I was pretty certain that the method used when I was their age better prepared a child for the rigors of the actual sport of baseball, but the T-ball kids seemed to be having a lot more fun.

In the first place, there were no outs that I could see. The entire lineup of each team hit through a rotation. Once all fifteen or so kids had hit (and they all hit; there was no such thing as a strikeout), they switched bats for gloves with the other team. Nobody kept score. If one child was actually alert enough to both catch the ball and tag out the runner, both kids were congratulated profusely by the base coach and then the runner stayed on base. A few parents yelled, “Pick up the ball for God’s sake, Andrea,” or “Run, Eddie, run! No, no-that way. That way!” But for the most part, the parents and coaches clapped for every hit that dribbled more than four feet, for every ball fielded and thrown back somewhere in the same zip code as the park, for every successful run from first base to third, even if the kid ran over the pitcher’s mound to get there.

Amanda McCready had played in this league. Signed up and brought to the games by Lionel and Beatrice, she’d been an Oriole, and her coach told us she usually played second base and could catch the ball pretty well when she wasn’t transfixed by the bird on her shirt.

“She missed a few that way.” Sonya Garabedian smiled and shook her head. “She’d be right out there where Aaron is now, and she’d be tugging at her shirt, staring at the bird, talking to it every now and then. And if a ball came her way-well, it would just have to wait until she was done looking at the pretty bird.”

The boy standing at the tee, a round and rather large kid for his age, smashed the ball into deep left, and all the outfielders and most of the infielders ran after it. As he rounded second base, the big boy decided, What the heck, he was going to try and field it too, and he ran into the outfield to join the party as the kids tackled and rolled and bounced off one another like bumper cars.

“That’s something you’d never see Amanda do,” Sonya Garabedian said.

“Hit a home run?” Angie said.

Sonya shook her head. “Well, that too. But, no, you see that pig pile out there? If we don’t get somebody to stop it, they’ll start playing King of the Mountain and forget why they came in the first place.”

As two parents walked out on the field toward the melee and kids somersaulted off the pile like circus performers, Sonya pointed to a small girl with red hair who was playing third base. She was probably five and smaller than almost anyone on either team. Her team shirt hung to her shins. She looked at the party going onto the outfield as more kids ran toward it, and then she bent to her knees and began digging in the dirt with a rock.

“That’s Kerry,” Sonya said. “No matter what happens-if an elephant walks out onto the field and starts letting all the kids play with its trunk-Kerry won’t join in. It simply wouldn’t occur to her.”

“She’s that shy?” I said.

“That’s part of it.” She nodded. “But more than that, she simply doesn’t respond to what other children predictably respond to. She’s never really sad, but she’s never really happy either. You understand?”

Kerry looked up from the dirt for a moment, her freckled face squinting as the dying sun bounced off the pitcher’s stop, and then she went back to digging.

“Amanda is like Kerry in that way,” Sonya said. “She doesn’t respond much to immediate stimulation.”

“She’s introverted,” Angie said.

“Partially, but not in a way that makes you think there’s all that much going on behind her eyes. It’s not that she’s locked in her own little world, it’s that she doesn’t see much that interests her in this world either.” She turned her face and looked up at me, and there was something sad and hard in the set of her jaw, the flatness of her gaze. “You’ve met Helene?”

“Yes.”

“What’d you think?”

I shrugged.

She smiled. “She makes people shrug, doesn’t she?”

“Did she come to games?” Angie asked.

“Once,” Sonya said. “Once, and she was drunk. She was with Dottie Mahew and they were both half in the bag, and they were very loud. I think Amanda was embarrassed. She kept asking me when the game would be over.” She shook her head. “Kids this age, they don’t grasp time the way we do. They just notice if it seems long or short. That day, the game must have seemed real long to Amanda.”

More parents and coaches had gone out to the field now, as had most of the Astros. Several kids were still bouncing in the original pile, but just as many had broken up into separate groups, playing tag, throwing their gloves at one another, or just rolling around on the grass like seals.

“Miss Garabedian, did you ever notice strangers lurking around the games?” Angie showed her the pictures of Corwin Earle, Leon, and Roberta Trett.

She looked at them, blinked at the size of Roberta, but eventually shook her head.

“See that big guy out there by the pile?” She pointed at a tall thick guy in his early forties with a bristly crew cut. “That’s Matthew Hoagland. He’s a professional bodybuilder, former Mr. Massachusetts a couple years in a row. A very sweet guy. And he loves his kids. Last year, we had a mangy-looking guy come by the field and watch the game for a few minutes, and none of us liked his eyes. So Matt made him leave. I have no idea what he said to the guy, but the guy turned white and left in a hurry. No one’s come back since. Maybe that type of…person has a network and spreads the word or whatever. I wouldn’t know. But no strangers come to these games.” She looked at us. “Until you two, that is.”

I touched my hair. “How’s my mange?”

She chuckled. “A few of us recognized you, Mr. Kenzie. We remember how you saved that child in the playground. You can baby-sit for any of us any time you want.”

Angie nudged me. “Our hero.”

“Shut up,” I said.

It took another ten minutes for order to be restored in the outfield and play, such as it was, to resume.

During that time, Sonya Garabedian introduced us to some of the parents who’d remained in the bleachers. A few of them knew Helene and Amanda, and we spent the rest of the game talking with them. What emerged from our conversations-other than further reinforcement of our perception of Helene McCready as a creature committed to self-interest-was a fuller portrait of Amanda.

Contrary to Helene’s depiction of some mythic sitcom moppet who lived only to smile and smile, the people we spoke to usually mentioned how little Amanda smiled, how she was generally listless and far too quiet for a four-year-old.

“My Jessica?” Frances Neagly said. “From the time she was two until she was five, she bounced off walls. And the questions! Everything was, ‘Mommy, why don’t animals talk like we do? How come I have toes? How come some water’s cold and some water’s hot?’” Frances gave us a tired smile. “I mean, it was constant. Every mother I know talks about how exasperating a four-year-old can be. They’re four, right? The world surprises them every ten seconds.”

“But Amanda?” Angie said.

Frances Neagly leaned back and looked around the park as the shadows deepened and crept across the children in the field, seemed to shrink them. “I baby-sat her a few times. Never by arrangement. Helene would drop by, say, ‘Could you just watch her a sec?’ And six or seven hours later she’d come pick her up. I mean, whatta you gonna do, say no?” She lit a cigarette. “Amanda was so quiet. Never a problem. Not once. But, really, who expects that from a four-year-old? She’d just sit wherever you left her and stare at the walls or the TV or whatever. She didn’t investigate my kids’ toys or pull the cat’s tail or anything. She’d just sit there, like a lump, and she never asked when her mother was coming back to get her.”

“Is she mentally handicapped?” I said. “Autistic, maybe?”

She shook her head. “No. If you talked to her, she responded fine. She always seemed a little surprised, but she’d be sweet, speak very well for her age. No, she’s a smart kid. She just isn’t a very excitable one.”

“And that seemed unnatural,” Angie said.

She shrugged. “Yeah, I guess. You know what it is? I think she was used to being ignored.” A pigeon swooped in low over the pitcher’s mound, and some kid threw his glove at it and missed. Frances smiled weakly at us. “And I think that sucks.”

She turned away from us as her daughter came up to the plate, a bat held awkwardly in her hands as she considered the ball and tee in front of her.

“Hit it out of the park, honey,” Frances called. “You can do it.”

Her daughter turned and looked at her. She smiled. Then she shook her head several times and threw the bat onto the field.

7

After the game, we stopped in the Ashmont Grille for a meal and a beer, and Angie had what I can only describe as a delayed-stress reaction to what had happened in the Filmore Tap.

The Ashmont Grille served the sort of food my mom used to make-meat loaf and potato and lots of gravy-and the waitresses all acted like moms, too. If you didn’t clean your plate, they asked you if the starving children in China would waste food. I always half expected to be told I couldn’t leave the table until I’d eaten every last bite.

If that were the case, Angie would have been there until next week, the way she picked at her chicken Marsala. For someone so petite and slim, Angie can out-eat truck drivers fresh off the road. But tonight, she swirled the linguine on her fork, then seemed to forget about it. She’d drop the fork on the plate, sip some beer, and stare off into space as if she were Helene McCready looking for a television set.

By the time she’d reached her fourth bite, my meal was gone. Angie took this as an indication that dinner was over and pushed her plate into the center of the table.

“You can never know people,” she said, her eyes on the table. “Can you? Understand them. It’s not possible. You can’t…fathom what makes them do the things they do, think the way they do. If it’s not the way you think, it never makes sense. Does it?” She looked up at me and her eyes were red and wet.

“You talking about Helene?”

“Helene”-she cleared her throat-“Helene, and Big Dave, and those guys in the bar, and whoever took Amanda. They don’t make sense. They don’t…” A tear fell to her cheek and she wiped at it with the back of her hand. “Shit.”

I took her hand and she chewed the inside of her mouth, and looked up at the ceiling fan above her.

“Ange,” I said, “those guys in the Filmore were human waste. They’re not worth a single moment’s thought.”

“Uh-huh.” She took a deep breath through her mouth, and I could hear it rattle its way through the liquid clogging her throat. “Yeah.”

“Hey,” I said. I stroked her forearm with my palm. “I’m serious. They’re nothing. They’re-”

“They would have raped me, Patrick. I’m sure of it.” She looked at me, and her mouth jerked erratically until it froze for a moment in a smile, one of the strangest smiles I’ve ever seen. She patted my hand and the flesh around her mouth crumbled, and then her whole face crumbled with it. The tears poured from her eyes, and she kept trying to hold that smile and pat my hand.

I’ve known this woman all my life, and I can count on one hand how many times she’s wept in my presence. I didn’t understand completely at the moment what had brought this on-I’d seen Angie face far more dire situations than the one we faced in the bar today and shrug them off-but whatever the cause, the pain was real, and seeing it in her face and body killed me.

I came out from my side of the booth, and she waved me away, but I slid in beside her, and she caved into me. She gripped my shirt and wept silently into my shoulder. I smoothed her hair, kissed her head, and held her. I could feel the blood coursing through her body as she shook in my arms.

“I feel like such a goof,” Angie said.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said.

We’d left the Ashmont Grille and Angie asked me to stop at Columbia Park in South Boston. A horseshoe of bleachers set in granite surrounded the dusty track at the tip of the park, and we bought a six-pack and took it down there with us, dusted some splinters off a bleacher plank before sitting down.

Columbia Park is Angie’s sacred place. Her father, Jimmy, disappeared in a mob hit over two decades ago, and the park is where her mother chose to tell Angie and her sister that their father was dead, corpse or no corpse. Angie returns to the park sometimes during her dark nights, when she can’t sleep, when the ghosts crawl around in her head.

The ocean was fifty yards to our right, and the breeze coming off it was cool enough for us to wrap up in each other to keep from shivering.

She leaned forward, staring out at the track and the wide swath of green park beyond. “You know what it is?”

“Tell me.”

“I don’t understand people who choose to hurt other people.” She turned on the bleacher until she was facing me. “I’m not talking about people who respond to violence with violence. I mean, we’re as guilty of that as anyone. I’m talking about people who hurt other people without provocation. Who enjoy ugliness. Who get off on dragging everyone down into the muck with them.”

“The guys in the bar.”

“Yeah. They would have raped me. Raped. Me.” Her mouth remained open for a moment, as if the full implication of that were truly hitting her for the first time. “And then they would have gone home and celebrated. No, no, wait.” She raised her arm in front of her face. “No, that’s not it. They wouldn’t have celebrated. That’s not the worst thing. The worst thing is, they wouldn’t have given it much thought at all. They would have opened up my body, violated me in every sick way they could think of, and then after they were done, they’d remember it the way you’d remember a cup of coffee. Not as something to celebrate, just as one more thing that got you through your day.”

I didn’t say anything. There wasn’t anything to say. I held her eyes and waited for her to go on.

“And Helene,” she said. “She’s almost as bad as those guys, Patrick.”

“With all due respect, that’s pushing it, Ange.”

She shook her head, her eyes wide. “No, it’s not. Rape is instant violation. It burns your insides out and reduces you to nothing in the time it takes some asshole to shove his dick in you. But what Helene does to her child…” She glanced at the dusty track below, took a slug from her beer. “You heard the stories from those mothers. You saw how she’s dealing with her little girl’s disappearance. I bet she violates Amanda every day, not with rape or violence but with apathy. She was burning that child’s insides out in tiny doses, like arsenic. That’s Helene. She’s arsenic.” She nodded to herself and repeated in a whisper, “She’s arsenic.”

I took her hands in mine. “I can make a phone call from the car and drop this case. Now.”

“No.” She shook her head. “No way. These people, these selfish, fucking people-these Big Daves and Helenes-they pollute the world. And I know they’ll reap what they sow. And good. But I’m not going anywhere until we find that child. Beatrice was right. She’s alone. And nobody speaks for her.”

“Except us.”

“Except us.” She nodded. “I’m going to find that girl, Patrick.”

There was an obsessive light in her eyes I’d never seen shine so brightly before.

“Okay, Ange,” I said. “Okay.”

“Okay.” She tapped my beer can with her own.

“What if she’s dead already?” I said.

“She isn’t,” Angie said. “I can feel it.”

“But if she is?”

“She isn’t.” She drained her beer, tossed the can into the bag at my feet. “She just isn’t.” She looked at me. “Understand?”

“Sure,” I said.

Back at the apartment, all Angie’s energy and fire drained out of her at once, and she passed out on top of the bedcovers. I slid them out from under her, then pulled them over her and turned out the light.

I sat at the kitchen table, wrote Amanda McCready on a file folder, and scribbled a few pages of notes regarding the last twenty-four hours: our interviews with the McCreadys and the men at the Filmore and the parents at the ball game. When I was through, I got up, took a beer from the fridge, and stood in the middle of the kitchen floor as I drank some of it. I hadn’t pulled the shades on the kitchen windows, and every time I looked at one of the dark squares, Gerry Glynn’s face leered back at me, his hair soaked with gasoline, his face spotted with the blood of his last victim, Phil Dimassi.

I pulled the shades.

Patrick, Gerry whispered from the center of my chest, I’m waiting for you.

When Angie, Oscar, Devin, Phil Dimassi, and I had gone head-to-head with Gerry Glynn, his partner, Evandro Arujo, and an imprisoned psychotic named Alec Hardiman, I doubt any of us had realized the toll it would take. Gerry and Evandro had been eviscerating people, decapitating and disemboweling and crucifying them, out of a sense of fun or spite, or because Gerry was mad at God, or just because. I never fully understood the reasons behind it. I’m not sure anyone could. Sooner or later motives pale in light of the actions they give birth to.

I had nightmares about Gerry often. Always Gerry. Never Evandro, never Alec Hardiman. Just Gerry. Probably because I’d known him my entire life. Back when he’d been a cop, walking the local beat, always with a smile and a friendly. ruffle of the hair for us kids. Then, after he’d retired, as owner and chief bartender of the Black Emerald. I drank with Gerry, had conversations long into the night with Gerry, felt at ease with him, trusted him. And all that time, over the course of three decades, he’d been killing runaway kids. A whole forgotten populace that nobody was looking for and nobody missed.

My nightmares varied, but usually Gerry killed Phil in them. In front of me. In reality, I hadn’t seen him slice Phil’s throat, even though I’d been only eight feet away. I’d been on the floor of Gerry’s bar, trying to keep his German shepherd from plunging its teeth into my eye, but I’d heard Phil scream; I’d heard him say, “No, Gerry. No.” And I’d held him while he died.

Phil Dimassi had been Angie’s husband for twelve years. Until their wedding, he’d also been my best friend. After Angie filed for divorce, Phil quit drinking, became gainfully employed again, was on the road to a kind of redemption, I think. But Gerry blew all that away.

Gerry fired a bullet into Angie’s abdomen. Gerry cut fissures into my jaw with a straight razor. Gerry helped end the relationship I had with a woman named Grace Cole and her daughter, Mae.

Gerry, the left side of his body on fire, had a shotgun pointed at my face when Oscar fired three bullets into him from behind.

Gerry damn near destroyed all of us.

And I wait for you down here, Patrick. I wait.

I had no logical reason to think that searching for Amanda McCready was going to lead to the sort of carnage my encounter with Gerry Glynn and his pals had created, no logical reason at all. It was this night, I reasoned, the first cool night in a few weeks, the dark-slate feel of it all. If it were last night, moist and balmy, I wouldn’t be feeling this way.

But then again…

What we’d learned, unequivocally, during our pursuit of Gerry Glynn was exactly what Angie had spoken of tonight-that people could rarely be understood. We were slippery creatures, our impulses ruled by a variety of forces, many of them incomprehensible even to ourselves.

Why would someone abduct Amanda McCready?

I had no idea.

Why would someone-several someones, actually-want to rape a woman?

Once again, I had no idea.

I sat for a while with my eyes closed, trying to see Amanda McCready, to conjure up a concrete inner sense of whether she was alive or not. But behind my eyelids, I saw only the dark.

I finished my beer and looked in on Angie.

She slept on her stomach in the middle of the bed, one arm splayed across the pillow on my side, the other clenched in a fist against her throat. I wanted to go to her and hold her until what happened in the Filmore stopped happening in her head, until her fear went away, until Gerry Glynn went away, until the world and everything ugly in it passed over our bodies and rode the night wind out of our lives.

I stood in the doorway a long time, watching her sleep, hoping my silly hopes.

8

After her estrangement from Phil and before she and I became lovers, Angie dated a producer with New England Cable News Network. I’d met the guy once and hadn’t been particularly impressed, though I do recall he had great taste in ties. Wore too much aftershave, though. And mousse. And dated Angie. So the chances of us getting together for late-night Nintendo games and Saturday softball were pretty slim from the get-go.

The guy proved useful after the fact, however, because Angie kept in touch and occasionally, when we needed them, scored us tapes of local news broadcasts. It’s always amazed me how she can do that-stay in touch, remain friends, get a guy she dumped two years ago to do her favors. I’d be lucky to call an ex-girlfriend and get my own toaster back. Maybe I need to work on my breakup technique.

The next morning, while Angie showered, I went downstairs and signed off with the FedEx guy for a box from Joel Calzada of NECN. This city has eight news channels: the major network affiliates, Four, Five, and Seven; the UPN, WB, and Fox channels; NECN; and finally a mom-and-pop independent at the top of the dial. Among these eight stations, all have noon and six P.M. broadcasts, three have five o’clocks, two have five-thirtys, four have ten in the evenings, and four wrap up at eleven. They broadcast at various times throughout the morning, beginning at five, and each has one-minute updates at several different times, during the day.

Joel had, at Angie’s request, gotten his hands on every broadcast by every station concerning Amanda’s disappearance since the night she’d vanished. Don’t ask me how he pulled this off. Maybe producers trade tapes all the time. Maybe Angie can sweet-talk with the best of them. Maybe it was Joel’s ties.

I’d spent a few hours last night rereading all the newspaper articles about Amanda, and I’d come up with nothing new except for hands stained so deeply with black ink I’d made a fingerprint collage on a sheet of legal paper before going to bed. When a case seems as dense and protective of its secrets as marble, sometimes the only thing to do is attempt a fresh approach, or at least an approach that feels fresh. That was the idea here-watch the tapes, see what jumped out at us.

I removed eight VHS tapes from the FedEx box, stacked them on the floor of the living room by the TV, and Angie and I ate breakfast at the coffee table and compared case notes and tried to come up with a plan of attack for the day. Short of trying to track down Skinny Ray Likanski and reinterviewing Helene, Beatrice, and Lionel McCready-in the desperate hope they’d remember something crucial they’d heretofore forgotten regarding the night Amanda disappeared-very little occurred to us.

Angie leaned back against the couch as I picked up her empty breakfast plate. “And then,” she said, “there are times you think, A job with the electric company-now why didn’t I take that?” She looked up at me as I placed her plate on top of my own. “Great benefits.”

“Excellent retirement plan.” I took the plates into the kitchen, placed them in the dishwasher.

“Regular hours.” Angie called from the living room, and I heard the snap of her Bic as she lit the morning’s first cigarette. “Stellar dental.”

I made us each a cup of coffee and returned to the living room. Angie’s thick hair was still damp from the shower, and the man’s sweatpants and T-shirt combination she usually wore in the morning made her seem smaller and less substantial than she really was.

“Thanks.” She took her coffee cup from my hand without looking up, turned a page of her notes.

“Those things’ll kill you,” I said.

She took her cigarette from the ashtray, eyes still on her notes. “I’ve been smoking since I was sixteen.”

“Long time.”

She turned another page. “And in all that time, you never gave me shit.”

“Your body, your mind,” I said.

She nodded. “But now that we’re sleeping together, it’s somehow partly your body, too. That it?”

Over the last six months, I’d become accustomed to her morning moods. Often she was insanely energetic-back from aerobics and a walk along Castle Island before I woke up-but even in the best of times, she was far from a Chatty Cathy in the morning. And if she felt she’d exposed some part of herself the night before, been vulnerable or weak (which in her mind was usually the same thing), a thin, cold mist would surround her like ground fog at dawn. You could see her, know she was there, but then you’d take your eyes off her for a second and she’d be gone, had drifted back behind wisps of white fog, wasn’t coming out for a while.

“Am I nagging?” I said.

She looked up at me, smiled coldly. “Just a bit.” She sipped her coffee and looked down at her notes again. “There’s nothing here.”

“Patience.” I turned on the TV, popped the first tape into the VCR.

The leader counted down from seven, the numbers black and slightly fuzzy against a blue backdrop, a header flashed the date of Amanda’s disappearance, and suddenly we were in the studio with Gordon Taylor and Tanya Biloskirka, anchors extraordinaire for Channel Five. Gordon always seemed to have trouble keeping his dark hair from falling to his forehead, unusual in this age of freeze-dried anchor heads, but he had piercing, righteous eyes and a constant quaver of outrage in his voice that made up for the hair thing, even when he was reporting on Christmas tree lightings and Barney sightings. Tanya, of the unpronounceable last name, wore glasses to give her an air of intellectualism, but every guy I knew still thought she was a babe, which I guess was the point.

Gordon straightened his cuffs and Tanya did this cool squirming/settling thing in her chair as she shuffled some papers in her hand and prepared to read from the TelePrompTer. The words MISSING CHILD appeared in the pop-up box image between their heads.

“A child disappears in Dorchester,” Gordon said gravely. “Tanya?”

“Thanks, Gordon.” The camera moved in for a close-up. “A four-year-old Dorchester girl’s disappearance has police baffled and neighbors worried. It happened just a few hours ago. Little Amanda McCready vanished from her Sagamore Street home, without, police say”-she leaned forward a hair and her voice dropped an octave-“a trace.”

They cut back to Gordon, who hadn’t been expecting it. His hand froze halfway up his forehead, a lock of his annoying hair spilling over his fingers. “For more on this breaking story, we go live to Gert Broderick. Gert?”

The street was crowded with neighbors and the curious as Gert Broderick stood with microphone in hand and reported the information Gordon and Tanya had just told us. About twenty feet behind Gert, on the other side of a stream of yellow caution tape and uniformed cops, a hysterical Helene was being held by Lionel on her front porch. She was shouting something that was hard to decipher amid the crowd noise, the hum of light generators from the news crews, the gaspy words of Gert’s reportage.

“…and that’s what police seem to know now-precious little.” Gert stared into the camera, trying not to blink.

Gordon Taylor’s voice cut into the live feed. “Gert.”

Gert touched a hand to her left ear. “Yes, Gordon. Gordon?”

“Gert.”

“Yes, Gordon. I’m here.”

“Is that the little girl’s mother on the porch behind you?”

The camera lens zoomed toward the porch, racked focus, and closed tight on Helene and Lionel. Helene’s mouth was open and tears poured down her cheeks and her head made an odd up-and-down, up-and-down motion, as if, like a newborn’s, it had lost the support of the neck muscles.

Gert said, “We believe that’s Amanda’s mother, though it has not been officially confirmed at this time.”

Helene’s fists hit Lionel’s chest and her eyes snapped open. She wailed and her left hand surged over Lionel’s shoulder, the index finger pointing at something off-camera. It was a live crumbling we were being made witness to on that porch, a deep invasion of the privacy of grief.

“She seems upset,” Gordon said. That Gordon, nothing slipped past him.

“Yes,” Tanya agreed.

“Since time is of the essence,” Gert said, “police are asking for any information, anyone who may have seen little Amanda-”

“Little Amanda?” Angie said, and shook her head. “What is she supposed to be at four, humongous Amanda? Mature Amanda?”

“-anyone who has any information on this little girl-”

Amanda’s photograph filled the screen.

“-please call the number listed below.”

The number for the Crimes Against Children squad flashed below Amanda’s photo for a few moments, and then they cut back to the studio. In place of MISSING CHILD in the pop-up box, they’d inserted the live feed, and a smaller Gert Broderick fondled her microphone and looked into the camera with a blank, vaguely confused look on her blank, vaguely confused face as Helene continued to go ballistic on the porch and Beatrice joined Lionel and tried to hold her in place.

“Gert,” Tanya said, “have you been able to talk to the mother at all?”

Gert’s sudden tight smile covered an annoyed spark that crossed her blank eyes like smoke. “No, Tanya. As of yet, the police have not allowed us past that caution tape you see behind me, so, again, we have yet to confirm if Helene McCready is in fact the hysterical woman you see on the porch behind me.”

“Tragic,” Gordon said, as Helene lunged into Lionel again and wailed so sharply that Gert’s shoulders tensed.

“Tragic,” Tanya agreed, as Amanda’s face and the phone number for Crimes Against Children filled the screen for another half second.

“In another breaking story,” Gordon said as they cut back to him, “a home invasion in Lowell has left at least two people dead and a third wounded by gunfire. For that story we go to Martha Torsney in Lowell. Martha?”

They cut to Martha, and a slash of snow burst across the screen for a split second before being replaced momentarily by a black screen and we settled in to watch the rest of the tape, confident Gordon and Tanya would be there to tell us how to feel about the events transpiring before us, fill in the emotional blanks.

Eight tapes and ninety minutes later, we’d come up with nothing except stiff bodies and an even more depressingly jaded view of broadcast journalism than we’d had before. Except for the camera angles, nothing distinguished one report from another. As the search for Amanda dragged on, the newscasts showed numbingly similar footage of Helene’s house, Helene herself being interviewed, Broussard or Poole giving statements, neighbors pounding the pavements with flyers, cops leaning over car hoods shining flashlights over maps of the neighborhood or reining in their search dogs. And all the reports were followed by the same pithy, rankly maudlin commentary, the same studied sadness and head-shaking morality in the eyes and jaws and foreheads of the newscasters. And now, back to our regularly scheduled program…

“Well,” Angie said, and stretched so hard I heard the vertebrae in her back crack like walnuts hit with a cleaver, “outside of seeing a bunch of people we know from the neighborhood on TV, what have we accomplished this morning?”

I sat forward, cracking my own neck. Pretty soon we’d have a band. “Not much. I did see Lauren Smythe. Always thought she’d moved.” I shrugged. “Guess she was just avoiding me.”

“Is that the one who attacked you with a knife?”

“Scissors,” I said. “And I prefer to think it was foreplay. She just wasn’t very good at it.”

She whacked my shoulder with the back of her hand. “Let’s see. I saw April Norton and Susan Siersma, who I haven’t seen since high school and Billy Boran and Mike O’Connor, who’s lost a lotta hair, don’t you think?”

I nodded. “Lost a lotta weight, too.”

“Who notices? He’s bald.”

“Sometimes I think you’re more shallow than I am.”

She shrugged and lit a cigarette. “Who else did we see?”

“Danielle Genter,” I said. “Babs Kerins. Friggin’ Chris Mullen was everywhere.”

“I noticed that too. In the early stuff.”

I sipped some cold coffee. “Huh?”

“In the early stuff. He was always hanging around the periphery in the early parts of every tape, never the later stuff.”

I yawned. “He’s a periphery guy, ol’ Chris.” I picked up her empty coffee cup, hung it off my finger beside my own. “More?”

She shook her head.

I went into the kitchen, put her cup in the sink, poured myself a fresh cup. Angie came in as I opened the refrigerator and removed the cream.

“When’s the last time you saw Chris Mullen in the neighborhood?”

I closed the door, looked at her. “When’s the last time you saw half the people we saw watching those tapes?”

She shook her head. “Forget about everyone else. I mean, they’ve been here. Chris? He moved uptown. Got himself a place in Devonshire Towers around, like, ’eighty-seven.”

I shrugged. “Again-so?”

“So what’s Chris Mullen do for work?”

I put the cream carton down on the counter beside my cup. “He works for Cheese Olamon.”

“Who happens to be in prison.”

“Big surprise.”

“For?”

“What?”

“What is Cheese in prison for?”

I picked up the cream carton again. “What else?” I turned in the kitchen as I heard my words, let the carton dangle by my thigh. “Drug dealing,” I said slowly.

“You are so goddamned right.”

9

Amanda McCready wasn’t smiling. She stared at me with still, empty eyes, her ash-blond hair falling limply around her face, as if it had been plastered to the sides of her head with a wet palm. She had her mother’s tremulous chin, too square and too small for her oval face, and the sallow crevices under her cheeks hinted of questionable nutrition.

She wasn’t frowning, nor did she appear to be angry or sad. She was just there, as if she had no hierarchy of responses to stimuli. Getting her photograph taken had been no different from eating or dressing or watching TV or taking a walk with her mother. Every experience in her young life, it seemed, had existed along a flat line, no ups, no downs, no anythings.

Her photograph lay slightly off-center on a white sheet of legal-sized paper. Below the photograph were her vital statistics. Directly below those were the words-IF YOU SEE AMANDA, PLEASE CALL-and below that were Lionel and Beatrice’s names and their phone number. Following that was the number of the CAC squad, with Lieutenant Jack Doyle listed as the contact person. Under that number was 911. And at the bottom of the list was Helene’s name and number.

The stack of flyers sat on the kitchen counter in Lionel’s house, where he’d left them after he’d come home this morning. Lionel had been out all night plastering them to streetlight poles and subway station support beams, across temporary walls at construction sites and boarded-up buildings. He had covered downtown Boston and Cambridge, while Beatrice and three dozen neighbors had divided up the rest of the greater metro area. By dawn, they’d put Amanda’s face in every legal and illegal spot they could find in a twenty-mile radius of Boston.

Beatrice was in the living room when we entered, going through her morning routine of contacting all police and press assigned to the case and asking for progress reports. After that, she’d call the hospitals again. Next she’d call any businesses that had refused to put up a flyer of Amanda in their break rooms or cafeterias and ask them to explain why.

I had no idea when, or if, she’d sleep.

Helene was in the kitchen with us. She sat at the table and ate a bowl of Apple Jacks and nursed a hangover. Lionel and Beatrice, possibly sensing something in the simultaneous arrival of Angie and myself with Poole and Broussard, followed us into the kitchen, Lionel’s hair still wet from the shower, dots of moisture speckling his UPS uniform, Beatrice’s small face carrying a war refugee’s weariness.

“Cheese Olamon,” Helene said slowly.

“Cheese Olamon,” Angie said. “Yes.”

Helene scratched her neck where a small vein pulsed like a beetle trapped under the flesh. “I don’t know.”

“Don’t know what?” Broussard said.

“I mean, the name sounds sorta familiar.” Helene looked up at me and fingered a tear in the plastic tabletop.

“Sorta familiar?” Poole said. “Sorta familiar, Miss McCready? Can I quote you on that?”

“What?” Helene ran a hand through her thin hair. “What? I said it sounded familiar.”

“A name like Cheese Olamon,” Angie said, “doesn’t sound any kind of way. You’re either acquainted with it or you’re not.”

“I’m thinking.” Helene touched her nose lightly, then pulled back the hand and stared at the fingers.

A chair scraped as Poole dragged it across the floor, set it down in front of Helene, sat in it.

“Yes or no, Miss McCready. Yes or no.”

“Yes or no what?”

Broussard sighed loudly and fingered his wedding band, tapped his foot on the floor.

“Do you know Mr. Cheese Olamon?” Poole ’s whisper sounded drenched in gravel and glass.

“I don’t-”

“Helene!” Angie’s voice was so sharp even I started.

Helene looked up at her, and the beetle in her throat lapsed into a seizure under her skin. She tried to hold Angie’s gaze for about a tenth of a second, and then she dropped her head. Her hair fell over her face, and a tiny rasping noise came from behind it as she crossed one bare foot on top of the other and clenched the muscles in her calves.

“I knew Cheese,” she said. “A bit.”

“A little bit or a lot of bit?” Broussard pulled out a stick of gum, and the sound of the foil wrapper as he removed it was like teeth on my spine.

Helene shrugged. “I knew him.”

For the first time since we’d come into their kitchen, Beatrice and Lionel moved from their places against the wall, Beatrice over to the oven between Broussard and me, Lionel to a seat in the corner on the other side of the table from his sister. Beatrice lifted a cast-iron kettle off the burner and placed it under the faucet.

“Who’s Cheese Olamon?” Lionel reached out and took his sister’s right hand from her face. “Helene? Who’s Cheese Olamon?”

Beatrice turned her head to me. “He’s a drug dealer or something, isn’t he?”

She’d spoken so softly that over the running water no one but Broussard and I had heard her.

I held out my hands and shrugged.

Beatrice turned back to the faucet.

“Helene?” Lionel said again, and there was a high, uneven pitch to his voice.

“He’s just a guy, Lionel.” Helene’s voice was tired and flat and seemed to come from a million years away.

Lionel looked at the rest of us.

Both Angie and I looked away.

“Cheese Olamon,” Remy Broussard said, and cleared his throat, “is, among other things, a drug dealer, Mr. McCready.”

“What else is he?” Lionel had a child’s broken curiosity in his face.

“What?”

“You said ‘among other things.’ What other things?”

Beatrice turned from the faucet, placed the kettle on the burner, and ignited the flame underneath. “Helene, why don’t you answer your brother’s question?”

Helene’s hair remained in her face and her voice a million years away. “Why don’t you go suck a nigger’s dick, Bea?”

Lionel’s fist hit the table so hard, a fissure rippled through the cheap covering like a stream through a canyon.

Helene’s head snapped back and the hair flew off her face.

“You listen to me.” Lionel pointed a quaking finger an inch from his sister’s nose. “You don’t insult my wife, and you don’t make racist remarks in my kitchen.”

“Lionel-”

“In my kitchen!” He hit the table again. “Helene!”

It wasn’t a voice I’d heard before. Lionel had raised his voice that first time in our office, and that voice I was familiar with. But this was something else. Thunder. A thing that loosened cement and launched tremors through oak.

“Who,” Lionel said, and his free hand gripped the corner of the table, “is Cheese Olamon?”

“He is a drug dealer, Mr. McCready.” Poole searched his pockets, came up with a pack of cigarettes. “And a pornographer. And a pimp.” He removed a cigarette from the pack, placed it upright on the table, leaned in to sniff from the top. “Also a tax evader, if you can believe that.”

Lionel, who’d apparently never seen Poole ’s tobacco ritual before, seemed momentarily transfixed by it. Then he blinked and turned his attention back to Helene.

“You associate with a pimp?”

“I-”

“A pornographer, Helene?”

Helene turned away from him, rested her right arm on the table, and looked out at the kitchen without meeting the eyes of any of its occupants.

“What’d you do for him?” Broussard said.

“Muling occasionally.” Helene lit a cigarette, cupped the match in her hand, and shook it out with the same motion she’d use to chalk a pool cue.

“Muling,” Poole said.

She nodded.

“From where to where?” Angie asked.

“Here to Providence. Here to Philly. It depended on the supply.” She shrugged. “Depended on the demand.”

“And for that you got what?” Broussard said.

“Some cash. Some stash.” Another shrug.

“Heroin?” Lionel said.

She turned her head, looked at him, her cigarette dangling from between her fingers, her body loose and puddling. “Yeah, Lionel. Sometimes. Sometimes coke, sometimes Ex, and sometimes”-she shook her head, turned it back toward the rest of the room-“whatever the fuck.”

“Track marks,” Beatrice said. “We would have seen track marks.”

Poole patted Helene’s knee. “She snorted it.” He flared his nostrils, slid them over his cigarette. “Didn’t you?”

Helene nodded. “Less addictive that way.”

Poole smiled. “Of course it is.”

Helene removed his hand from her knee and stood up, crossed to the refrigerator, and pulled out a can of Miller. She opened it with a hard snap and the beer foamed to the top and she slurped it up into her mouth.

I looked at the clock: ten-thirty in the morning.

Broussard called two CAC detectives and told them to locate and begin immediate surveillance of Chris Mullen. In addition to the original detectives searching for Amanda, and the two who’d been assigned to locate Ray Likanski, the entire CAC division was now clocking overtime on one case.

“This is strictly need-to-know,” he said into the phone. “That means only I need to know what you’re doing for the time being. Clear?”

When he hung up, we followed Helene and her morning beer onto Lionel and Beatrice’s back porch. Flat cobalt clouds drifted overhead and the morning turned sluggish and gray, gave the air a moist thickness, a promise of afternoon rain.

The beer seemed to give Helene a concentration she usually lacked. She leaned against the porch rail and met our eyes without fear or self-pity and answered our questions about Cheese Olamon and his right-hand man, Chris Mullen.

“How long have you known Mr. Olamon?” Poole asked.

She shrugged. “Ten, maybe twelve years. From around the neighborhood.”

“Chris Mullen?”

“’Bout the same.”

“Where did your association begin?”

Helene lowered her beer. “What?”

“Where did you meet this Cheese guy?” Beatrice said.

“The Filmore.” She took a slug off the beer can.

“When did you start working for him?” Angie asked.

Another shrug. “I did some small stuff over the years. ’Bout four years ago I needed more money to take care of Amanda-”

“Jesus Christ,” Lionel said.

She glanced at him, then back at Poole and Broussard. “-so he sent me on a few buys. Hardly ever big stuff.”

“Hardly ever,” Poole said.

She blinked, then nodded quickly.

Poole turned his head, his tongue pushing against the inside of his lower lip. Broussard met his eyes and pulled another stick of gum from his pocket.

Poole chuckled softly. “Miss McCready, do you know what squad Detective Broussard and I worked for before we were asked to join Crimes Against Children?”

Helene grimaced. “I care?”

Broussard popped the gum in his mouth. “No reason you should, really. But just for the record-”

“Narcotics,” Poole said.

“CAC is pretty small, not much in the way of camaraderie,” Broussard said, “so we still hang out mostly with narcs.”

“Keep abreast of things,” Poole said.

Helene squinted at Poole, tried to figure out where this was going.

“You said you ran dope through the Philadelphia corridor,” Broussard said.

“Uh-huh.”

“Who to?”

She shook her head.

“Miss McCready,” Poole said, “we’re not here on a narco bust. Give us a name so we can confirm whether you really muled for Cheese Ol-”

“Rick Lembo.”

“Ricky the Dick,” Broussard said, and smiled.

“Where did the deals go down?”

“The Ramada by the airport.”

Poole nodded at Broussard.

“You do any New Hampshire runs?”

Helene took a hit off the beer and shook her head.

“No?” Broussard raised his eyebrows. “Nothing up Nashua way, no quick sales to the biker gangs?”

Again Helene shook her head. “No. Not me.”

“How much you hit Cheese for, Miss McCready?”

“Excuse me?” Helene said.

“The Cheese violates his parole three months ago. He takes a ten-to-twelve fall.” Broussard spit his gum over the railing. “How much you take off him when you heard he got dropped?”

“Nothing.” Helene’s eyes stayed on her bare feet.

“Bullshit.”

Poole stepped over to Helene and gently took the beer can from her hand. He leaned over the railing and tipped the can, poured the contents into the driveway behind the house.

“Miss McCready,” he said, “word I’ve heard on the proverbial street the past few months is that Cheese Olamon sent a goody bag up to some bikers in a Nashua motel just before his arrest. The goody bag was recovered in a raid, but not the money. Since the bikers-hale fellows all-had yet to partake of the contents of the bag, speculation among our northern law enforcement friends was that the deal had gone down only moments before the raid. Further speculation led many to believe that the mule walked off with the money. Which, according to current urban lore, was news to the members of Cheese Olamon’s camp.”

“Where’s the money?” Broussard said.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Care to take a polygraph?”

“I already took one.”

“Different questions this time.”

Helene turned to the railing, looked out on the small tar parking lot, the withered trees just beyond.

“How much, Miss McCready?” Poole ’s voice was soft, without a hint of pressure or urgency.

“Two hundred thousand.”

The porch was silent for a full minute.

“Who rode shotgun?” Broussard said eventually.

“Ray Likanski.”

“Where’s the money?”

The muscles in Helene’s scrawny back clenched. “I don’t know.”

“Liar, liar,” Poole said. “Pants on fire.”

She turned from the railing. “I don’t know. I swear to God.”

“She swears to God.” Poole winked at me.

“Oh, well, then,” Broussard said, “I guess we have to believe her.”

“Miss McCready?” Poole pulled his shirt cuffs from underneath his suit coat, smoothed them against his wrists. His voice was light and almost musical.

“Look, I-”

“Where’s the money?” The lighter and more melodious the singsong got, the more threatening Poole seemed.

“I don’t…” Helene ran a hand over her face, and her body sagged against the railing. “I was stoned, okay? We left the motel; two seconds later every cop in New Hampshire is running through the parking lot. Ray snuggled up to me, and we just walked right through them. Amanda was crying, so they must have thought we were just a family who’d been on the road.”

“Amanda was there with you?” Beatrice said. “Helene!”

“What,” Helene said, “I was going to leave her in the car?”

“So you drove away,” Poole said. “You got stoned. And then what?”

“Ray stopped at a friend’s place. We were in there, like, an hour.”

“Where was Amanda?” Beatrice said.

Helene scowled. “The fuck I know, Bea? In the car or in the house with us. One of the two. I told you, I was fucked up.”

“Was the money with you when you left the house?” Poole asked.

“I don’t think so.”

Broussard flipped open his steno pad. “Where was this house?”

“In an alley.”

Broussard closed his eyes for a moment. “Where was it located? The address, Miss McCready.”

“I told you, I was stoned. I-”

“The fucking town then.” Broussard’s teeth were clenched.

“ Charlestown,” she said. She cocked her head, thought about it. “Yeah. I’m almost sure. Or Everett.”

“Or Everett,” Angie said. “That narrows it down.”

I said, “ Charlestown ’s the one with the big monument, Helene.” I smiled my encouragement. “You know the one. Looks like the Washington Monument, except it’s on Bunker Hill.”

“Is he making fun of me?” Helene asked Poole.

“I wouldn’t hazard a guess,” Poole said. “But Mr. Kenzie has a point. If you were in Charlestown, you’d remember the monument, wouldn’t you?”

Another long pause as Helene searched what remained of her brain. I wondered if I should go grab another beer for her, see if it would speed things up.

“Yeah,” she said, very slowly. “We drove over the big hill by the monument on our way out.”

“So the house,” Broussard said, “was on the east side of town.”

“East?” Helene said.

“You were closer to Bunker Hill project, Medford Street or Bunker Hill Avenue, than you were to Main or Warren streets.”

“If you say so.”

Broussard tilted his head, ran the back of his hand slowly across the stubble on his cheek, took a few shallow breaths.

“Miss McCready,” Poole said, “besides the fact that the house was at the end of an alley, do you remember anything else about it? Was it a one-family or two?”

“It was really small.”

“We’ll call it a one-family.” Poole jotted in his notepad. “Color?”

“They were white.”

“Who?”

“Ray’s friends. A woman and a guy. Both white.”

“Excellent,” Poole said. “But the house. What color was that?”

She shrugged. “I don’t remember.”

“Let’s go look for Likanski,” Broussard said. “We can go to Pennsylvania. Hell, I’ll drive.”

Poole held up a hand. “Give us another minute here, Detective. Miss McCready, please search your memory. Remember that night. The smells. The music Ray Likanski played on his stereo. Anything that will help put you back in that car. You drove from Nashua to Charlestown. That’s about an hour’s drive, maybe a little less. You got stoned. You pulled over into this alley, and you-”

“We didn’t.”

“What?”

“Pull into the alley. We parked on the street because there was an old broken-down car in the alley. We had to drive around for like twenty minutes till we found a parking space, too. That place sucks for parking.”

Poole nodded. “This broken-down car in the alley, was there anything memorable about it?”

She shook her head. “It was just a rust heap, up on blocks. No wheels or nothing.”

“Hence the blocks,” Poole said. “Nothing else?”

Helene was midway through another shake of her head when she stopped and giggled.

“Care to share your joke with the class?” Poole said.

She looked over at him, still smiling. “What?”

“Why are you laughing, Miss McCready?”

“ Garfield.”

“James A.? Our twentieth president?”

“Huh?” Helene’s eyes bulged. “No. The cat.”

We all stared at her.

“The cat!” She held out her hands. “In the comic strip.”

“Uh-huh,” I said.

“’Member when everyone used to have those Garfields stuck to the back of their windows? Well, this car had one, too. That’s how I knew it had been there, like, forever. I mean, who puts Garfields on their windows anymore?”

“Indeed,” Poole said. “Indeed.”

10

When Winthrop and the original settlers arrived in the New World, they chose to settle on a square mile’s worth of land, most of it hill, that they named Boston, after the town in England they’d left behind. During the one harsh winter Winthrop ’s pilgrims spent there, they found the water inexplicably brackish, so they moved across the channel, taking the name Boston with them and leaving what would become Charlestown without a name or purpose for a while.

Since then, Charlestown has held tight to an outpost’s identity. Historically Irish, home to deca-generations of fishermen, merchant marines, and dockworkers, Charlestown is infamous for its code of silence, a resistance to speaking to the police, which has left it with a murder rate that, while low, boasts the highest percentage of unsolved cases in the nation. This adherence to keeping one’s mouth shut even extends to simple directions. Ask a townie how to get to such-and-such street and his eyes will narrow. “The fuck you doing here if you don’t know where you’re going?” might be the polite response, followed by an extended middle finger if he really likes you.

So Charlestown is an easy place to get confused. Signs bearing street names disappear all the time, and the houses are often stacked so close together they conceal small alleys that lead to other homes behind. The streets that climb the hill are apt to dead-end or else force the driver to turn in the opposite direction from where he was headed.

The sections of Charlestown change character with bewildering speed as well. Depending on which direction one is heading, the Mishawum Housing Project can give way to the gentrified brownstones surrounding Edwards Park in a horseshoe; the roads passing through the grandeur of the red-brick and white-trim colonial town houses fronting Monument Square drop without warning or respect for gravity into the dark gray of Bunker Hill Project, one of the most poverty-stricken white housing developments this side of West Virginia.

But speckled throughout it all, one finds a sense of history-of brick and mortar, colonial clapboard and cobblestone, pre-Revolutionary taverns and post-Treaty of Versailles sailors quarters-that’s hard to duplicate in most of America.

Still sucks to drive through, though.

Which is what we’d been doing for the last hour, following Poole and Broussard, accompanied by Helene in the backseat of their Taurus, up and over and around and across Charlestown. We’d crisscrossed the hill, loped around the back of both housing projects, jerked bumper-to-bumper through the yuppie enclaves up by the Bunker Hill Monument and down at the base of Warren Street. We’d driven along the docks, rolled past Old Ironsides and the naval quarters and once-dingy warehouses and tanker-repair hangars converted into pricey condos, rumbled along the cracked roads that skirted the burned-out shells of long-forgotten fisheries at the edge of the land mass, where more than one wise guy had gazed at his final vista of moonlight bathing the Mystic River as a bullet cracked through a breech and into his head.

We’d tailed the Taurus along Main Street and Rutherford Avenue, followed the hill up to High Street and down to Bunker Hill Avenue and beyond to Medford Street, and we’d cased every tiny street in between, idling at the alleys that appeared suddenly out of the corners of our eyes. Looking for a car on blocks. Looking for two hundred grand. Looking for Garfield.

“Sooner or later,” Angie said, “we’re going to run out of gas.”

“Or patience,” I said, as Helene pointed at something through the Taurus window.

I applied the brakes, and once again the Taurus stopped ahead of us, and Broussard got out with Helene and they walked over to an alley and stared in. Broussard asked her something and Helene shook her head and they walked back to the car and I took my foot off the brake.

“Why are we looking for the money again?” Angie asked a few minutes later as we dropped over the other side of the hill and the hood of our Crown Victoria pointed straight down and the brakes clacked and the pedal jumped against my foot.

I shrugged. “Maybe because, A, this is the closest lead there’s been in a while to anything and, B, maybe Broussard and Poole figure it’s a drug-related kidnapping now.”

“So where’s the ransom demand? How come Chris Mullen or Cheese Olamon or one of their boys hasn’t contacted Helene yet?”

“Maybe they’re waiting for her to figure it out.”

“That’s expecting a lot from someone like Helene.”

“Chris and Cheese ain’t rocket scientists.”

“True, but-”

We’d stopped again, and this time Helene was out of the car before Broussard, gesturing maniacally at a construction Dumpster on the sidewalk. The construction crew working on the house across the street was nowhere to be seen; I knew they were somewhere nearby, though, if only for the scaffolding erected against the building facade.

I pressed down the emergency brake and stepped out of the car, and pretty soon I saw why Helene was so excited. The Dumpster, five feet tall and four feet wide, had obscured the alley behind it. There in the alley sat a late-seventies Grand Torino, up on blocks, one fat orange cat attached by suction cups to the rear window, paws spread wide, smiling like an idiot through the dirty glass.

It was impossible to double-park on the street without blocking it entirely, so we spent another five minutes finding parking spaces back up the hill on Bartlett Street. Then the five of us walked back toward the alley. The construction crew had returned in the interim and milled around the scaffolding with their coolers and liters of Mountain Dew. They whistled at Helene and Angie as we walked down the hill.

Poole saluted one of them as we neared the alley, and the man quickly looked away.

“Mr. Fred Griffin,” Poole said. “Still have a taste for the amphetamines?”

Fred Griffin shook his head.

“Apologize,” Poole said in that threatening singsong of his, as he turned into the alley.

Fred cleared his throat. “Sorry, ladies.”

Helene flipped him the bird and the rest of the construction crew hooted.

Angie nudged me as we lagged behind the other three. “You get the feeling Poole ’s a bit tightly wound behind that big smile?”

“Personally,” I said, “I wouldn’t fuck with him. But I’m a wuss.”

“That’s our secret, babe.” She patted my ass as we turned into the alley, which drew another round of hoots from across the street.

The Gran Torino hadn’t been used in a while. Helene was right about that. Chips of rust and sallow beige spots stained the cinder blocks under the wheels. The windows had accumulated so much dust it was a wonder we’d been able to discern Garfield in the first place. A newspaper that bore a headline detailing Princess Diana’s peace mission to Bosnia lay on the dashboard.

The alley was cobblestone, cracked in places, shattered in others, to reveal a pink-gray earth beneath. Two plastic trash cans spilled garbage beneath a cobwebbed gas meter. The alley cut so narrowly between two three-deckers, I was surprised they’d been able to fit the car in.

At the end of the alley, about ten yards off the street, sat a single-story box of a house, dating back to the forties or fifties, from the unimaginative look of the construction. It could have been the foreman’s shack on a construction site or a small radio station, and probably wouldn’t have stood out quite so much if it were in a less architecturally rich neighborhood, but even so it was an eyesore. There were no steps, just a crooked door raised about an inch off the foundation, and the wood shingles were covered in black tarpaper, as if someone had once considered aluminum siding but then quit before the delivery was made.

“You remember the names of the occupants?” Poole asked Helene, as he unsnapped his holster strap with a flick of his thumb.

“No.”

“’Course not,” Broussard said, his eyes scanning the four windows fronting the alley, the grimy plastic shades pulled down to their sills. “You said there were two?”

“Yeah. A guy and his girlfriend.” Helene looked up and around at the three-deckers casting their shadows over us.

A window behind us shot open, and we spun toward the sound.

“Jesus Christ,” Helene said.

A woman in her late fifties stuck her head out a second-story window and peered down at us. She held a wooden spoon in one hand, and a strand of linguine fell off the edge and dropped to the alley.

“You the animal people?”

“Ma’am?” Poole squinted up at her.

“The SPCA,” she said and waggled the wooden spoon. “You with them?”

“All five of us?” Angie said.

“I been calling,” the woman said. “I been calling.”

“Pertaining to what?” I asked.

“Pertaining to those friggin’ cats, smart-ass, that’s what. I gotta listen to my grandson Jeffrey whining in one ear and my husband bitching in the other. I look like I got a third ear at the back of my head to listen to those friggin’ cats?”

“No, ma’am,” Poole said. “No third ear I can see.”

Broussard cleared his throat. “Of course, we can only see your front from here, ma’am.”

Angie coughed into her fist and Poole dropped his head, looked at his shoes.

The woman said, “You’re cops. I can tell.”

“What gave it away?” Broussard asked.

“The lack of respect for working people.” The woman slammed the window back down so hard the panes shook.

“We can only see your front.” Poole chuckled.

“You like that?” Broussard turned to the door of the small house and knocked.

I looked in the overstuffed trash cans by the gas meter, saw at least ten small tins of cat food.

Broussard knocked again. “I respect working people,” he said to no one in particular.

“Most times,” Poole agreed.

I looked over at Helene. Why hadn’t Poole and Broussard left her in the car?

Broussard knocked a third time, and a cat yowled from inside.

Broussard stepped back from the door. “Miss McCready?”

“Yeah.”

He pointed at the door. “Would you be so kind as to turn the doorknob?”

Helene gave him a look but did so, and the door opened inward.

Broussard smiled at her. “And would you take one step inside?”

Again, Helene did so.

“Excellent,” Poole said. “See anything?”

She looked back at us. “It’s dark. Smells funny, though.”

Broussard said as he jotted in his notebook, “Citizen stated premises smelled abnormal.” He capped his pen. “Okay. You can come out, Miss McCready.”

Angie and I looked at each other, shook our heads. You had to hand it to Poole and Broussard. By getting Helene to open the door and step in first, they’d avoided the need for a warrant. “Abnormal smell” was good enough for probable cause, and once Helene had opened the door, just about anyone could legally enter.

Helene stepped out onto the cobblestones and looked back up at the window where the woman had complained about the cats.

One of them-an emaciated orange tabby with sharply defined ribs-shot past Broussard and then around me, leaped into the air, landed atop one of the trash cans, and dove its head into the collection of tins I’d seen.

“Guys,” I said.

Poole and Broussard turned from the doorway.

“The cat’s paws. There’s dried blood on them.”

“Oh, gross,” Helene said.

Broussard pointed at her. “You stay here. Don’t move until we call for you.”

She fished in her pockets for her cigarettes. “You don’t have to tell me twice.”

Poole stuck his head in the doorway and sniffed. He turned back to Broussard, frowned, and nodded at the same time.

Angie and I came up beside them.

“Bloaters,” Broussard said. “Anyone got cologne or perfume?”

Angie and I shook our heads. Poole produced a small vial of Aramis from his pocket. Until then, I hadn’t known they still manufactured it.

“Aramis?” I said. “What, they were out of Brut?”

Poole raised his eyebrows up and down several times. “Old Spice, too, unfortunately.”

He passed the bottle around, and we each applied it liberally to our upper lips. Angie doused a handkerchief with it as well. Nasty as it smelled as it scorched the insides of my nostrils, it was still preferable to smelling a bloater without anything at all.

Bloaters are what some cops, paramedics, and doctors call bodies that have been dead for a while. Once the body’s gases and acids have been allowed to run rampant after rigor mortis, the body will bloat and balloon and do all sorts of other really appetizing things.

A porch the width of my car greeted us. Winter boots caked with dried salt sat stuck to last February’s newspapers beside a spade with gashes in the wood handle, a rusted hibachi, and a bag of empty beer cans. The thin green rug was ripped apart in several places, and the bloody footprints of several cats had dried into the fabric.

The next room we entered was a living room, and light from the windows was joined by the silver shaft from a TV with the volume turned down. The inside of the house was dark, but gray light came in from the side windows, filling the rooms with a pewter haze that didn’t do much to improve the squalid surroundings. The rugs on the floors were a mismatched shag, patched together with a drug addict’s sense of aesthetics. In several places, you could see the tufts rising in ridges where the sections had been cut and placed side by side. The walls were paneled in blond plywood, and the ceilings flaked white paint. A shredded futon couch sat against the wall, and as we stood in the center of the room, our eyes adjusting to the gray light, I noticed several sets of sparkling eyes brighten from the torn fabric.

A soft electric hum, like cicadas buzzing around a generator, rolled out from the futon, and the several sets of eyes moved in a jagged line.

And then they attacked.

Or at least it seemed that way at first. A dozen high-pitched meows preceded a scratch-and-scramble exodus as the cats-Siamese and calicoes and tabbies and one Hemingway-shot off the couch and over the coffee table, hit the shag carpet sections, burst through our legs, and banged off the baseboards on their way toward the door.

Poole said, “Mother of God,” and hopped up on one leg.

I flattened against the cheap wall, and Angie joined me, and a hunk of thick fur slithered over my foot.

Broussard jerked to his right and then left, whacked at the hem of his suit jacket.

The cats weren’t after us, though. They were after sunlight.

Outside, Helene shrieked as they poured through the open doorway. “Holy shit! Help!”

“What I tell ya?” A voice I recognized as the middle-aged lady’s yelled. “A blight. A goddamned blight on the city a’ Charlestown!”

Inside the house, it was suddenly so quiet I could hear the tick of a clock coming from the kitchen.

“Cats,” Poole said with thick disdain, and wiped his brow with a handkerchief.

Broussard bent to check his pant cuffs, dusted a wisp of cat hair off his shoes.

“Cats are smart.” Angie came off the wall. “Better than dogs.”

“Dogs get the paper for you, though,” I said.

“Dogs don’t scratch the shit out of couches, either,” Broussard said.

“Dogs don’t eat their owners’ corpses when they’re hungry,” Poole said. “Cats do.”

“Ugh,” Angie managed. “That’s not true. Is it?”

We moved slowly into the kitchen.

As soon as we entered, I had to stop for a moment, catch my breath, and suck in the cologne on my upper lip with flared nostrils.

Angie said, “Shit,” and buried her face in her handkerchief.

A naked man was tied to a chair. A woman knelt on the floor a few feet away from him, her chin to her chest, the straps of her bloody white negligee hanging down to her elbows, her wrists and ankles hog-tied together behind her back. Both bodies had thickened with gas and turned the white of volcanic ash after blood stopped pumping through their veins.

The man had taken a large blast to his chest that had demolished his sternum and upper rib cage. By the size of the hole, I had to assume the blast had been unleashed from a shotgun at close range. And unfortunately, Poole had been right about the feeding habits and questionable loyalty of felines. More than just buckshot had chewed into the man’s flesh. Between the damage wrought by the blast, time, and the cats, his upper chest looked as if it had been pushed open by surgical shears from the inside.

“Those aren’t what I think they are,” Angie said, her eyes on the gaping hole.

“Sorry to inform you,” Poole said, “but those are the man’s lungs.”

“It’s official,” Angie said. “I’m nauseous.”

Poole titled the man’s chin up with a ballpoint pen. He took a step back. “Well, hello, David!”

“Martin?” Broussard said, and took a step closer to the body.

“The same.” Poole dropped the chin and touched the man’s dark hair. “You’re looking peaked, David.”

Broussard turned to us. “David Martin. Also known as Wee David.”

Angie coughed into her handkerchief. “He looks pretty tall to me.”

“It has nothing to do with his height.”

Angie glanced at the man’s groin. “Oh.”

“This must be Kimmie,” Poole said, and stepped over a puddle of dried blood to the woman in the negligee.

He lifted her head with the pen, and I said, “Christ almighty.”

A black wound cut a small canyon across Kimmie’s throat. Her chin and cheekbones were splattered with black blood and her eyes looked upward, as if asking for deliverance or help or proof that something, anything, waited for her beyond this kitchen.

Her arms bore several deep cuts, thick and caked black with blood, and holes I recognized as cigarette burns dotted her shoulders and collarbone.

“She was tortured.”

Broussard nodded. “In front of the boyfriend. ‘Tell me where it is or I cut her again.’ That sort of thing.” He shook his head. “This kinda sucks. Kimmie was all right for a cokehead.”

Poole stepped back from Kimmie’s corpse. “The cats didn’t touch her.”

“What?” Angie said.

He pointed at Wee David. “As you can see, they feasted on Mr. Martin. Not Kimmie, though.”

“What’s your point?” I said.

He shrugged. “They liked Kimmie. Didn’t like Wee David. Too bad the killers didn’t feel the same way.”

Broussard stepped up beside his partner. “You think Wee David gave up the goods?”

Poole lowered Kimmie’s head gently back to her chest, made a tsk noise. “He was a greedy bastard.” He looked over his shoulder at us. “Not to speak ill of the dead, but-” He shrugged.

“Wee David and a previous girlfriend broke into a drugstore a couple of years ago, raided the place for Demerol, Darvon, Valium, whatever. Anyway, the cops are coming and Wee Dave and his girl go out a back door, have to jump down to an alley from a second-story fire escape. The girl sprains her ankle. Wee Dave loves her so much he unburdens her of her supply and leaves her there in the alley.”

First Big Dave Strand. Now Wee Dave Martin. Time to stop naming our children David.

I looked around the kitchen. The floor tiles had been torn up, the pantry shelves swept clear of food; piles of canned goods and empty potato-chip bags littered the floor. The ceiling slats had been removed and lay in a pile of white dust by the kitchen table. The oven and refrigerator had been pulled away from the wall. The cupboard doors lay open.

Whoever had killed Wee David and Kimmie seemed to have been thorough.

“You want to call it in?” Broussard said.

Poole shrugged. “Why don’t we poke around a bit first?”

Poole produced several pairs of thin plastic gloves from his pocket. He separated them and passed a pair each to Broussard, Angie, and me.

“This is a crime scene,” Broussard said to Angie and me. “Don’t queer it.”

The bedroom and bathroom were in the same state of distress as the kitchen and living room. Everything had been overturned, cut open, emptied onto the floor. Given the houses of other drug addicts I’ve seen, it wasn’t noticeably worse than most.

“The TV,” Angie said.

I stuck my head out of the bedroom as Poole came out of the kitchen and Broussard exited the bathroom. We joined Angie around the TV.

“No one thought to touch it.”

“Probably because it’s on,” Poole said.

“So?”

“Kind of hard to hide two hundred grand in there and keep all the parts working,” Broussard said. “Don’t you think?”

Angie shrugged, looked at the screen, watched one of Jerry Springer’s guests being restrained. She turned up the volume.

One of Jerry Springer’s guests called another guest a ho’, called an amused man a dirty dog.

Broussard sighed. “I’ll get a screwdriver.”

Jerry Springer looked at the audience knowingly. The audience hooted. Many words were bleeped out.

Behind us, Helene said, “Oh, cool. Springer Time.”

Broussard came out of the bathroom with a tiny screwdriver with a red rubber handle. “Miss McCready,” he said, “I need you to wait outside.”

Helene sat on the edge of the torn-up futon, eyes on the TV. “That lady’s yelling ’cause of the cats. She said she’s calling the police.”

“You tell her we are the police?”

Helene smiled distantly as one of Jerry’s female guests threw a lopping punch at another one. “I told her. She said she was going to call ’em anyway.”

Broussard brandished the screwdriver and nodded at Angie. She shut off the TV in mid-bleep.

Helene said, “Damn.” She sniffed the air. “Smells in here.”

“Want some cologne?”

She shook her head. “My old boyfriend’s trailer smelled worse. He used to, like, leave dirty socks soaking in the sink. Now that’s a smell, lemme tell you.”

Poole tilted his head as if about to say something, but then he glanced at her and changed his mind, exhaled a loud, hopeless sigh.

Broussard unscrewed the back of the TV, and I helped slide it off. We peered in.

“Anything?” Poole said.

“Cables, wires, internal speakers, a motor, picture tube,” Broussard said.

We slid the casing back on.

“Shoot me,” Angie said. “It wasn’t the worst idea of the day.”

“Oh, no.” Poole held up his hands.

“Wasn’t the best, either,” Broussard said out of the side of his mouth.

“What?” Angie said.

Broussard flashed his million-dollar smile at her. “Hmm?”

“Could you turn it back on?” Helene said.

Poole narrowed his eyes in her direction, shook his head. “Patrick?”

“Yeah?”

“There’s a backyard behind here. Could you take Miss McCready out there while we finish up in here?”

“What about the show?” Helene said.

“I’ll fill in the blanks,” I said. “Ho’,” I said. “You dirty dog,” I said. “Bleep,” I said.

Helene looked up at me as I offered her my hand. “You don’t make sense a lot.”

“Whoo-whoo,” I said.

As we approached the kitchen, Poole said, “Close your eyes, Miss McCready.”

“What?” Helene reared back from him a bit.

“You don’t want to see what’s in here.”

Before either of us could stop her, Helene leaned forward and craned her head over his shoulder.

Poole ’s face sagged and he stepped aside.

Helene entered the kitchen and stopped. I stood behind her, waited for her to scream or faint or fall to her knees or run back into the living room.

“They dead?” she said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Very.”

She moved into the kitchen, headed for the back door. I looked at Poole. He raised an eyebrow.

As Helene passed Wee Dave, she paused to look at his chest.

“It’s like in that movie,” she said.

“Which?”

“The one with all the aliens who pop out of people’s chests, bleed acid. What was it called?”

“Alien,” I said.

“Right. They came out of your chest. But what was the movie called?”

Angie made a run to the local Dunkin’ Donuts and joined Helene and me out in the backyard a few minutes later, while Poole and Broussard went through the house with notebooks and cameras.

The yard was barely a yard. The closet in my bedroom was bigger. Wee Dave and Kimmie had placed a rusted metal table and chairs out there, and we sat and listened to the sounds of the neighborhood as the day bled into midafternoon and the air chilled-mothers calling for children, the construction crew using mortar drills on the other side of the house, a whiffle-ball game in progress a couple of blocks over.

Helene sipped her Coke through a straw. “Too bad. They seemed like nice people.”

I took a sip of coffee. “How many times did you meet them?”

“Just that one time.”

Angie asked, “You remember anything special about that night?”

Helene sucked some more Coke through the straw as she thought about it. “All those cats. They were, like, everywhere. One of them scratched Amanda’s hand, the little bitch.” She smiled at us. “The cat, I mean.”

“So Amanda was in the house with you.”

“I guess.” She shrugged. “Sure.”

“Because earlier you weren’t sure if you’d left her behind in the car.”

She shrugged again, and I resisted an urge to reach out with both hands and slap her shoulders back down. “Did I? Well, till I remembered the cat scratching her, I wasn’t sure. No, she was in the house.”

“Anything else you remember?” Angie’s fingers drummed the tabletop.

“She was nice.”

“Who, Kimmie?”

She pointed a finger at me, smiled. “Yeah. That was her name: Kimmie. She was cool. She took me and Amanda in her bedroom, showed us pictures of her trip to Disney World. Amanda was, like, psyched. Everything on the ride home was, ‘Mommy, can we go see Mickey and Minnie? Can we go to Disney World?’” She snorted. “Kids. Like I had the money.”

“You had two hundred thousand dollars when you entered that house.”

“But that was Ray’s deal. I mean, I wouldn’t rip off a nut job like Cheese Olamon on my own. Ray said he’d cut me in at some point. He’d never lied to me before, so I figured it’s his deal, his problem if Cheese finds out.” Another shrug.

“Me and Cheese go way back,” I said.

“That right?”

I nodded. “Chris Mullen, too. We all played Babe Ruth together, hung on the corner, et cetera.”

She raised her eyebrows. “No shit?”

I held up a hand. “Swear to God. And Cheese. Helene, you know what he’d do if he thought someone had ripped him off?”

She picked up her soda cup, placed it back down again. “Look, I told you, it was Ray. I didn’t do nothing but walk into that motel room with-”

“Cheese-and this was when we were kids, fifteen maybe-he saw his girlfriend glance at another guy one night? Cheese shattered a beer bottle against a streetlight and slashed her face with it. Tore her nose off, Helene. That was Cheese at fifteen. What do you think he’s like now?”

She sucked on her straw until the air rattled the ice at the bottom. “It was Ray’s-”

“You think he’ll lose any sleep killing your daughter?” Angie said. “Helene.” She reached across the table and grasped Helene’s bony wrist. “Do you?”

“Cheese?” Helene said, and her voice cracked. “You think he had something to do with Amanda’s disappearance?”

Angie stared at her for a full thirty seconds before she shook her head and dropped Helene’s wrist. “Helene, let me ask you something.”

Helene rubbed her wrist and looked at her soda cup again. “Yeah?”

“What fucking planet are you from exactly?”

Helene didn’t say anything for a while after that.

Autumn died in technicolor all around us. Bright yellows and reds afire, burnished oranges and rusty greens painted the leaves that floated from the branches, collected in the grass. That vibrant odor of dying things, so particular to fall, creased the blades of air that cut through our clothing and made us tense our muscles and widen our eyes. Nowhere does death occur so spectacularly, so proudly, as it does in New England in October. The sun, broken free of the storm clouds that had threatened this morning, turned windowpanes into hard squares of white light and washed the brick row houses that surrounded the tiny yard in a smoked tint that matched the darker leaves.

Death, I thought, is not this. Death is directly behind us. Death is the grungy kitchen of Wee David and Kimmie. Death is black blood and disloyal cats who feed on anything.

“Helene,” I said.

“Yeah?”

“While you were in the room with Kimmie looking at pictures of Disney World, where were Wee David and Ray?”

Her mouth opened slightly.

“Quick,” I said. “Off the top of your head. Don’t think.”

“The backyard,” she said.

“The backyard.” Angie pointed at the ground. “Here.”

She nodded.

“Could you see the backyard from Kimmie’s bedroom?” I asked.

“No. The shades were drawn.”

“Then how’d you know they were out here?” I asked.

“Ray’s shoes were filthy when we left,” she said slowly. “Ray is a slob in a lot of ways.” She reached out and touched my arm as if she were about to share a deeply personal secret with me. “But, man, he takes care of his shoes.”

11

GTwo Hundred + Composure = Child

“Gee two hundred?” Angie said.

“Two hundred grand,” Broussard said quietly.

“Where’d you find that note?” I said.

He looked over his shoulder at the house. “Curled up tight and stuck in the waistband of Kimmie’s lacy Underalls. An attention grabber, I think.”

We stood in the backyard.

“It’s here,” Angie said, and pointed at a small mound by a dry and withered elm tree. The dirt was freshly turned there, the mound the only ridge in a plot of land that was otherwise as flat as a nickel.

“I believe you, Miss Gennaro,” Broussard said. “So now what do we do?”

“Dig it up,” I said.

“And impound it and make it public knowledge,” Poole said. “Tie it, through the press, to Amanda McCready’s disappearance.”

I looked around at the dead grass, the burgundy leaves curled atop the blades. “No one’s touched this place in a while.”

Poole nodded. “Your conclusion?”

“If it is buried there”-I pointed at the mound-“then Wee David kept it to himself even though they tortured Kimmie to death in front of him.”

“No one ever accused Wee Dave of being a candidate for the Peace Corps,” Broussard said.

Poole walked over to the tree, placed a foot on either side of the mound, stared down at it.

Inside the house, Helene sat in the living room, fifteen feet from two bloating corpses, and watched TV. Springer had given way to Geraldo or Sally or some other ringmaster sounding the cowbell for the latest cavalcade of carnival freaks. The public “therapy” of confession, the continued watering down of the meaning of the word “trauma,” a steady stream of morons shouting at the void from a raised dais.

Helene didn’t seem to mind. She only complained about the smell, asked if we could open a window. Nobody had a good enough reason why we couldn’t, and once we did, we left her there, her face bathed in flickers of silver light.

“So we’re out of this,” Angie said, a note of quiet, sad surprise in her voice, a sudden confronting of the anticlimax that comes when a case ends abruptly.

I thought about it. It was a kidnapping now, complete with a ransom note and logical suspects with a motive. The FBI would take over, and we could follow the case through the news like every other couch potato in the state, wait for Helene to show up on Springer Time with other parents who’d misplaced their kids.

I held out my hand to Broussard. “Angie’s right. It was nice working with you.”

Broussard shook the hand and nodded but didn’t say anything. He looked over at Poole.

Poole toed the small ridge of dirt with his shoe, his eyes on Angie.

“We are out of this,” Angie said to him, “aren’t we?”

Poole held her gaze for a bit, then looked back at the tiny mound.

No one spoke for a couple of minutes. I knew we should go. Angie knew we should go. Yet we stayed, planted, it seemed, in that tiny yard with the dead elm.

I turned my head toward the ugly house behind us, could see Wee David’s head from here, the top of the chair he’d been bound to. Had he been aware of the feel of his bare shoulder blades against the cheap wicker backing of the chair? Had that been the last sensation he’d acknowledged before the buckshot opened up his chest cavity as if the bone and flesh were made of tissue paper? Or was it the sensation of the blood draining to his bound wrists, the fingers turning blue and numb?

The people who’d entered this house that last day or night of his life had known they’d kill Kimmie and Wee David. That was a professional execution back in that kitchen. Kimmie’s throat had been sliced as a last-ditch effort to get Wee David to talk, but she’d also been killed with a knife, out of prudence.

Neighbors will almost always attribute one gunshot to something else-a car backfiring, maybe, or, in the case of a shotgun blast, an engine blowing or a china cabinet falling to the floor. Particularly when the sound may have come from the home of drug dealers or users, people who are known by their neighbors to make odd sounds at all times of night.

No one wants to think they actually heard a gunshot, were actually witness-if only aurally-to a murder.

So the killers had killed Kimmie quickly and silently, probably without warning. But Wee David-they’d been pointing that shotgun at him for a while. They’d wanted him to see the curl of the finger against the trigger, hear the hammer hit the shell, the explosive click of ignition.

And these were the people who held Amanda McCready.

“You want to trade the two hundred thousand for Amanda,” Angie said.

There it was. What I’d known for the last five minutes. What Poole and Broussard were unwilling to put into words. A cataclysmic breach of police protocol.

Poole studied the trunk of the dead tree. Broussard lifted a red leaf off the green grass with the toe of his shoe.

“Right?” Angie said.

Poole sighed. “I’d prefer that the kidnappers not open a suitcase full of newspaper or marked money and kill the child before we get to them.”

“That’s happened to you before?” Angie said.

“It’s happened to cases I’ve turned over to the FBI,” Poole said. “That’s what we’re dealing with here, Miss Gennaro. Kidnapping is federal.”

“We go federal,” Broussard said, “the money goes into an evidence locker, and the Feds do the negotiating, get a chance to show how clever they are.”

Angie looked out at the tiny yard, the dying violet petals growing through the chain-link fence from the other side. “You two want to negotiate with the kidnappers without the Feds.”

Poole dug his hands into his pockets. “I’ve found too many dead children in closets, Miss Gennaro.”

She looked at Broussard. “You?”

He smiled. “I hate Feds.”

I said, “This goes bad, you’ll lose your pensions, guys. Maybe worse.”

On the other side of the yard, a man hung a throw rug out his third-story window and started beating it with a hockey stick that was missing the blade. The dust rose in angry, ephemeral clouds, and the man kept whacking without seeming to notice us.

Poole lowered himself to his haunches, picked at a blade of grass by the mound. “You remember the Jeannie Minnelli case? Couple years back?”

Angie and I shrugged. It was sad how many horrible things you forgot.

“Nine-year-old girl,” Broussard said. “Disappeared riding her bike in Somerville.”

I nodded. It was coming back.

“We found her, Mr. Kenzie, Miss Gennaro.” Poole snapped the blade of grass between his fingers at both ends. “In a barrel. Soaked in cement. The cement hadn’t hardened yet because the geniuses who killed her had used the wrong ratio of water to cement in the mix.” He slapped his hands together, to clear them of dust or pollen or just because. “We found a nine-year-old’s corpse floating in a barrel of watery cement.” He stood. “Sound pleasant?”

I looked over at Broussard. The memory had blanched his face, and several tremors spilled down his arms until he put his hands in his pockets, tightened his elbows against the sides of his torso.

“No,” I said, “but if this goes wrong, you’ll-”

“What?” Poole said. “Lose my benefits? I’m retiring soon, Mr. Kenzie. You ever see what the policemen’s union can do to someone trying to take away the retirement money of a decorated officer with thirty years in?” Poole pointed a finger at us, wagged it. “It’s like watching starving dogs go after meat hung on a man’s balls. Not pretty.”

Angie chuckled. “You’re something else, Poole.”

He touched her shoulder. “I’m a broken-down old man with three ex-wives, Miss Gennaro. I’m nothing. But I’d like to go out my last case a winner. With luck, take down Chris Mullen and bury Cheese Olamon deeper in jail while I’m at it.”

Angie glanced at his hand, then up into his face. “And if you blow it?”

“Then I drink myself to death.” Poole removed the hand and ran it through the hard stubble on his head. “Cheap vodka. The best I can do on a cop’s pension. Sound okay to you?”

Angie smiled. “Sounds fine, Poole. Sounds fine.”

Poole glanced over his shoulder at the guy whacking his throw rug, then back at us. “Mr. Kenzie, did you notice that gardening spade on the porch?”

I nodded.

Poole smiled.

“Oh,” I said. “Right.”

I went back through the house and got the spade. As I came back through the living room, Helene said, “We outa here soon?”

“Pretty soon.”

She looked at the spade and the plastic gloves on my hands. “You find the money?”

I shrugged. “Maybe.”

She nodded, looked back at the TV.

I started walking again, and her voice stopped me at the doorway to the kitchen.

“Mr. Kenzie?”

“Yeah.”

Her eyes sparkled in the glow from the TV screen in such a way they reminded me of the cats’. “They wouldn’t hurt her. Would they?”

“You mean Chris Mullen and the rest of Cheese Olamon’s crew?”

She nodded.

On the TV a woman told another woman to stay away from my daughter, you dyke. The audience hooted.

“Would they?” Helene’s eyes remained fixed on the TV.

“Yes,” I said.

She turned her head sharply in my direction. “No.” She shook her head, as if doing so would make her wish come true.

I should have told her I was kidding. That Amanda would be fine. That she’d be returned and things would go back to normal and Helene could drug herself with TV and booze and heroin and whatever else she used to cocoon herself from just how nasty the world could be.

But her daughter was out there, alone and terrified, handcuffed to a radiator or a bedpost, electrical tape tied around the lower half of her face so she couldn’t make any noise. Or she was dead. And part of the reason for that was Helene’s self-indulgence, her determination to act as if she could do whatever she chose and there’d be no consequence, no opposite and equal reaction.

“Helene,” I said.

She lit a cigarette, and the match head jumped around the target several times before the tobacco ignited. “What?”

“Are you getting all this finally?”

She looked to the TV, then back at me, and her eyes were moist and pink. “What?”

“Your daughter was abducted. Because of what you stole. The men who have her don’t give a shit about her. And they might not give her back.”

Two tears rolled down Helene’s cheeks, and she wiped at them with the back of her wrist.

“I know that,” she said, her attention back on the TV. “I’m not stupid.”

“Yes you are,” I said, and walked out to the backyard.

Standing in a circle around the mound, we blocked it from the view of any neighboring row houses. Broussard pushed the spade into the dirt and overturned it several times before we saw the wrinkled top of a green plastic bag appear.

Broussard dug a little more, and then Poole looked around and bent over, pulled at the bag, and wrenched it free from the hole.

They hadn’t even tied the top of the bag, just twisted it several times, and Poole allowed it to revolve in his hand, the green plastic crinkling as the tight lines spread apart at the neck and the bag grew wider. Poole dropped it to the ground and the top of the bag opened up.

A pile of loose bills greeted us, mostly hundreds and fifties, old and soft.

“That’s a lot of money,” Angie said.

Poole shook his head. “That, Miss Gennaro, is Amanda McCready.”

Before Poole and Broussard called in the forensics team and medical examiner, we shut off the TV in the living room and ran it down for Helene.

“You’ll trade the money for Amanda,” she said.

Poole nodded.

“And she’ll be alive.”

“That’s the hope.”

“And I have to do what again?”

Broussard lowered himself to his haunches in front of her. “You don’t have to do anything, Miss McCready. You just have to make a choice right now. Us four here”-he waved his hand at the rest of us-“happen to think this might be the right approach. But if my bosses find out I plan to do it this way, I’ll get suspended or fired. You understand?”

She half nodded. “If you tell people, they’ll want to arrest Chris Mullen.”

Broussard nodded. “Possibly. Or, we think, the FBI might put the capture of the kidnapper before your daughter’s safety.”

Another half nod, as if her chin kept meeting an invisible barrier on its way down.

Poole said, “Miss McCready, the bottom line is, it’s your decision. If you want us to, we’ll call this in right now, hand over the money, and let the pros handle it.”

“Other people?” She looked at Broussard.

He touched her hand. “Yes.”

“I don’t want other people. I don’t…” She stood up a bit unsteadily. “What do I have to do if we do it your way?”

“Keep quiet.” Broussard came off his haunches. “Don’t talk to the press or the police. Don’t even tell Lionel and Beatrice what’s going on.”

“Are you going to talk to Cheese?”

I said, “That’s probably our next move, yeah.”

“Mr. Olamon seems to be holding the cards at the moment,” Broussard said.

“What if you just, like, followed Chris Mullen? Maybe he’d take you to Amanda without knowing it?”

“We’ll be doing that as well,” Poole said. “But I have a feeling they’ll be expecting it. I’m sure they have Amanda well hidden.”

“Tell him I’m sorry.”

“Who?”

“Cheese. Tell him I didn’t mean nothing bad. I just want my kid back. Tell him not to hurt her. Could you do that?” She looked at Broussard.

“Sure.”

“I’m hungry,” Helene said.

“We’ll get you some-”

She shook her head at Poole. “Not me. Not me. That’s what Amanda said.”

“What? When?”

“When I put her to bed that night. That’s the last thing she said to me: ‘Mommy, I’m hungry.’” Helene smiled, but her eyes filled. “I said, ‘Don’t worry, honey. You’ll eat in the morning.’”

No one said anything. We waited to see if she’d crumble.

“I mean, they’d have fed her, right?” She held the smile as tears rolled down her face. “She’s not still hungry, is she?” She looked at me. “Is she?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

12

Cheese Olamon was a six-foot-two four-hundred-and-thirty-pound yellow-haired Scandinavian who’d somehow arrived at the misconception that he was black.

Though his flesh jiggled when he walked and his fashion sense ran toward the fleece or thick cotton sweats favored by overweight men everywhere, it would have been a large error to mistake Cheese for a jolly fat guy or confuse his bulk with a lack of speed.

Cheese smiled a lot, and there was a very real joy that seemed to overtake him in the presence of some people. And for all the wincing that his dated, pseudo Shaft-speak could induce in people, there was something strangely endearing and infectious about it. You’d find yourself listening to him talk and you’d wonder if his adoption of a slang very few people-black or white-had ever truly spoken this side of a Fred Williamson/Antonio Fargas opus was misplaced affection for black ghetto culture, deranged racism, or both. In any case, it could be damn catchy.

But I was also familiar with the Cheese who’d glanced at a guy in a bar one night with such self-possessed malevolence you knew the guy’s life expectancy had just dropped to about a minute and a half. I knew the Cheese who employed girls so thin and skagged out they could disappear by ducking behind a baseball bat, took rolls of bills from them as they leaned into his car, patted their bony asses, and sent them back to work.

And all the rounds he bought at the bar, all the fins and sawbucks he pressed into the flesh of broken rummies and then drove them to get Chinese with it, all the turkeys he handed out to the neighborhood poor at Christmas couldn’t erase the junkies who’d died in hallways with spikes still sticking out of their arms; the young women who turned into craven hags seemingly overnight, gums bleeding, begging in the subways for money to spend on AZT treatments; the names he’d personally edited from next year’s phone books.

A freak of both nature and nurture, Cheese had been small and sickly through most of grade school; his rib cage had shone through his cheap white shirt like an old man’s fingers; he sometimes had coughing fits so violent he’d vomit. He rarely spoke. He had no friends that I remember, and while most of us ate lunch from Adam-12 and Barbie lunch boxes, Cheese carried his in a brown paper bag that he carefully folded after he was done and took home to use again.

Both parents walked him up to the schoolyard gate every morning for the first few years. They’d speak to him in a foreign tongue, and their brusque voices carried into the schoolyard as they fussed with their son’s hair or scarf, fiddled with the buttons on his heavy peasant’s coat, before setting him free. They’d walk back down the avenue-giants, both of them-Mr. Olamon wearing a satin fedora at least fifteen years out of fashion with a weathered orange feather in the band, his head cocked slightly, as if he expected taunts or trash to be hurled down on him and his wife from second-story porches. Cheese would watch them until they were out of sight, wincing if his mother paused to pull a sagging sock back up over her thick ankle.

For whatever reason, the memories I have of Cheese and his parents seem trapped in the saber-blade sunlight of early winter: snapshots of an ugly little boy at the edge of a schoolyard pocked with half-frozen puddles watching his gigantic parents stoop their shoulders and walk under shivering black trees.

Cheese took multiple shit and multiple beatings for his light accent, his parents’ far thicker ones, his country-village clothes, and his skin, which had a soapy, yellowish luster that reminded kids of bad cheese. Hence the name.

During Cheese’s seventh year at St. Bart’s, his father, a janitor at an exclusive grade school in Brookline, was indicted for physically assaulting a ten-year-old student who’d spit on the floor. The child, the son of a Mass General neurosurgeon and visiting professor at Harvard, had received a broken arm and nose in the few seconds of Mr. Olamon’s sudden attack, and the penalty promised to be stiff. The same year, Cheese grew ten inches in five months.

The next year-the year of his father’s conviction and sentence to three-to-six-Cheese bulked up.

Fourteen years of being pissed on went into the muscle mass, fourteen years of being taunted and having his slight accent aped, fourteen years of humiliation and swallowed rage turned into a hot, calcified cannonball of bile in his stomach.

That summer between eighth grade and high school became Cheese Olamon’s Summer of Payback. Kids got sucker-punched rounding corners, looked up from the sidewalk to see one of Cheese’s size twelves descending into their ribs. There were broken noses and broken arms, and Carl Cox-one of Cheese’s oldest and most merciless tormentors-got a rock dropped on his head from a three-decker roof that, among other things, tore off half his ear and left him talking funny for the rest of his life.

It wasn’t just the boys from our graduating class at St. Bart’s who got it, either; several fourteen-year-old girls spent that summer with bandages over their noses or making trips to the dentist to repair broken teeth.

Even then, though, Cheese knew how to pick his targets. The ones whom he correctly guessed were too timid or powerless to come back against him saw his face when he hurt them. The ones he hurt worst-and therefore those most likely to speak to the police or their parents-never saw anything at all.

Among the ones who escaped Cheese’s revenge were Phil, Angie, and myself, who’d never tormented him, if only because we each had at least one unfashionably immigrant parent ourselves. And Cheese left Bubba Rogowski alone, as well. I don’t remember if Bubba had ever messed with Cheese or not, but even if he had, Cheese was smart enough to know that, when it came to warfare, Cheese would be the German army and Bubba the Russian winter. So Cheese stuck to the fronts and battles he knew he could win.

No matter how much bigger, craftier, and more dangerously psychotic Cheese became over the years, he maintained an almost sycophantic persona in Bubba’s presence, even going so far as to personally feed and groom Bubba’s dogs when Bubba was overseas on various weapons buys.

That’s Bubba for you. The people who terrify you and me feed his dogs.

“‘Mother institutionalized when subject was seventeen,’” Broussard read from Cheese Olamon’s file, as Poole drove past Walden Pond Nature Preserve toward Concord Prison. “‘Father released from Norfolk a year later, disappeared.’”

“Rumor has it Cheese killed him,” I said. I lounged in the backseat, head against the window, Concord ’s glorious trees floating past.

After Broussard and Poole had called in the double homicide at Wee David’s, Angie and I took the bag of money and drove Helene back to Lionel’s house. We dropped her off and drove to Bubba’s warehouse.

Two o’clock in the afternoon is prime sleeping time for Bubba, and we were greeted at the door by the sight of him in a flaming red Japanese kimono and a somewhat irritated look on that deranged cherub’s face of his.

“Why am I awake?” he said.

“We need your safe,” Angie said.

“You own a safe.” He glowered at me.

I looked up into his glare. “Ours doesn’t have a minefield protecting it.”

He held out his hand, and Angie placed the bag in it.

“Contents?” Bubba said.

“Two hundred grand.”

Bubba nodded as if we’d just said Grandmother’s heirlooms. We could have told him Proof of extraterrestrials, and the reaction would have been the same. Unless you could hook him up on a date with Jane Seymour, Bubba’s pretty hard to impress.

Angie pulled the pictures of Corwin Earle and Leon and Roberta Trett from her bag, fanned them up in front of Bubba’s sleepy face. “Know any of them?”

“Hot goddamn!” he said.

“You do?” Angie said.

“Huh?” He shook his head. “No. That’s one big hairy bitch, though. She walk upright and everything?”

Angie sighed and put the photos back in her bag.

“The other two were cons,” Bubba said. “Never met ’em, but you can always tell.”

He yawned, nodded, and shut the door in our faces.

“It wasn’t his presence I missed when he was in jail,” Angie said.

“It was the engaging verbal discourse,” I said.

Angie dropped me back at my apartment, where I waited for Poole and Broussard, while she drove over to Chris Mullen’s condo building to begin surveillance. She opted for the duty because she’s never been real keen on entering men’s prisons. Besides, Cheese gets kind of funny around her, takes to blushing and asking her who she’s dating these days. I took the ride with Poole and Broussard because I was an allegedly friendly face, and Cheese has never been known for cooperating with the men in blue.

“Suspect in the death of one Jo Jo McDaniel, 1986,” Broussard said, as we wound our way up Route 2.

“Cheese’s mentor in the drug trade,” I said.

Broussard nodded. “Suspect in the disappearance and suspected death of Daniel Caleb, 1991.”

“Didn’t hear about that one.”

“Accountant.” Broussard flipped a page. “Supposedly cooked books for a few unsavory characters.”

“Cheese caught him with his hand in the till.”

“Apparently.”

Poole caught my eyes in the rearview mirror. “Quite the association you have with the criminal element, Patrick.”

I sat up in the seat. “Gee, Poole, whatever could you mean?”

“Friends with Cheese Olamon and Chris Mullen,” Broussard said.

“They’re not friends. Just guys I grew up with.”

“Didn’t you also grow up with the late Kevin Hurlihy?” Poole brought the car to a stop in the left lane, waiting for a break in traffic on the other side of the road so he could cross Route 2 and enter the prison driveway.

“Last I heard, Kevin was just missing,” I said.

Broussard smiled over the seat at me. “And let’s not forget the infamous Mr. Rogowski.”

I shrugged. I was used to my association with Bubba raising eyebrows. Especially cops’ eyebrows.

“Bubba’s a friend,” I said.

“Hell of a friend,” Broussard said. “Is it true he’s got a floor of his warehouse mined with explosives?”

I shrugged. “Drop in on him sometime, see for yourself.”

Poole chuckled. “Talk about your early retirement plans.” He turned into the gravel driveway of the prison. “Some neighborhood you come from, Patrick, that’s all. Some neighborhood.”

“We’re just misunderstood down there,” I said. “Hearts of gold, every one of us.”

When we stepped out of the car, Broussard stretched and said, “Oscar Lee tells me you’re not comfortable with judgment.”

“With what?” I said, and looked up at the prison walls. Typical of Concord. Even the prison looked inviting.

“Judgment,” Broussard said. “Oscar says you hate judging people.”

I followed the cyclone wire at the top of the wall. A little less inviting, suddenly.

“Says that’s why you hang with a psycho like Rogowski, maintain relations with the likes of Cheese Olamon.”

I squinted into the bright sun. “No,” I said. “I’m not very good at judging people. Every now and then I’ve had to.”

“And?” Poole said.

I shrugged. “Left a bad taste in my mouth.”

“So you judged poorly?” Poole said lightly.

I thought of my calling Helene “stupid” just a couple of hours ago; the way the word seemed to shrink her and stab her at the same time. I shook my head. “No. My judgment was correct. Just left a bad taste in my mouth. Simple as that.”

I stuck my hands in my pockets and walked toward the front door of the prison before Poole and Broussard could think of any more questions regarding my character or lack thereof.

The warden posted a guard at each of the two gates that led in and out of the small visitor’ yard at Concord Prison, and the guards in the towers shifted their attention to us. Cheese was already there when we arrived. He was the only convict in the yard, Broussard and Poole having requested as much privacy as possible.

“Yo, Patrick, how’s it hanging?” Cheese called, as we crossed the yard. He stood by a water fountain. In comparison to the Orca with yellow hair that was Cheese, the fountain looked like a golf tee.

“Not bad, Cheese. It’s a nice day.”

“I am fucking down with that, brother.” He brought his fist down on top of my own. “Day like this is like righteous pussy, Jack Daniel’s, and a pack of Kools all rolled into one. Know what I’m saying?”

I didn’t, but I smiled. That’s how it worked with Cheese. You nodded, you smiled, you wondered when he’d start making some sense.

“Damn!” Cheese reared back on his heels. “You brought yourself the law with you. The Man is in the house!” he shouted. “In da house. Poole and…”-he snapped his fingers-“Broussard. Right? Thought you boys left Narco.”

Poole smiled into the sun. “We did, Mr. Cheese, sir. We certainly did.” He pointed to a long dark scab on Cheese’s chin. It looked like a slice left by a jagged blade. “You’ve been making enemies here?”

“This? Shit.” Cheese rolled his eyes at me. “Motherfucker ain’t been born yet can put the Cheese down.”

Broussard chuckled and toed the dirt with his left foot. “Yeah, Cheese, sure. You been talking your black rap and pissed off some brother don’t like white boys with a confused sense of identity. That it?”

“Yo, Poole,” Cheese said, “what’s a cool-as-ice-cream cat like yourself doing with this deadweight-nappy-headed-couldn’t-find-his-own-ass-with-a-map motherfucker?”

“Slumming,” Poole said, and a small smile twitched the corners of Broussard’s mouth.

“Heard you lost a bag of cash,” Broussard said.

“You did?” Cheese rubbed his chin. “Hmm. Can’t rightly recall that, officer, but you got a bag of cash you’re looking to unload-well, I’ll be happy to take it off your hands. Give it to my man Patrick, he’ll hold it for me till I get out.”

“Aww, Cheese,” I said, “that’s touching.”

“We down, brother, ’cause I know your shit’s straight. How’s Brother Rogowski?”

“Fine.”

“Motherfucker did a year in Plymouth? Cons still shaking in that place. ’Fraid he might come back, he seemed to like it so much.”

“He ain’t going back,” I said. “He missed a year of TV he’s still catching up on.”

“How’re the dogs?” Cheese whispered, as if they were a secret.

“Belker died about a month ago.”

The information rocked Cheese in place for a moment. He looked up at the sky as a soft breeze found his eyelids. “How’d he die?” He looked at me. “Poison?”

I shook my head. “Hit by a car.”

“Intentional?”

I shook my head again. “Little old lady was driving. Belker just beelined into the avenue.”

“How’s Bubba taking it?”

“He’d had Belker neutered the month before.” I shrugged. “He’s pretty sure it was suicide.”

“Makes sense.” Cheese nodded. “Sure.”

“The money, Cheese.” Broussard waved a hand in front of Cheese’s face. “The money.”

“Ain’t missing none, officer. What I tol’ you.” Cheese shrugged and turned away from Broussard, walked over to a picnic bench, and took a seat on top, waited for us to join him.

“Cheese,” I said, as I sat down beside him, “we got a missing girl in the neighborhood. Maybe you heard about it?”

Cheese lifted a blade of grass off his shoelaces, twirled it between his chubby fingers. “Heard a bit. Amanda something, wasn’t it?”

“McCready,” Poole said.

Cheese pursed his lips, seemed to give it about a millisecond’s worth of thought, then shrugged. “Don’t ring a bell. What’s this about a bag of cash?”

Broussard chuckled softly and shook his head.

“Let’s try a hypothetical,” Poole said.

Cheese clasped his hands together between his legs and looked at Poole with an eager small-boy’s expression on his buttery face. “Okeydokey.”

Poole placed a foot up on the bench by Cheese’s. “Let us say, just for argument-”

“Just for argument,” Cheese said happily.

“-that someone stole some money from a gentleman on the same day he was incarcerated by the state for a parole violation.”

“This story got any tit in it?” Cheese asked. “The Cheese likes him some story with tit.”

“I’m getting to it,” Poole said. “I promise.”

Cheese nudged me with his elbow, gave me a huge grin, then turned back to Poole. Broussard leaned back on his heels, looked out at the guard towers.

“So this person-who does in fact have breasts-steals from a man she shouldn’t. And a few months later, her child disappears.”

“Pity,” Cheese said. “A goddamn shame, you ask the Cheese.”

“Yes,” Poole said. “A shame. Now a known associate of the man this woman angered-”

“Stole from,” Cheese said.

“Excuse me.” Poole tipped an imaginary hat. “A known associate of the man this woman stole from was seen in the crowd gathered outside the woman’s house the night her daughter disappeared.”

Cheese rubbed his chin. “Interesting.”

“And that man works for you, Mr. Olamon.”

Cheese raised his eyebrows. “Straight up and shit?”

“Mmm.”

“You said there was a crowd outside this house?”

“I did.”

“So, lookee here, I bets a whole boatload of folks were standing there who don’t work for me.”

“This is true.”

“You gonna question them, too?”

“The mother didn’t rip them off,” I said.

Cheese turned his head. “How do you know? A bitch crazy enough to take from the Cheese, she may be ripping off the whole motherfucking neighborhood. Am I right, brother?”

“So you admit she stole from you?” Broussard said.

Cheese looked at me, jerked his thumb in Broussard’s direction. “I thought this was a hypothetical.”

“Of course.” Broussard held up a hand. “Excuse me, Your Cheeseness.”

“Here’s the deal,” Poole said.

“Oooh,” Cheese said. “A deal.”

“Mr. Olamon, we’ll keep this quiet. Between just us.”

“Just us,” Cheese said, and rolled his eyes at me.

“But we want that child returned safely.”

Cheese looked at him for a long time, a smile steadily growing on his face. “Let me get this straight. You saying that you-the Man-are going to let my hypothetical boy pick up this hypothetical money in return for one hypothetical kid, and then we all’s just walk away friends? That the shit you trying to sell me, officer?”

“Detective sergeant,” Poole said.

“Whatever.” Cheese snorted, threw his hands out in front of him.

“You’re familiar with the law, Mr. Olamon. Just by offering you this deal, we are entrapping you. Legally, you can do whatever you want with this offer and not suffer any charges.”

“Bullshit.”

“No shit,” Poole said.

“Cheese,” I said, “who gets hurt with this deal?”

“Huh?”

“Seriously. Someone gets his money back. Someone else gets her kid back. Everyone walks away happy.”

He wagged a finger at me. “Patrick, my brother, do not attempt a career in sales. Who gets hurt? That what you’re asking? Who gets motherfucking hurt?”

“Yeah. Tell me.”

“The motherfucker who got ripped off, that’s who!” He threw his hands up in the air, slapped them down on his enormous thighs, leaned his head in toward mine until we were almost touching. “That motherfucker gets hurt. That motherfucker gets motherfucking butt-fucked. What, he supposed to trust the Man? The Man and his deal?” He put a hand on the back of my neck, squeezed, “Fuck, nigger, you been smoking motherfucking crack?”

“Mr. Olamon,” Poole said, “how do we convince you that we’re on the level?”

Cheese let go of my neck. “You don’t. Y’all step back, maybe let things cool down a bit, let folks work shit out amongst themselves.” He wagged his thick finger at Poole. “Maybe then, everybody get happy.”

Poole extended his arms, palms up. “We can’t do that, Mr. Olamon. You must know that.”

“Okay, okay.” Cheese nodded hurriedly. “Maybe someone needs to offer a certain righteous motherfucker some kind of reduction of sentence for his help in facilitating a certain transaction. What you think about that?”

“That would mean bringing in the District Attorney,” Poole said.

“So?”

“Maybe you missed the part where we said we want to keep this quiet,” Broussard said. “Get the girl back, go on our merry way.”

“Well, then, your hypothetical man, he take that sort of deal, he’s a chump. Motherfucking hypothetical dumb-ass, and that’s for damn sure.”

“We just want Amanda McCready,” Broussard said. He placed his palm on the back of his neck, kneaded the flesh. “Alive.”

Cheese leaned back on the table, tilted his head to the sun, sucked in the air through nostrils so wide they could vacuum rolls of quarters off a rug.

Poole stepped back from the table, crossed his arms over his chest, and waited.

“Used to keep a bitch in my stable name of McCready,” Cheese said eventually. “Occasional trade, not regular. Didn’t look like much, but you gave her the right party favor, that girl could go. Know what I’m saying?”

“Stable?” Broussard stepped over to the table. “Are you telling us you exploited Helene McCready for the purposes of prostitution, Cheese Whiz?”

Cheese leaned forward and laughed. “P-p-p-purposes of p-p-p-prostitution. Dang, that’s got a nice ring to it, don’t it now? Form myself a band, call it Purposes of Prostitution, pack the clubs like a motherfucker.”

Broussard flicked his wrist and hit Cheese Olamon in the center of the nose with the back of his hand. It wasn’t a love tap, either. Cheese got his hands up to his nose and blood immediately seeped through the fingers, and Broussard stepped between the big man’s open legs and grabbed his right ear in his hand, squeezed until I heard cartilage rattle.

“Listen to me, mutt. You listening?”

Cheese made a noise that sounded like an affirmative.

“I don’t give a fuck about Helene McCready and whether you turned her out on Easter Sunday to a roomful of priests. I don’t care about your bullshit scag deals and the street you’re still running from behind these walls. I care about Amanda McCready.” He leaned into the ear, twisted his vise-grip hold. “You hear that name? Amanda McCready. And if you don’t tell me where she is, you Richard Roundtree-wannabe piece of shit, I’m going to get the names of the four biggest black-buck cons who hate your dumb ass and make sure they spend a night with you in solitary with nothing but their dicks and a Zippo. You following this or should I hit you again?”

He let go of Cheese’s ear and stepped back.

Sweat had darkened Cheese’s hair, and the thick rattle he made behind his cupped hands was the same one he’d made as a kid between coughing attacks, often just before he vomited.

Broussard flourished a hand in Cheese’s direction and looked over at me. “Judgment,” he said, and wiped the hand on his pants.

Cheese dropped his hands from his nose and leaned back on the picnic bench as blood trickled over his upper lip and into his mouth. He took several deep breaths, his eyes never leaving Broussard.

The guards in the towers looked off into the sky. The two guards manning the gates studied their shoes as if they’d each received a new pair that morning.

I could hear a distant clank of steel as someone worked out with weights inside the prison walls. A tiny bird swooped across the visitors’ yard. It was so small and moved so fast, I couldn’t even tell what color it was before it shot up the wall and over the cyclone wire, disappeared from view.

Broussard stood back from the bench, his feet spread, staring at Cheese, his gaze so devoid of emotion or life he could have been studying tree bark. This was another Broussard, one I hadn’t met before.

As fellow investigators, Angie and I had been treated by Broussard with professional respect and even a bit of charm. I’m sure that’s the Broussard most people knew-the handsome, articulate detective with flawless grooming and a movie star’s smile. But in Concord Prison, I was seeing the street cop, the alley brawler, the interrogation-by-nightstick Broussard. As he leveled his dark gaze at Cheese, I saw the righteous, win-at-all-costs menace of a guerrilla fighter, a jungle warrior.

Cheese spit a thick mix of phlegm and blood onto the grass.

“Yo, Mark Fuhrman,” he said, “kiss my black ass.”

Broussard lunged for him, and Poole caught the back of his partner’s jacket as Cheese scrambled backward and swung his huge body off the picnic table.

“These are some sorry-ass crackers you hanging with, Patrick.”

“Hey, mutt!” Broussard shouted. “You remember me that night in solitary! You got it?”

“Got a picture of your wife doing it with a pile of dwarfs in my cell,” Cheese said. “That’s what I got. Want to come look?”

Broussard made another lunge, and Poole wrapped his arms around his partner’s chest, lifted the bigger man off his feet, and pivoted away from the bench.

Cheese headed for the prisoners’ gate and I trotted to catch up.

“Cheese.”

He looked back over his shoulder, kept walking.

“Cheese, for Christ’s sake, she’s four years old.”

Cheese kept walking. “I’m real sorry about that. Tell the man he need to work on his social skills.”

The guard stopped me at the gate as Cheese passed through. The guard had mirrored sunglasses, and I could see my funhouse reflection in each eye as he pushed me back. Two little shimmering versions of me, the same goofy, dismayed look in each face.

“Come on, Cheese. Come on, man.”

Cheese turned back to the fence, put his fingers through the rungs, stared at me for a long time.

“I can’t help you, Patrick. Okay?”

I gestured over my shoulder at Poole and Broussard. “Their deal was real.”

Cheese shook his head slowly. “Shit, Patrick. Cops are like cons, man. Motherfuckers always got an angle.”

“They’ll come back with an army, Cheese. You know how this works. They’re working a red ball and they’re pissed.”

“And I don’t know shit.”

“Yes, you do.”

He smiled broadly, the blood beginning to clot and thicken on his upper lip. “Prove it,” he said, and turned away, walked along the pebbled path that led across a short lawn and back into the prison.

I walked back past Broussard and Poole on my way to the visitors’ gate.

“Nice judgment,” I said. “Picture-fucking-perfect.”

13

Broussard caught up with me as we made our way down the corridor toward the sign-in desk. His hand gripped my elbow from behind and turned me toward him.

“Problem with my method, Mr. Kenzie?”

“Fucking method?” I pulled my arm out of his grasp. “That what you call what you did back there?”

Poole and the guard reached us, and Poole said, “Not here, gentlemen. There are appearances to maintain.”

Poole steered us both down the corridor and through the metal detectors and the last remaining gate. Our weapons were returned to us by a sergeant with hair plugs springing from the top of his head in tiny, tightly wrapped bundles, and then we walked out into the parking lot.

Broussard started in as soon as our shoes hit gravel. “How much bullshit were you willing to swallow from that slug, Mr. Kenzie? Huh?”

“Whatever it took to-”

“Maybe you’d like to go back in, talk about dog suicides and-”

“-get a fucking deal, Detective Broussard! That’s what I-”

“-how much you’re down with your man Cheese.”

“Gentlemen.” Poole stepped in between us.

The echo of our voices was raw in that parking lot, and our faces were red from shouting. The tendons in Broussard’s neck bulged like lines of rope stretched taut, and I could feel adrenaline shake my blood.

“My methods were sound,” Broussard said.

“Your methods,” I said, “sucked.”

Poole put a hand on Broussard’s chest. Broussard looked down at it and kept his eyes there for a bit, his jaw muscles rolling up under the flesh.

I walked across the parking lot, felt the adrenaline turning to jelly in my calves, the gravel crunching underfoot, heard the sharp cry of a bird slicing through the air from the direction of Walden Pond, saw the sun soften and spread against the tree trunks as it died. I leaned against the back of the Taurus, placed a foot up on the bumper. Poole still had a hand on Broussard’s chest, was talking to him, his lips close to the younger man’s ear.

All the shouting aside, my temper hadn’t really shown itself yet. If I’m truly angry, if that switch in my head has been tripped, my voice rides a flat line, becomes dead and monotonous, and a red marble of light drills through my skull and blots out all fear, all reason, all empathy. And the hotter the red marble glows, the colder my blood chills, until it’s the blue of fine metal, and the monotone becomes a whisper.

That whisper-rarely with any warning to myself or anyone else-is then broken by the lash of my hand, the kick of my foot, the fury of muscle extending in an instant from that pool of red marble and ice-metal blood.

It is my father’s temper.

So even before I was aware I had it, I knew its character. I’d felt its hand.

The crucial difference between my father and me-I hope-has always been a matter of action. He acted on his anger, whenever and wherever it beset him. His temper ruled him the way alcohol or pride or vanity rules other men.

At a very early age, just as the child of an alcoholic swears he’ll never drink, I swore to guard against the advance of the red marble, the cold blood, the tendency toward monotone. Choice, I’ve always believed, is all that separates us from animals. A monkey can’t choose to control his appetite. A man can. My father, at certain hideous moments, was an animal. I refuse to be.

So while I understood Broussard’s rage, his desperation to find Amanda, his lashing out at Cheese Olamon’s refusal to take us seriously, I refused to condone it. Because it got us nowhere. It got Amanda nowhere-except, maybe, deeper down the hole in which she already lay and that much farther away from us.

Broussard’s shoes appeared on the gravel below the bumper. I felt his shadow cool the sun on my face.

“I can’t do this anymore.” His voice was so soft it almost disappeared on the breeze.

“What’s that?” I said.

“Let scumbags hurt kids and walk away, feel like they’re clever. I can’t.”

“Then quit your job,” I said.

“We have his money. He has to go through us and trade the girl to get it.”

I looked up into his face, saw the fear there, the rabid hope he’d never see another dead or hopelessly fucked-up kid again.

“What if he doesn’t care about the money?” I said.

Broussard looked away.

“Oh, he cares.” Poole came over to the car, rested his hand on the trunk, but he didn’t sound so sure.

“Cheese has a shitload of money,” I said.

“You know these guys,” Poole said, as Broussard stood very still, a frozen curiosity in his face. “There’s never enough money. They always want more.”

“Two hundred grand isn’t pocket change to Cheese,” I said, “but it ain’t house money either. It’s bribe and property-tax petty cash. For one year. What if he wants to make a moral point?”

Broussard shook his head. “Cheese Olamon has no morals.”

“Yes, he does.” I kicked the bumper with my heel, as surprised as anyone, I think, by the vehemence in my voice. More quietly, I repeated, “Yes, he does. And the number one moral law in his universe is: Don’t fuck with Cheese.”

Poole nodded. “And Helene did.”

“Goddamn right.”

“And if Cheese is pissed off enough, you think he’ll kill the girl and say ‘fuck it’ to the money just to send that message.”

I nodded. “And sleep right through the night.”

Poole ’s face took on a gray cast as he stepped into the shadow between Broussard and me. He suddenly looked very old, no longer vaguely threatening so much as vaguely threatened, and the sense of elfin mischief had left him.

“What if,” he said, so quietly I had to lean in to hear, “Cheese wishes to make both his moral point and a profit?”

“Run a bait-and-switch?” Broussard said.

Poole dug his hands into his pockets, steeled his back and shoulders against the sudden late-afternoon bite in the breeze.

“We may have tipped our hand in there, Rem.”

“How so?”

“Cheese now knows we’re so desperate to get the child back that we’re willing to break the rules, leave the badge at home, and step into a money-for-child scenario with no official authority.”

“And if Cheese wants to walk away a winner…”

“Then no one else walks away at all,” Poole said.

“We’ve got to get to Chris Mullen,” I said. “See who he leads us to. Before the trade goes down.”

Poole and Broussard nodded.

“Mr. Kenzie.” Broussard offered his hand. “I was out of line in there. I let that mug get the better of me, and I could have fucked us on this.”

I took the hand. “We’ll bring her home.”

He tightened his grip on my hand. “Alive.”

“Alive,” I said.

“You think Broussard’s cracking under the strain?” Angie said.

We sat parked at the edge of the financial district on Devonshire Street, covering the rear of Devonshire Place, Chris Mullen’s condo tower. The CAC detectives who’d tailed Mullen back here had gone home for the night. Several other two-man teams covered all the other key players in Cheese’s crew, while we watched Mullen. Broussard and Poole covered the front of the building from the Washington Street side. It was just past midnight. Mullen had been inside for three hours.

I shrugged. “Did you see Broussard’s face when Poole talked about finding Jeannie Minnelli’s body in the barrel of cement?”

Angie shook her head.

“It was worse than Poole ’s. He looked like he was going to have a nervous breakdown just hearing about it. Hands started to shake, face got all white and shiny. The man looked bad.” I looked up at the three yellow squares on the fifteenth floor that we’d identified as Mullen’s windows as one of them went black. “Maybe he is losing it. He overreacted with Cheese, that’s for sure.”

Angie lit a cigarette and cracked her window. The street was still. Brooked by canyons of white limestone facades and shimmering blue-glass skyscrapers, it looked like a film set at night, a giant model of a world no real people occupied. In the daytime, Devonshire would be packed with the vaguely joyous, vaguely violent hustle of pedestrians and stockbrokers, lawyers and secretaries and bicycle messengers, trucks and cabs honking their horns, briefcases, power ties, and cell phones. But after nine or so it shut down, and sitting in a car packed between all that vast and empty architecture felt like we were just one more prop in a giant museum piece, after the lights have been dimmed and the security guards have left the room.

“’Member the night Glynn shot me?” Angie said.

“Yeah.”

“Just before it happened, I remember struggling with you and Evandro in the dark, all the candles in my bedroom flickering like eyes, and I thought: I can’t do this anymore. I can’t invest any more of myself-not one more piece-in all this violence and…shit.” She turned on the seat. “Maybe that’s what Broussard feels. I mean, how many kids can you find in pools of cement?”

I thought about the pure nothing that had come into Broussard’s eyes after he’d slapped Cheese. A nothing so complete it had overwhelmed even his fury.

Angie was right: How many dead kids could you find?

“He’ll burn down the city if he thinks it’ll lead to Amanda,” I said.

Angie nodded. “Both of them will.”

“And she may already be dead.”

Angie flicked her cigarette ash over the top of her window. “Don’t say that.”

“Can’t help it. It’s a distinct possibility. You know it. So do I.”

The towering quiet of the empty street slipped into the car for a bit.

“Cheese hates witnesses,” Angie said eventually.

“Hates ’em,” I agreed.

“If that child is dead,” Angie said, and cleared her throat, “then Broussard definitely-and Poole most probably-will snap.”

I nodded. “And God help whoever they think was involved.”

“You think God’ll help?”

“Huh?”

“God,” she said, and crushed her cigarette in the ashtray. “You think He’ll help Amanda’s kidnappers any more than He helped her?”

“Probably not.”

“Then again…” She looked out the windshield.

“What?”

“If Amanda is dead and Broussard flips out, kills her kidnappers, maybe God is helping.”

“Heck of a strange God.”

Angie shrugged. “You take what you can get,” she said.

14

I’d heard about Chris Mullen’s banker’s hours, his determination to run a nighttime business during daylight hours, and the next morning, at exactly 8:55, he walked out of Devonshire Towers and turned right on Washington.

I was parked on Washington a half block up from the condo towers, and when I picked up Mullen walking toward State in my rearview mirror, I depressed the transmit button on the walkie-talkie lying on the seat and said, “He just left through the front.”

From her post on Devonshire Street, where no cars were allowed to park or even idle in the morning, Angie said, “Gotcha.”

Broussard, wearing a gray T-shirt, black sweats, and a dark blue and white warm-up jacket, stood across from my car in front of Pi Alley. He sipped coffee from a Styrofoam cup and read the sports page like a jogger just finished his run. He’d rigged a headset to a receiver strapped to his waistband and painted both the earphones and receiver yellow and black to look like a Discman. He’d even sprayed water down the front of his shirt five minutes ago to make it look like sweat. These ex-vice and narcotics guys-masters of the small details of disguise.

As Mullen took a right at the flower stand in front of the Old State House, Broussard crossed Washington and followed. I saw him raise his coffee to his mouth and his lips move as he spoke into the transmitter strapped under his watchband.

“Moving east on State. I got him. Showtime, kids.”

I turned the walkie-talkie off and slipped it into my coat pocket until my part had been played. In keeping with the disguise motif of the day, I was dressed in the rattiest gray trench coat this side of a subway bum, and I’d stained it freshly this morning with egg yolk and Pepsi. My soiled T-shirt was torn across the chest and my jeans and the tops of my shoes were speckled with paint and dirt. The tips of my shoe soles were separated from the top and clapped softly as I walked, and my bare toes peeked out. I’d brushed my hair straight off my forehead and blown it dry to give it that Don King look, and what remained of the egg I’d used on the trench coat I’d rubbed into my beard.

Styling.

I unzipped my fly as I stumbled across Washington Street and poured the rest of my morning coffee down my chest. People saw me coming and sidestepped my lumbering steps and swinging arms, and I mumbled a whole stream of words I’d never learned from my mom and pushed through the gilt-edged front doors of Devonshire Place.

Boy, did the security guard look psyched to see me.

So did the three people who exited the elevator and cut a wide swath around me on the marble floor. I leered at the two women in the trio, smiled at the cut of their legs dropping from the hems of their Anne Klein suits.

“Join me for a pizza?” I asked.

The businessman steered the women even farther away as the security guard said, “Hey! Hey, you!”

I turned toward him as he came out from behind his gleaming black horseshoe desk. He was young and lean, and he had a finger rudely pointed in my direction.

The businessman pushed the women out of the building and pulled a cell phone from his inside pocket, extended the antenna by gripping it between his teeth, but kept walking up Washington.

“Come on,” the security guard said. “Turn around and go out the way you came in. Right now. Come on.”

I swayed in front of him and licked my beard, came back with eggshell. I left my mouth open as I chewed on it and it crackled.

The security guard set his feet on the marble and placed a hand on his nightstick. “You,” he said, like he was talking to a dog. “Go.”

“Uh-ah,” I mumbled, and swayed some more.

The elevator bank dinged as another car reached the lobby.

The security guard reached for my elbow, but I pivoted and his fingers snapped at air.

I reached into my pocket. “Got something to show you.”

The security guard pulled his nightstick from its holster. “Hey! Keep your hands where I can see-”

“Oh, my God,” someone said as the crowd exited the elevator and I pulled a banana from my trench coat, pointed it at the rent-a-cop.

“Jesus Christ, he’s got a banana!” The voice came from behind me. Angie.

Always the improviser. Couldn’t stick to the script.

The crowd from the elevator was trying to cross the lobby, avoid eye contact with me, and still see enough of the incident to have the day’s best story at the watercooler.

“Sir,” the security guard said, trying to sound authoritative and yet polite, now that several tenants bore witness, “put the banana down.”

I pointed the banana at him. “Got this from my cousin. He’s an orangutan.”

“Shouldn’t someone call the police?” a woman asked.

“Ma’am,” the security guard said, a bit desperately, “I have this under control.”

I tossed the banana at him. He dropped his nightstick and jumped back as if he’d been shot.

Someone in the crowd yelped, and several people jogged for the doors.

At the elevator bank, Angie caught my eye and pointed at my hair. “Very hot,” she mouthed, and then she slipped into the elevator and the doors closed.

The security guard picked up his nightstick and dropped the banana. He looked ready to rush me. I didn’t know how many people remained behind me-maybe three-but at least one of them could be thinking about heroically rushing the vagrant as well.

I turned so that my back was to the horseshoe desk and elevators. Only two men, one woman, and the security guard remained. And both men were inching toward the doors. The woman seemed fascinated, however. Her mouth was open, and one hand was pressed against the base of her throat.

“Whatever happened to Men at Work?” I asked her.

“What?” The security guard took another step toward me.

“The Australian band.” I turned my head, locked the security guard in a kind, curious stare. “Very big in the early eighties. Huge. Do you know what happened to them?”

“What? No.”

I cocked my head as I stared at him, scratched my temple. For a long moment, no one in the lobby moved or even breathed it seemed.

“Oh,” I said eventually. I shrugged. “My mistake. Keep the banana.”

I stepped over it on my way out, and the two men flattened against the wall.

I winked at one of them. “First-rate security guard you got. Without him, I’da busted up the place.” I pushed open the doors onto Washington Street.

I was about to give a covert thumbs-up to Poole, who sat in the Taurus on the corner of School and Washington, when the heels of two palms hit my shoulder and chucked me into the side of the building.

“Out of my way, you fucking derelict.”

I turned my head in time to see Chris Mullen walk back through the revolving doors, gesture toward the frozen security guard in my direction, and keep walking toward the elevator bank.

I broke into the stream of pedestrians filling the street, cleared the walkie-talkie from my pocket, and turned it on.

“ Poole, Mullen’s back.”

“Affirmative, Mr. Kenzie. Broussard’s contacting Ms. Gennaro as we speak. Turn around, go to your car. Do not blow our covers.” I could see his lips move behind his windshield, and then he dropped his walkie-talkie back onto his seat and glared at me.

I turned in the crowd.

A woman with coke-bottle glasses and hair tied back so tightly off her forehead her face looked like a bug’s stared up at me.

“Are you some kind of cop?”

I raised a finger to my lips. “Sssh.” I put the walkie-talkie back in my trench coat, left her standing there, mouth open, and walked back to my car.

As I opened the trunk, I saw Broussard leaning against the window of Eddie Bauer. He held his hand up by his ear and spoke into his wrist.

I tuned to his channel as I leaned under the open trunk.

“…say again, Miss Gennaro, subject en route. Abort immediately.”

I brushed all the eggshell from my beard and put a baseball cap over my head.

“Say again,” Broussard whispered. “Abort. Out.”

I tossed the trench coat in the trunk, removed my black leather jacket, placed the walkie-talkie in the pocket, and closed the jacket over my soiled T-shirt. I closed the trunk and cut back through the crowds to Eddie Bauer, stared through the window at the mannequins.

“She respond?”

“No,” Broussard said.

“Was her walkie-talkie working?”

“Couldn’t tell. We have to assume she heard me and clicked off before Mullen could hear it.”

“We go up,” I said.

“You take a move toward that building, I’ll blow your leg off at the knee.”

“She’s exposed up there. If her walkie-talkie was on the fritz and she didn’t hear your-”

“I won’t allow you to queer this surveillance just because you’re sleeping with her.” He came off the window and passed me in a loose, loping, post-jog stride. “She’s a professional. Why don’t you start acting like one?”

He walked up the street and I looked at my watch: 9:15 A.M.

Mullen had been inside four minutes. Why’d he turn around in the first place? Had Broussard blown the tail?

No. Broussard was too good. I’d only seen him because I knew to look for him, and even then he blended into crowds so well my eyes had skipped over him once before I’d identified him.

I looked at my watch again: 9:16.

If Angie had gotten Broussard’s message as soon as he’d realized Mullen was headed back to Devonshire Place, she would have been in the elevators, or possibly have gotten as far as the outside of Mullen’s door. She would have turned and headed right for the stairwell. And she’d be down by now.

9:17.

I watched the entrance to Devonshire Place. A pair of young stockbrokers stepped out in shiny Hugo Boss suits, Gucci shoes, and Geoffrey Beene ties, hair so thick with gel it would take a wood-chipper to muss it. They stepped aside for a slim woman in a dark-blue power suit and a matching pair of wafer-thin Revos over her eyes, checked out her ass as she stepped into a taxi.

9:18.

The only way Angie would still be up there was if she’d been forced to hide in Mullen’s apartment or if he’d caught her, either inside or at his door.

9:19.

She’d never have been dumb enough to hop back in the elevators if she had, in fact, gotten Broussard’s message. Stand there and see the car door open to Chris Mullen on the other side…

Hey, Ange, long time no see.

You too, Chris.

What brings you by my building?

Visiting a friend.

Yeah? Aren’t you working that missing girl case?

Why do you have a gun pointed at me, Chris?

9:20.

I glanced across Washington to the corner of School Street.

Poole met my eyes, shook his head very deliberately.

Maybe she had reached the lobby but was being harassed by the security guard.

Miss, hold on. I don’t remember seeing you in here before.

I’m new.

I don’t think so. His hand goes to the phone, dials 911…

But she’d be out the door by then.

9:22.

I took a step toward the building. Took another one. Then stopped.

If nothing had gone wrong, if Angie had simply turned off her walkie-talkie so the squawk wouldn’t alert anyone to her presence and was, as I stood there, standing on the other side of a fifteenth-floor exit door, watching Mullen’s apartment door through a small square of glass, and I stepped in front of the entrance just as Mullen walked out, recognized me…

I leaned back against the wall.

9:24.

Fourteen minutes since Mullen had shoved me into the wall and entered the building.

The walkie-talkie in my jacket purred against my chest. I pulled it out and there was a quick low bleat, followed by: “He’s coming back down.”

Angie’s voice.

“Where are you?”

“Thank God for fifty-inch TVs, is all I can say.”

“You’re inside?” Broussard said.

“’Course. Nice place, but easy locks, man, I swear.”

“What brought him back?”

“His suit. It’s a long story. Tell you later. He should be reaching the street any second.”

Mullen exited the building wearing a blue suit instead of the black one he’d worn on the way in. His tie was different, too. I was staring at the knot when the head above it swung my way and I glanced down at my shoes without moving my head. Quick movements are the first thing your paranoid drug dealer types notice in a crowd, so I wasn’t about to turn away.

I counted down from ten very slowly, thumbed down the volume on the walkie-talkie in my pocket, and barely heard Broussard’s voice. “He’s moving again. I got him.”

I looked up as Mullen’s shoulders moved in front of a young girl in a bright yellow jacket, and I turned my head slightly and picked up Broussard sliding through the crowd where Court became State Street as Mullen turned right before the Old State House and cut through the alley again.

I turned back to the window of Eddie Bauer, met my reflection.

“Whew,” I said.

15

An hour later, Angie opened the passenger door of the Crown Victoria and said, “Wired for sound, man. Wired for sound.”

I’d moved the car to the fourth story of the Pi Alley garage and pointed it toward Devonshire Place.

“You bugged every room?”

She lit a cigarette. “The phones, too.”

I looked at my watch. She’d been in there an hour flat. “What’re you, CIA?”

She smiled around her cigarette. “I tell you, I might have to kill you later, babe.”

“So what was up with the suit?”

She had a far-off look in her eyes as she stared through the windshield at the facade of Devonshire Place. Then she shook her head slightly.

“The suits. Right. He talks to himself.”

“Mullen?”

She nodded. “In the third person.”

“Must have picked it up from Cheese.”

“He comes in the door going, ‘Great fucking choice, Mullen. A black suit on a Friday. You out of your fucking mind?’ Like that.”

“I’d like Inane Superstitions for three hundred, Alex.”

She chuckled. “Exactly. So then he goes in his bedroom and he’s thrashing around in there, ripping his suit off, slamming hangers together in the closet, ya ya ya. Anyway, it takes him a few minutes, and then he selects a new suit and he puts it on, and I’m thinking, Good, he’s outa here, because I’m getting real cramped behind that TV, piles of cables back there like snakes…”

“And?”

Angie can get lost in moments like these, so sometimes a gentle prodding helps.

She scowled at me. “Mister Cut-to-the-Chase, over here. So…then suddenly I hear him talking again. He’s going, ‘Fuckhead. Hey, fuckhead! Yeah, you!”

“What?” I leaned forward.

“Interested again, are we?” She winked. “Yeah, so I think he’s spotted me. I think I’m bagged. Cooked. Right?” Her large brown eyes had grown huge.

“Right.”

She took a drag off her cigarette. “Nah. Talking to himself again.”

“He calls himself ‘fuckhead’?”

“When the mood strikes him, apparently. ‘Hey, fuckhead, you’re going to wear a yellow tie with this suit? That’s good. Real good, fuck face.”

“Fuck face.”

“I swear to God. A bit limited on the vocabulary, I’d say. So then there’s more thrashing around as he gets another tie, puts it on, mumbles under his breath the whole way. And I’m thinking, He’ll get the tie right, be halfway out the door, and decide the shirt’s wrong. I’ll be so cramped, I’ll need traction to get out from behind his TV.”

“And?”

“He left. I called you guys.” She flicked her cigarette out the window. “End of story.”

“Were you in the apartment when Broussard walkie-talkied he was on his way back?”

She shook her head. “At Mullen’s door with picks in hand.”

“You kidding me?”

“What?”

“You broke in after you knew he was coming back?”

She shrugged. “Something came over me.”

“You’re nuts.”

She gave me a throaty chuckle. “Nuts enough to keep you interested, Slick. That’s all I need.”

I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to kiss her or kill her.

The walkie-talkie squawked on the seat between us, and Broussard’s voice popped through the speaker. “ Poole, you got him?”

“Affirm. Taxi moving south on Purchase, heading for the expressway.”

“Kenzie.”

“Yeah?”

“Miss Gennaro with you?”

“Affirm,” I said in my deepest voice. Angie punched my arm.

“Stand by. Let’s see where he’s going. I’m going to start walking back.”

We listened to a minute or so of dead air before Poole came back on. “He’s on the expressway and heading south. Ms. Gennaro?”

“Yeah, Poole.”

“Are all our friends in place?”

“Every last one.”

“Turn on your receivers and leave your position. Pick up Broussard and head south.”

“You got it. Detective Broussard?”

“I’m heading west on Broad Street.”

I put the car in reverse.

“We’ll meet you at the corner of Broad and Batterymarch.”

“Copy that.”

As I left the garage, Angie turned on the boxy portable receiver in the backseat and adjusted the volume until we heard the soft hiss of Mullen’s empty apartment. I cut through the parking ramp under Devonshire Place, took a left on Water, rolled through Post Office and Liberty squares, and found Broussard leaning against a street lamp in front of a deli.

He hopped in the car as Poole ’s voice came over the walkie-talkie. “Getting off the expressway in Dorchester by the South Bay Shopping Center.”

“Back to the old neighborhood,” Broussard said. “You Dorchester boys just can’t stay away.”

“It’s like a magnet,” I assured him.

“Scratch that,” Poole said. “He’s taking a left on Boston Street, heading toward Southie.”

I said, “Not a very strong magnet, however.”

Ten minutes later we passed Poole’s empty Taurus on Gavin Street in the heart of Old Colony Project in South Boston and parked half a block up. Poole ’s last transmission had told us he was following Mullen into Old Colony on foot. Until he contacted us again, there wasn’t much to do but sit and wait and look at the project.

Not a bad-looking sight, actually. The streets are clean and tree-lined and curve gracefully through red-brick buildings with freshly painted white trim. Small hedges and squares of grass lie under most first-floor windows. The fence encircling the garden is upright, rooted, and free of rust. As far as projects go, Old Colony is one of the most aesthetically pleasing you’re apt to find in this country.

It has a bit of a heroin problem, though. And a teen suicide problem, which probably stems from the heroin. And the heroin probably stems from the fact that even if you do grow up in the prettiest project in the world, it’s still a project, and you’re still growing up there, and heroin ain’t much but it beats staring at the same walls and the same bricks and the same fences your whole life.

“I grew up here,” Broussard said, from the backseat. He peered out the window, as if expecting it to shrink or grow in front of him.

“With your name?” Angie said. “You can’t be serious.”

He smiled and gave her a small shrug. “Father was a merchant marine from New Orleans. Or ‘Nawlins,’ as he called it. He got in some trouble down there, ended up working the docks, in Charlestown and then Southie.” He cocked his head toward the brick buildings. “We settled here. Every third kid was named Frankie O’Brien and the rest were Sullivans and Sheas and Carrolls and Connellys. And if their first name wasn’t Frank, it was Mike or Sean or Pat.” He raised his eyebrows at me.

I held up my hands. “Oops.”

“So having a name like Remy Broussard…yeah, I’d say it toughened me up.” He smiled broadly and looked out at the projects, whistled softly. “Man, talk about going home again.”

“You don’t live in Southie anymore?” Angie asked.

He shook his head. “Haven’t since my dad died.”

“You miss it?”

He pursed his lips and glanced at some kids running past on the sidewalk, shouting, throwing what appeared to be bottle caps at each other for no apparent reason.

“Not really, no. Always felt like a misplaced country boy in the city. Even in New Orleans.” He shrugged. “I like trees.”

He turned the frequency dial on his walkie-talkie, raised it to his lips. “Detective Pasquale, this is Broussard. Over.”

Pasquale was one of the CAC detectives assigned to watch Concord Prison for any visitors who’d come to see Cheese. “This is Pasquale.”

“Anything?”

“Nothing. No visitors since you guys yesterday.”

“Phone calls?”

“Negative. Olamon lost phone privileges when he got in a beef on the yard last month.”

“Okay. Broussard out.” He dropped the walkie-talkie on the seat. He raised his head suddenly and watched a car come up the street toward us. “What have we here?”

A smoke-gray Lexus RX 300 with a vanity plate that read PHARO pulled past us and drove another twenty or thirty yards before banging a U-turn and pulling into a space along the curb and blocking an alley. It was a fifty-thousand-dollar sport utility vehicle built for off-road travel and those occasional jungle safaris that come through these parts, and every inch of it gleamed as if it had been polished with silk pillows. It fit right in with all the Escorts, Golfs, and Geos parked along the street, the early eighties Buick with green trash bags taped over the shattered rear window.

“The RX 300,” Broussard said, in the deep bass of a commercial announcer. “Pristine comfort for the drug dealer who can’t be hindered by snowstorms and bad roads.” He leaned forward and rested his arms on the seat back between us, his eyes on the rearview mirror. “Ladies and gentlemen, meet Pharaoh Gutierrez, Lord High of the city of Lowell.”

A slim Hispanic man stepped out of the Lexus. He wore black linen trousers and a lime-green shirt, clasped at the neck with a black stud, underneath a black silk dinner jacket with tails that fell to the bend in his knees.

“Quite the fashion plate,” Angie said.

“Ain’t he just?” Broussard said. “And he’s dressing conservative today. You should see the man when he goes out clubbing.”

Pharaoh Gutierrez straightened his tails and smoothed the thighs of his trousers.

“What the fuck is he doing here?” Broussard said softly.

“Who is he?”

“He handles Cheese’s action in Lowell and Lawrence, all the real sexy old mill towns. Rumor has it he’s the only one can deal with all the psycho fishermen up in New Bedford to boot.”

“So then it makes sense,” Angie said.

Broussard’s eyes remained fixed on the mirror. “What’s that?”

“Him meeting with Chris Mullen.”

Broussard shook his head. “No, no, no. Mullen and the Pharaoh despise each other. Something to do with a woman, I heard; goes back a decade. That’s why Gutierrez was banished to the 495 Beltway dumps, and Mullen gets to stay cosmopolitan. This makes no sense.”

Gutierrez looked up and down the street, using both hands to grasp the lapels of his dinner jacket like a judge, his chin tilted up slightly. His long thin nose sniffed the air. There was something recalcitrant and illogical in his stiff bearing; it didn’t go with his slim build. He cut the figure of a man who brooked no offense, yet always seemed to be expecting one. So insecure he’d kill to prove he wasn’t.

He reminded me of a few guys I’ve known-shorter guys, usually, or slight of build, but so ferociously determined to prove they could be just as dangerous as the big guys that they never stopped fighting, never paused for breath, ate too quickly. The men I’d known like this either became cops or criminals. There didn’t seem to be much room in between. And they often died quickly and young, an angry question frozen in their faces.

“He looks like a pain in the ass,” I said.

Broussard placed his hands on the seat back, rested his chin on them. “Yeah, that about sums the Pharaoh up. Too much to prove, not enough time to prove it. I always figured him for snapping, maybe walking up to Chris Mullen and busting a cap in his forehead some day, Cheese Olamon be damned.”

“Maybe this is that day,” Angie said.

“Maybe,” Broussard said.

Gutierrez walked around the Lexus and leaned back against the front quarter panel. He looked down the alley he blocked, then at his watch.

“Mullen’s coming your way.” Poole ’s voice was a whisper over the walkie-talkie.

“Unfriendly third party out front,” Broussard said. “Hang back, man.”

“Copy.”

Angie reached up and tilted the rearview mirror a bit to the right so we had a clear view of Gutierrez, the Lexus, and the edge of the alley.

Mullen appeared at the end of the alley. He ran a palm down his tie, looked at Gutierrez and the Lexus blocking his path for a still moment.

Broussard leaned back from the front seat, removed his Glock from his waistband, and racked the slide.

“This goes bad, don’t move from this car, just call 911.”

Mullen held up a slim black valise and smiled.

Gutierrez nodded.

Broussard ducked down on the seat and hooked his fingers over the passenger door handle.

Mullen reached out his free hand, and after a moment Gutierrez took it. Then the two men hugged, clapped each other’s backs with their fists.

Broussard let go of the door handle. “Oh, this is interesting.”

When they broke their clinch, Gutierrez held the valise. He turned to the Lexus and opened the door with a flourish and small bow, and Mullen climbed into the passenger seat. Then Gutierrez walked around to the driver’s door, climbed in, and started the engine.

“ Poole,” Broussard said into his walkie-talkie, “we got Pharaoh Gutierrez and Chris Mullen out here acting like long-lost brothers.”

“Hush your mouth.”

“Swear to God, man.”

Pharaoh Gutierrez’s Lexus pulled away from the curb and rolled past us.

As it continued up the street, Broussard raised the walkie-talkie to his lips. “Clear, Poole. We’re tailing a dark-gray Lexus SUV driven by Gutierrez with Mullen riding shotgun. They’re heading out of the project.”

As we passed the second alley, Poole came jogging out. He wore a vagrant’s disguise similar to my own except he’d added the dash of a dark-blue bandanna. He removed it as he crossed behind our car and trotted to the Taurus, and we followed the Lexus back onto Boston Street. Gutierrez took a right, and we followed into Andrew Square and then over to the annex road that ran parallel to the expressway.

“If Mullen and Gutierrez are friends now,” Angie said, “what does that mean?”

“Shitload of bad news for Cheese Olamon.”

“Cheese is in prison, his two lieutenants-supposedly mortal enemies-join up against him?”

Broussard nodded. “Take over the empire.”

“Where’s that leave Amanda?” I said.

Broussard shrugged. “In the middle somewhere.”

“The middle of what?” I said. “Crosshairs?”

16

One of the things that happens when you follow scumbags around for a while is that you grow a little envious of their lifestyles.

Oh, it’s not the big things-the sixty-thousand-dollar cars, the million-dollar condos, the fifty-yard-line seats at Patriots’ games-that really get to you, though they can be annoying. It’s the small, everyday carte blanche a good drug dealer enjoys that seems truly alien to the rest of us working folk.

For example, in all the time we watched them, I rarely saw Chris Mullen or Pharaoh Gutierrez obey traffic signals. Red lights, apparently, were for the wee people, stop signs for suckers. The fifty-five-mile-per-hour speed limit on the expressway? Please. Why go fifty-five when ninety gets you there all that much faster? Why use the passing lane when the breakdown lane is free and clear?

And then there was the parking situation. A parking space in Boston is about as common as a ski slope in the Sahara. Little old ladies in mink stoles have fought gun battles over a contested spot. In the mid-eighties some moron actually paid a quarter million dollars for a deeded parking slip in a Beacon Hill garage, and that didn’t include monthly maintenance fees.

Boston: We’re small, we’re cold, but we’ll kill for a good parking space. Come on up. Bring the family.

Gutierrez and Mullen and several of their minions we followed over the next few days didn’t have that problem. They simply double-parked: wherever and whenever the mood struck them, for as long as they desired.

Once, on Columbus Avenue in the South End, Chris Mullen finished his lunch and walked out of Hammersleys to find a very pissed-off artiste complete with signature goatee and three studs in one ear waiting for him. Chris had blocked in the artiste’s dumpy Civic with his sleek black Benz. The artiste’s girlfriend was with him, so he had to make a stink. From where we sat, idling a half block up on the other side of the street, we couldn’t hear what was said, but we got the gist. The artiste and his girlfriend shouted and pointed. As Chris approached he tucked his cashmere scarf under his dark Armani raincoat, smoothed his tie, and kicked the artiste in the kneecap so deftly the guy was on the ground before his girlfriend ran out of things to say. Chris stood so close to the woman they could have been mistaken for lovers. He placed his index finger against her forehead and cocked his thumb, held it there for what probably seemed like hours to her. Then he dropped the hammer. He took his finger back from the woman’s head and blew on it. He smiled at her. He leaned in and gave her a quick peck on her cheek.

Then Chris walked around to his car, got in, and drove off, left the girl staring after him, stunned, still unaware, I think, that her boyfriend was howling in pain, writhing on the sidewalk like a cat with a broken back.

Besides ourselves and Broussard and Poole, several cops from the CAC unit worked the surveillance, and in addition to Gutierrez and Mullen we observed a rogues’ gallery of Cheese Olamon’s men. There was Carlos “the Shiv” Orlando, who oversaw the day-to-day operations in the housing projects and kept a stack of comic books with him wherever he went. There was JJ MacNally, who’d worked his way up to head pimp of all non-Vietnamese hookers in North Dorchester but dated and doted upon a Vietnamese girl who looked to be all of fifteen. Joel Green and Hicky Vister oversaw loansharking and bookmaking from a booth in Elsinore’s, a bar Cheese owned in Lower Mills, and Buddy Perry and Brian Box-two guys so dumb they’d need maps to find their own bathrooms-ran the muscle.

It was not, from even a cursory glance, a think tank. Cheese had risen through the ranks by paying his dues, showing respect, paying homage to anyone who could hurt him, and stepping up whenever there was a power vacuum. The biggest of these happened a few years back when Jack Rouse, godfather of the Irish mob in Dorchester and Southie, vanished along with his chief henchman, Kevin Hurlihy, a guy who had a hornet’s nest in his brain and industrial corrosive for blood. When they disappeared, Cheese put in a bid for upper Dorchester and got the action. Cheese was smart, Chris Mullen was halfway there, and Pharaoh Gutierrez seemed to have a bit on the ball. The rest of Cheese’s guys, though, conformed to his policy of never hiring anyone who, besides being greedy (which Cheese regarded as a given in this business), was smart enough to do anything about it.

So he hired chuckleheads and adrenaline freaks and guys who liked to wad their money in rubber bands and talk like James Caan and swagger, but who had very little ambition beyond that.

Every time Mullen or Gutierrez went anywhere indoors-an apartment, a warehouse, an office building-the place was immediately tagged for CAC surveillance and over the next three days was watched around the clock and infiltrated if possible.

The bugs we’d placed in Mullen’s place revealed that he called his mother every night at seven and had the same conversation about why he wasn’t married, why he was too selfish to give his mother grandkids, why he didn’t date nice girls, and how come he always looked so pale when he had such a good job working for the Forest Service. At seven-thirty every night, he watched Jeopardy!, and answered the questions aloud, batting about.300. He had a real gift for geography questions but flat-out sucked when it came to seventeenth-century French artists.

We heard him talk to several girlfriends, bullshit with Gutierrez about cars and movies and the Bruins, but like a lot of criminals, he seemed to have a healthy distrust of talking business over the phone.

The search for Amanda McCready had failed on all other fronts, and police manpower was gradually being shifted away from CAC and into other areas.

On the fourth day of surveillance, Broussard and Poole got a call from Lieutenant Doyle telling them to be down at the precinct in half an hour and to make sure they had us with them.

“This could be ugly,” Poole said, as we drove downtown.

“Why us?” Angie said.

“That’s what we meant about ugly,” Poole said, and smiled as Angie stuck her tongue out at him.

Doyle didn’t seem to be having a great day. His skin was gray and the flesh under his eyes was dark and his entire body smelled of cold coffee.

“Close the door,” he said to Poole, as we entered.

We took seats across the desk from him as Poole shut the door behind us.

Doyle said, “When I set up CAC and was looking for good detectives, I looked everywhere but Vice and Narcotics. Now why would I do that, Detective Broussard?”

Broussard played with his tie. “Because everyone’s afraid to work with Vice and Narco, sir.”

“And why is that, Sergeant Raftopoulos?”

Poole smiled. “Because we’re so pretty, sir.”

Doyle made a keep-it-coming gesture with his hand and nodded several times to himself.

“Because,” he said eventually, “Narco and Vice detectives are cowboys. Crazy cops. They like the juice, like the jack, like the rush. Like to do things their own way.”

Poole nodded. “Often an unfortunate side effect of the assignments, yes, sir.”

“But I was assured by your lieutenant at the Oh-Six that you two were stand-up guys, very effective, very by-the-book. Yes?”

“That’s the rumor, sir,” Broussard said.

Doyle gave him a tight smile. “You made Detective First last year. Correct, Broussard?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Care to be busted back to Second or Third? Patrolman, possibly?”

“Uh, no, sir. That I would not enjoy much, sir.”

“Then stop breaking my balls with the wise-ass shit, Detective.”

Broussard coughed into his fist. “Yes, sir.”

Doyle picked a sheet of paper off his desk, read it for a bit, placed it back down. “You’ve got half the detectives in the CAC working the surveillance of Olamon’s men. When I asked why, you said you’d received an anonymous tip that Olamon was involved in the disappearance of Amanda McCready.” He nodded to himself again, then looked up and locked eyes with Poole. “Care to revise that statement?”

“Sir?”

Doyle looked at his watch and stood up. “I’ll count down from ten. Tell me the truth before I get to one, and maybe you’ll keep your jobs. Ten,” he said.

“Sir.”

“Nine.”

“Sir, we don’t know-”

“Oooh. Eight. Seven.”

“We believe Amanda McCready was kidnapped by Cheese Olamon in order to ensure the return of money her mother stole from Olamon’s organization.” Poole sat back, shrugged at Broussard.

“So, it’s kidnapping,” Doyle said, and sat down.

“Possibly,” Broussard said.

“Which is federal.”

“Only if we’re sure,” Poole said.

Doyle opened a desk drawer and removed a tape recorder, which he tossed on top of the desk. He looked at Angie and me for the first time since we’d entered the office and pressed PLAY.

There was a bit of scratchy static, then the sound of a phone ringing, then a voice I recognized as Lionel’s said, “Hello.”

A woman’s voice on the other end of the line said, “Tell your sister to send the old cop, the good-looking cop, and the two private detectives to the Granite Rail Quarry tomorrow night at eight o’clock. Tell them to approach from the Quincy side, up the old railway slope.”

“Excuse me. Who is this?”

“Tell them to bring what they found in Charlestown.”

“Ma’am, I’m not sure what-”

“Tell them what they found in Charlestown will be traded for what we found in Dorchester.” The woman’s voice, low and flat, lightened. “You got that, honey?”

“I’m not sure. Can I get a piece of paper?”

A throaty chuckle. “You’re a caution, honey. Really. It’s all on tape. For anyone who’s listening? If we see anyone but the four I mentioned at Granite Rail tomorrow night, that package from Dorchester goes over a cliff.”

“No one’s-”

“Bye-bye, honey. You stay sweet now. You hear?”

“No, wait-”

There was a click, followed by the harsh sound of Lionel’s breathing, followed by a dial tone.

Doyle turned the tape recorder off. He leaned back in his chair and made a steeple of his fingers, tapped it against his lower lip.

After a few minutes’ silence, he said, “What did you find in Charlestown, guys?”

No one said anything.

He swiveled his chair, looked at Poole and Broussard. “You want me to do the countdown thing again?”

Poole looked at Broussard. Broussard held out a hand, palm up, and swung it back in Poole ’s direction.

“Thanks, sweetie.” Poole turned to Doyle. “We found two hundred thousand dollars in the backyard of David Martin and Kimmie Niehaus.”

“The bloaters in C-Town,” Doyle said.

“Yes, sir.”

“And this two hundred thousand-it’s been tagged as evidence, of course.”

Poole swung his hand in Broussard’s direction.

Broussard looked at his shoes. “Not exactly, sir.”

“Really.” Doyle picked up a pencil, jotted something in the notepad by his elbow. “And after I call Internal Affairs and you’re both summarily fired by this department, which security firm do you think you’ll work for?”

“Well, you see-”

“Or will it be a bar?” Doyle smiled broadly. “Civilians love that-knowing their bartender’s a former cop. Get to hear all those war stories.”

“Lieutenant,” Poole said, “with all due respect, we’d love to keep our jobs.”

“I’m sure you would.” Doyle wrote some more on the notepad. “Should have thought of that before you misappropriated evidence in a murder investigation. That’s a felony, gentlemen.” He picked up the phone, punched two numbers, waited. “Michael, get me the names of the investigating officers on the David Martin/Kimmie Niehaus homicides. I’ll hold.” He tucked the phone against his shoulder, tapped the pencil eraser against the desktop, and whistled lightly through his teeth. A small, tinny voice emanated from the receiver, and he leaned into the phone again. “Yeah. Got it.” He scribbled on the notepad and hung up. “Detectives Daniel Guden and Mark Leonard. Know ’em?”

“Vaguely,” Broussard said.

“I can assume then that you failed to let them know what you found in the backyard of their victims.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Yes, sir, you let them know? Or yes, sir, you failed to let them know?’

“The latter,” Poole said.

Doyle placed his hands behind his head and leaned back in his chair again. “Run it down for me now, gentlemen. If it doesn’t smell as bad as it does at the moment, maybe-and I mean only maybe-you’ll have jobs next week. But I promise you this: They won’t be with CAC. I want fucking cowboys, I’ll watch Rio Bravo.”

Poole told him everything, from the time Angie and I had spotted Chris Mullen on the newscast videos until now. The only thing he left out was the ransom note they’d found in Kimmie’s underwear, and once I replayed the tape of Lionel’s conversation with the woman in my head, I realized that without the note there was no hard evidence that Lionel’s caller was demanding money for a child. No evidence of kidnapping: no Feds.

“Where’s the money?” Doyle asked, when Poole finished.

“I have it,” I said.

“You do, do you?” he said, without glancing in my direction. “This is very good, Sergeant Poole. Two hundred thousand dollars in stolen money-and stolen evidence, I might add-in the hands of a private citizen whose name has been brought up over the years in connection with three unsolved homicides and-some say-the disappearance of Jack Rouse and Kevin Hurlihy.”

“Not me,” I said. “Must be confusing me with that other Patrick Kenzie guy.”

Angie kicked my ankle.

“Pat,” Doyle said, and leaned forward in his chair, looked at me.

“Patrick,” I said.

“’Scuse me,” Doyle said. “Patrick, I have you dead to rights on receiving stolen property, obstruction of justice, interfering in a capitol felony investigation, and tampering with evidence in the same. Care to fuck with me some more and see what I can dig up if I really don’t like you?”

I shifted in my chair.

“What’s that?” Doyle said. “I didn’t hear you.”

“No,” I said.

He put his hand behind his ear. “Again?”

“No,” I said. “Sir.”

He smiled, slapped the desk with his fingers. “Very good, son. Speak when spoken to. Otherwise, keep it zipped.” He nodded at Angie. “Like your partner there. Always heard you were the brains of the operation, ma’am. Seems to be holding true here.” He swiveled back toward Poole and Broussard. “So you two geniuses decided to play at Cheese Olamon’s level and swap the money for the kid.”

“Pretty much, sir.”

“And the reason I shouldn’t turn this over to the Feds is?” He held out his hands.

“Because there’s been no official ransom demand,” Broussard said.

Doyle glanced down at the tape recorder. “What did we just listen to, then?”

“Well, sir.” Poole leaned across the desk, pointed at the tape recorder. “If you listen to it again you’ll hear a woman suggesting a trade of ‘something’ found in Charlestown for ‘something’ found in Dorchester. That woman could be discussing the trade of stamps for baseball cards.”

“The fact that she called the mother of a missing child, that wouldn’t intrigue our federal law enforcement brothers?”

“Well, technically,” Broussard said, “she called the brother of the missing child’s mother.”

“And said, ‘Tell your sister,’” Doyle said.

“Yes, true, but still, sir, no hard evidence that we’re talking about a kidnapping. And you know the Feds, they fucked up Ruby Ridge, Waco, cut insane deals with the Boston mob, they-”

Doyle held up a hand. “We’re all aware of recent Bureau transgressions, Detective Broussard.” He looked down at the tape recorder, then at the notes he’d jotted by his elbow. “The Granite Rail Quarry is not our jurisdiction. It’s shared between the State Police and the Quincy P.D. So…” He clapped his hands together. “Okay.”

“Okay?” Broussard said.

“Okay means no explicit mention of the McCready kid means we propose a joint effort with the Staties and the Quincy blues. Leave the Feds at home. The caller said no cops besides you two on the Granite Rail Quarry trail. Fine. But we’re going to lock down those hills, gentlemen. We’re going to tie a rope around the Quincy quarries, and as soon as that kid’s out of harm’s way, we’re going to throw a lead blanket over Mullen, Gutierrez, and whoever else thinks he’s going to have a two-hundred-grand payday.” He slapped his fingers on the desktop again. “Sound good?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Yes, sir.”

He gave them that broad, icy smile of his. “And once that’s done, I’m transferring you humps out of my division and out of my precinct. Anything goes wrong at that quarry tomorrow night? I’m transferring you to the Bomb Squad. You get to mark time till your retirements climbing under cars and hoping they don’t go boom. Any questions?”

“No, sir.”

“No, sir.”

A swivel back our way. “Mr. Kenzie and Miss Gennaro, you are civilians. I don’t like your being in this office, never mind going up that hill tomorrow night, but I don’t have much choice. So here’s the deal: You will not engage the suspects in any exchange of gunfire. You will not speak with the suspects. Should there be a confrontation, you will drop to your knees and cover your heads. When this is over, you will not discuss any aspects of the operation with the press. And you will not write books about the affair. Clear?”

I nodded.

Angie nodded.

“If you fail me on any of these points, I’ll have your licenses and gun permits revoked, and I’ll put the Cold Case squad on the Marion Socia homicide, call my friends in the press, and have them do a retrospective on the strange disappearance of Jack Rouse and Kevin Hurlihy. Understood?”

We nodded.

“Give me a ‘Yes, Lieutenant Doyle.’”

“Yes, Lieutenant Doyle,” Angie murmured.

“Yes, Lieutenant Doyle,” I said.

“Excellent.” Doyle leaned back in his chair and held his arms out wide to the four of us. “Now get the fuck out of my sight.”

“Swell guy,” Angie said, when we reached the street.

“He’s just an old softie,” Poole said.

“Really?”

Poole looked at me like I was sniffing glue and shook his head very slowly.

“Oh,” I said.

“The money is safe, isn’t it, Mr. Kenzie?”

I nodded. “You want it now?”

Poole and Broussard looked at each other, then shrugged.

“No point,” Broussard said. “There’ll be a war room meeting sometime tomorrow between us and the Staties and the Quincy boys. Bring it then.”

“Who knows?” Poole said. “Maybe, with all the manpower we have staking out Olamon’s people, we’ll catch one of them leaving the house for the quarries tomorrow with the child in tow. We’ll drop ’em then and this whole thing’ll be over.”

“Sure, Poole,” Angie said. “Sure. It’ll be that easy.”

Poole sighed and rocked back on his heels.

“Man,” Broussard said, “I don’t want to work for no Bomb Squad.”

Poole chuckled. “This,” he said, “is the Bomb Squad, boy.”

We sat on the steps of Beatrice and Lionel’s front porch and gave them as much of an update and recent case history as we could, fudging any details that could possibly put them under federal indictment if this blew up in our faces at a later date.

“So,” Beatrice said when we finished, “this all happened because Helene pulled one of her fucked-up schemes and ripped off the wrong guy.”

I nodded.

Lionel picked at a large callus on the side of his thumb, blew air out of his mouth in a steady rush. “She’s my sister,” he said eventually, “but this-this is…”

“Unforgivable,” Beatrice said.

He looked back at her, then turned back to me as if he’d had tonic water splashed in his face. “Yeah. Unforgivable.”

Angie came over to the railing and I stood up, felt her warm hand slide into mine.

“If it’s any consolation,” she said, “I doubt anyone could have seen this coming.”

Beatrice crossed the porch and sat on the steps beside her husband. She took both his large hands in hers and they looked far off down the street for a minute or so, their faces drawn and empty and angry and resigned all at the same time.

“I just don’t understand,” Beatrice said. “I just don’t understand,” she whispered.

“Will they kill her?” Lionel looked over his shoulder at us.

“No,” I said. “There’s no sense in that.”

Angie squeezed my hand to hold me up against the weight of the lie.

Back at the apartment, I took the first shower to wash off four days of sitting in cars and following scumbags around town, and Angie took the second.

When she came out, she stood in the living room doorway, the white towel wrapped tightly around her honey skin, and ran a brush back through her hair, watching me as I sat in the armchair and jotted notes of our meeting with Lieutenant Doyle.

I looked up, met her eyes.

They are amazing eyes, the color of caramel and very large. I sometimes think they could drink me if they wanted to. Which would be fine, believe me. Perfectly fine.

“I’ve missed you,” she said.

“We’ve been locked in a car for three and a half days. What was to miss?”

She tilted her head slightly, held my gaze until I got it.

“Oh,” I said. “You mean you’ve missed me.”

“Yeah.”

I nodded. “How much?”

She dropped the towel.

“That much,” I said and something caught in my throat. “My, my.”

After making love, I live for a time in a world of echoes and snapshot memories. I lie in the damp dark with Angie’s heart beating atop my own, her spine pressed against my fingertips or her hip warming my palm, and I can hear the echo of her soft groans, a sudden gasp, the low, throaty chuckle she emits after we’re spent and she tosses her head back for a moment and her dark hair falls from her face and down her back. With my eyes closed, I see in close-up the bite of her upper teeth on her lower lip, the cut of her calf on the white mattress, the press of a shoulder blade against her flesh, the wisps of dream and appetite that suddenly cloud and moisten her eyes, the points of her dark pink nails sinking into the skin above my abdomen.

After making love with Angie, I’m no good for anything for half an hour or so. Most times, I need someone to draw me a diagram just to dial a phone. All but the most basic motor skills are largely beyond me. Intelligent conversation is out of the question. I just float in echoes and snapshots.

“Hey.” She drummed her fingers on my chest, tightened her thigh against the inside of my own.

“Yeah?”

“You ever think-”

“Not at the moment.”

She laughed, hooked a foot around my ankle, and rose up my chest a bit, ran a tongue along my throat. “Seriously, just for a sec.”

“Shoot,” I managed.

“You ever think, I mean, when you’re inside me, that what we’re doing could, if we let it, produce life?”

I tilted my head and opened my eyes, looked into hers. She stared back calmly. A smudge of mascara under her left eye looked like a bruise in the soft dark of our bedroom.

And it was our bedroom now, wasn’t it? She still owned the house she’d grown up in on Howes Street, still kept most of her furniture there, but she hadn’t spent a night there in almost two years.

Our bedroom. Our bed. Our sheets tangled around these two bodies lying together, heartbeats drumming, flesh pressed together so tightly it would be hard for an observer to decide where one of us ended and the other began. Hard for me sometimes, too.

“A child,” I said.

She nodded.

“Bring a child,” I said slowly, “into this world. With our jobs.”

Another nod, and this time her eyes glistened.

“You want that?”

“I didn’t say that,” she whispered, and leaned in and kissed the tip of my nose. “I said, ‘Did you ever think about it?’ Did you ever think about the power we have when we’re making love in this bed and the springs are making noise and we’re making noise and everything feels…well, wonderful, and not just because of the physical sensation, but because we’re joined-me and you-right here?” She pressed a palm against my groin. “We’re capable of creating life, baby. Me and you. One pill I forget to take-one chance in, what is it, a hundred thousand?-and I could have life growing in me right now. Your life. Mine.” She kissed me. “Ours.”

Lying like this, so close, so warm with the other’s heat, so deeply, deeply enthralled with each other, it was easy to wish life was beginning at this moment in her womb. All that was sacred and mysterious about a woman’s body in general and Angie’s in particular seemed locked in this cocoon of sheets, this soft mattress and rickety bed. It all seemed so clear suddenly.

But the world was not this bed. The world was cement-cold and jaggedly sharp. The world was filled with monsters who’d once been babies, who’d started as zygotes in the womb, who’d emerged from woman in the only miracle the twentieth century has left, yet emerged angry or twisted or destined to be so. How many other lovers had lain in similar cocoons, similar beds, and felt what we felt now? How many monsters had they produced? And how many victims?

“Speak,” Angie said, and pushed the damp hair off my forehead.

“I’ve thought about it,” I said.

“And?”

“And it awes me.”

“Me too.”

“Scares me.”

“Me too.”

“A lot.”

Her eyes grew small. “How come?”

“Little kids found in cement barrels, the Amanda McCreadys who vanish like they’d never lived, pedophiles out there roaming the streets with electrical tape and nylon cord. This world is a shit hole, honey.”

She nodded. “And?”

“And what?”

“And it’s a shit hole. Okay. But then what? I mean, our parents probably knew it was a shit hole, but they had us.”

“Great childhoods we had, too.”

“Would you prefer never to have been born?”

I placed both hands on her lower back and she leaned back into them. Her body rose off mine and the sheet fell from her back and she settled on my lap and looked down at me, her hair falling from behind her ears, naked and beautiful and as close to sheer perfection as any thing or any person or any fantasy I’d ever known.

“Would I prefer never to have been born?”

“That’s the question,” she said softly.

“Of course not,” I said. “But would Amanda McCready?”

“Our child wouldn’t be Amanda McCready.”

“How do we know?”

“Because we wouldn’t rip off drug dealers who’d take our child to get the money back.”

“Kids disappear every day for a lot less reason than that, and you know it. Kids disappear because they were walking to school, on the wrong corner at the wrong time, got separated from their parents at a mall. And they die, Ange. They die.”

A single tear fell to her breast, and after a moment it slid over the nipple and fell to my chest, already cold by the time it hit my skin.

“I know that,” she said. “But be that as it may, I want your child. Not today, maybe not even next year. But I want it. I want to produce something beautiful from my body that is us and yet a person completely unlike us.”

“You want a baby.”

She shook her head. “I want your baby.”

At some point we dozed.

Or I did. I woke a few minutes later to find her gone from the bed, and I got up and walked through the dark apartment into the kitchen, found her sitting at the table by the window, her bare flesh paled by the fractured moonlight cutting through rips in the shade.

There was a notepad by her elbow, the case file in front of her, and she looked up as I came through the doorway and said, “They can’t let her live.”

“Cheese and Mullen?”

She nodded. “It’s a dumb tactical move. They have to kill her.”

“They’ve kept her alive so far.”

“How do we know? And even if they have, they’ll only do so, maybe, until they get the money. Just to be sure. But then they’ll have to kill her. She’s too much of a loose end.”

I nodded.

“You’ve already faced this,” she said.

“Yes.”

“So tomorrow night?”

“I expect to find a corpse.”

She lit a cigarette, and her skin was momentarily flushed by the lighter flame. “Can you live with that?”

“No.” I came over to the table by her, put my hand on her shoulder, was aware of our nakedness in the kitchen, and I found myself thinking again of the power we held in our bed and our bodies, that potential third life floating like a spirit between our bare skin.

“Bubba?” she said.

“Most certainly.”

“ Poole and Broussard won’t like it.”

“Which is why we won’t tell them he’s there.”

“If Amanda is still alive when we reach the quarries, and we can locate her, or at least pinpoint her location-”

“Then Bubba will drop anyone holding her. Drop ’em like a sack of shit and disappear back into the night.”

She smiled. “You want to call him?”

I slid the phone across the table. “Be my guest.”

She crossed her legs as she dialed, tilted her head into the receiver. “Hey, big boy,” she said, when he answered, “want to come out and play tomorrow night?”

She listened for a moment, and her smile widened.

“If you’re particularly blessed, Bubba, sure, you’ll get to shoot someone.”

17

Major John Dempsey of the Massachusetts State Police had a wide Irish face as flat as a pancake and the wary, bulging eyes of an owl. He even blinked like an owl; a sudden snap of the ocular muscles would clamp his thick lids down over his eyes, where they’d remain a tenth of a second longer than normal before they’d snap back up like window shades and disappear under the brows.

Like most state troopers I’ve encountered, his spine seemed forged of lead pipe and his lips were pale and too thin; in the flat whiteness of his face they appeared to have been etched into the flesh by a weak pencil. His hands were a creamy white, the fingers long and feminine, the nails manicured as smooth as the edge of a nickel. But those hands were the only softness in him. The rest of him was constructed of shale, his slim frame so hard and stripped of body fat that if he fell from the podium I was sure he’d break apart in chips.

The uniforms of our state troopers have always unsettled me, and none more so than that of the upper ranks. There’s something aggressively Teutonic in all that spit-polished black leather, those pronounced epaulets and shiny silver brass, the hard strap of the Sam Browne as it clamps across the chest from right shoulder to left hip, the extra quarter inch of height in the cap brim so that it settles over the forehead and shrouds the eyes.

City cops always remind me of the grunts in old war movies. No matter how nicely dressed, they seem one step away from crawling on their bellies up the beach at Normandy, wet cigar clenched between their teeth, dirt raining on their backs. But when I look at the average Statie-the clenched jaw and arrogant turn of chin, the sun glinting off all those uniform parts built to glint-I instantly picture them goose-stepping down the autumn streets of Poland circa 1939.

Major Dempsey had removed his large hat shortly after we were all assembled, to reveal an alarmingly orange tuft of hair underneath. It was shorn to bright stubbled pikes that rose from the scalp like Astroturf, and he seemed aware of the disconcerting effect it had on strangers. He smoothed the sides with his palms, lifted the pointer off his desk, and tapped it against his open palm as his owl eyes surveyed the room with a bemused contempt. To his left, in a small row of chairs under the seal of the Commonwealth, Lieutenant Doyle sat with the police chief of Quincy, both dressed in their funereal best, all three watching the room with imposing stares.

We’d convened in the briefing room of the State Police barracks in Milton, and the entire left side of the room was commandeered by the Staties themselves, all hawkeyed and smooth-skinned, hats tucked crisply under their arms, not so much as a hairline wrinkle in their trousers or shirts.

The left side of the room was made up of Quincy cops in the front rows and Boston in the rear. The Quincy cops seemed to be emulating the Staties, though I spotted a few wrinkles, a few hats cast to the floor by their feet. They were mostly young men and women, cheeks as smooth and shiny as striped bass, and I’d have bet hard cash none of them had ever fired their guns in the line of duty.

The rear of the room, by comparison, looked like the waiting area at a soup kitchen. The uniformed cops looked okay, but the CAC guys and women, as well as the host of other detectives brought in from other squads on temporary assignment, were a color-clashing, coffee-stained collection of five o’clock shadow, cigarette-stink breath, rumpled hair, and clothes so wrinkled you could lose small appliances in their folds. Most of the detectives had been working the Amanda McCready case since the outset, and they had that “fuck-you-if-you-don’t-like-it” demeanor of all cops who’ve been clocking too much overtime and banging on too many doors. Unlike the Staties and the Quincy cops, the members of the Boston contingent sprawled in their seats, kicked at each other, and coughed a lot.

Angie and I, arriving just before the meeting began, took our seats in the rear. In her freshly laundered black jeans and untucked black cotton shirt under a brown leather jacket, Angie looked good enough to sit up with the Quincy cops, but I was strictly post-Seattle grunge in a torn flannel shirt over a white Ren amp; Stimpy T-shirt and jeans speckled with flecks of white paint. My hi-tops were brand-spanking-new, though.

“Those the kind you pump?” Broussard asked, as we slid into the seats beside him and Poole.

I brushed a piece of lint off my new kicks. “Nope.”

“Too bad. I like the pump.”

“According to the commercial,” I said, “they’ll help me jump as high as Penny Hardaway and get two chicks at once.”

“Oh, well, then. Worth the cash.”

Behind Major Dempsey, two troopers hung a large topographical map of the Quincy quarries and the Blue Hills Reservation on the wall. As soon as it was fastened, Dempsey lifted his pointer and tapped a spot midway up the map.

“Granite Rail Quarry,” he said crisply. “Recent developments in the Amanda McCready disappearance lead us to believe that an exchange will be made tonight at twenty hundred hours. The kidnappers wish to trade the child for a satchel of stolen money which is currently in the care of the Boston Police Department.” He drew a large circle around the map with his pointer. “As you can see, the quarries were probably chosen because of the myriad potential escape routes.”

“Myriad,” Poole said under his breath. “Good word.”

“Even with helicopters at our disposal and a full-scale task force waiting at strategic points around both the quarries and the Blue Hills Reservation, this will not be an easy area to contain. To make things even more difficult, the kidnappers have demanded that only four people approach the area tonight. Until the exchange occurs, we have to maintain a completely invisible presence.”

A trooper raised his hand and cleared his throat. “Major, how are we to establish a perimeter around the area and still keep from being seen?”

“There’s the rub.” Dempsey ran a hand over his chin.

“He didn’t just say that,” Poole whispered.

“He did.”

“Wow.”

“Command Post One,” Dempsey said, “will be set up in this valley, at the base of the bunny slope in the Blue Hills. From there, the top of Granite Rail Quarry is less than one minute by helicopter. The majority of our forces will be on standby there. As soon as we have word that the exchange has been completed, we will sweep out and around the reservation, block Quarry Street at both ends, Chickatawbut and Saw Cut Notch roads at both ends, seal off both the south and north exits and entrance ramps to the southeast expressway, and throw a blanket over the whole kit and kaboodle.”

“Kit,” Poole said.

“Kaboodle,” Broussard said.

“Command Post Two will be here at the entrance to Quincy Cemetery, and Command Post Three…”

We listened for the next hour as Dempsey outlined the plan of containment and carved up duties between state and local police departments. Over one hundred and fifty cops would be deployed and camping out around the Quincy quarries and at the edge of the Blue Hills. They had three helicopters at their disposal. The elite BPD Hostage Negotiation Team would be on-site. Lieutenant Doyle and the Quincy police chief would act as “rovers”-each in his own car, headlamps off, circling the quarries in the dark.

“Pray they don’t crash into each other,” Poole said.

The quarries comprised a large land mass. At the height of the New England granite boom, more than sixty were in operation. Granite Rail remained one of twenty-two that hadn’t been filled in, and the sites of the rest spread wide across the torn hills between the expressway and the Blue Hills. We’d be entering at night with very little light. Even the rangers Dempsey brought in to speak about the area admitted that there were so many trails in those hills that some were known only to the few people who used them.

But the trails weren’t really the issue. Trails eventually led somewhere and that somewhere was a small number of roads, a public park or two. Even if the kidnappers could slip through the dragnet on the hills, they’d be nabbed somewhere below. If it were a case of just the four of us and a few cops monitoring the hills, I’d give the edge to Cheese’s people. But with one hundred and fifty cops, I was hard-pressed to see how anyone planned to move in and out of there unnoticed.

And no matter how dumb most of the people in Cheese’s organization were, even they had to know that, no matter what their demands, in a hostage situation there would be a lot of cops.

So how were they planning to get out?

I raised my hand the next time Dempsey paused, and when he saw me, he looked like he was considering ignoring me, so I said, “Major.”

He looked down at his pointer. “Yes.”

“I don’t see how the kidnappers can escape.”

Several cops chuckled and Dempsey smiled.

“Well, that’s the point, Mr. Kenzie, isn’t it?”

I smiled back. “I understand that, but don’t you think the kidnappers do too?”

“How do you mean?”

“They picked this location. They would have realized that you’d surround it. Right?”

Dempsey shrugged. “Crime makes you stupid.”

Another round of polite laughter from the boys in blue.

I waited for it to die down. “Major, if they had planned for such a contingency, though, what then?”

His smile widened, but his owl eyes didn’t follow suit. They narrowed at me, slightly confused, slightly angry. “There’s no way out, Mr. Kenzie. No matter what they think. It’s a billion to one.”

“But they think they’re the one.”

“Then they’re wrong.” Dempsey looked at his pointer and scowled. “Any more dumb questions?”

At six, we met with Detective Maria Dykema of Hostage Negotiation in a van they’d parked under a water tower about thirty yards off Ricciuti Drive, the road that was carved through the heart of the Quincy quarries. She was a slim, petite woman in her early forties with short hair the color of milk and almond eyes. She wore a dark business suit and tugged idly at the pearl earring on her left ear throughout most of our conversation.

“If any of you come face-to-face with the kidnapper and the child, what do you do?” Her glance swept across the four of us and settled on the wall of the van, where someone had taped a copy of the National Lampoon picture in which a hand held a pistol to the head of a dog and the caption read: BUY THIS MAGAZINE OR WE’LL KILL THIS DOG. “I’m waiting,” she said.

Broussard said, “We tell the suspect to release-”

“You ask the supect,” she corrected.

“We ask the suspect to release the child.”

“And if he replies ‘Fuck off’ and cocks his pistol, what then?”

“We-”

“You back off,” she said. “You keep him in sight, but you give him room. He panics, the kid dies. He feels threatened, same thing. The first thing you do is give him the illusion of space, of breathing room. You don’t want him to feel in command, but you don’t want him to feel helpless either. You want him to feel he has options.” She turned her head away from the photo, tugged her earring, and met our eyes. “Clear?”

I nodded.

“Don’t draw a bead on the suspect, whatever you do. Don’t make sudden moves. When you are going to do something, tell him. As in: ‘I’m going to back up now. I’m lowering my gun now.’ Et cetera.”

“Baby him,” Broussard said. “That’s your recommendation.”

She smiled slightly, her eyes on the hem of her skirt. “Detective Broussard, I’ve got six years in with Hostage Negotiation, and I’ve only lost one. You want to puff out your chest and start screaming, ‘Down, motherfucker!’ should you run into this sort of situation, be my guest. But do me a favor and spare me the talk-show circuit after the perp blows Amanda McCready’s heart all over your shirt.” She raised her eyebrows at him. “’Kay?”

“Detective,” Broussard said, “I wasn’t questioning how you do your job. I was just making an observation.”

Poole nodded. “If we have to baby someone to save this girl, I’ll put the fella in a carriage and sing lullabies to him. You have my word.”

She sighed and leaned back, ran both hands through her hair. “The chances of anyone running into the perp with Amanda McCready are slim to none. But if you do, remember-that girl is all they got. People who take hostages and then get into a standoff, they’re like rats backed into a corner. They’re usually very afraid and very lethal. And they won’t blame themselves and they won’t blame you for the situation. They’ll blame her. And unless you’re very careful, they’ll cut her throat.”

She let that sink in. Then she removed four business cards from her suit pocket and handed one to each of us. “You all have cell phones?”

We nodded.

“My number is on the back of that card. If you do get into a standoff with this perp and you run out of things to say, call me and hand the phone to the kidnapper. Okay?”

She looked out the back window at the black craggy mass of the hills and quarry outcroppings, the jutting silhouettes of jagged granite peaks.

“The quarries,” she said. “Who would pick a place like that?”

“It doesn’t seem the easiest place to escape from,” Angie said. “Under the circumstances.”

Detective Dykema nodded. “And yet they picked it. What do they know that we don’t?”

At seven, we assembled in the BPD’s Mobile Command Post, where Lieutenant Doyle gave us his version of a pep talk.

“If you fuck up, there are plenty of cliffs up there to jump from. So”-he patted Poole ’s knee-“don’t fuck up.”

“Inspiring speech, sir.”

Doyle reached under the console table and removed a light blue gym bag, tossed it onto Broussard’s lap. “The money Mr. Kenzie turned in this morning. It’s all been counted, all serial numbers recorded. There is exactly two hundred thousand dollars in that bag. Not a penny less. See that it’s returned that way.”

The radio that took up a good third of the console table squawked: “Command, this is Unit Five-niner. Over.”

Doyle lifted the receiver off its cradle and flicked the SEND switch. “This is Command. Go ahead, Fifty-nine.”

“Mullen has left Devonshire Place in a Yellow taxi heading west on Storrow. We are attached. Over.”

“West?” Broussard said. “Why’s he going west? Why’s he on Storrow?”

“Fifty-nine,” Doyle said, “did you establish positive ID on Mullen?”

“Ah…” There was a long pause amid crackles of static.

“Say again, Fifty-nine. Over.”

“Command, we intercepted Mullen’s transmission with the cab company and watched him step into it on Devonshire at the rear entrance. Over.”

“Fifty-nine, you don’t sound so sure.”

“Uh, Command, we saw a man matching Mullen’s physical description wearing a Celtics hat and sunglasses… Uh… Over.”

Doyle closed his eyes for a moment, placed the receiver in the center of his forehead. “Fifty-nine, did you or did you not make a positive ID on the suspect? Over.”

Another long pause filled with static.

“Uh, Command, come to think of it, that’s a negative. But we’re pretty sure-”

“Fifty-nine, who was covering Devonshire Place with you? Over.”

“Six-seven, Command. Sir, should we-”

Doyle cut them off with a flick of a switch, punched a button on the radio, and spoke into the receiver.

“Sixty-seven, this is Command. Respond. Over.”

“Command, this is Sixty-seven. Over.”

“What is your location?”

“South on Tremont, Command. Partner on foot. Over.”

“Sixty-seven, why are you on Tremont? Over.”

“Following suspect, Command. Suspect is on foot, walking south along the Common. Over.”

“Sixty-seven, are you saying you’re following Mullen south on Tremont?”

“Affirmative, Command.”

“Sixty-seven, instruct your partner to detain Mr. Mullen. Over.”

“Ah, Command, we don’t-”

“Instruct your partner to detain the suspect, Sixty-seven. Over.”

“Affirmative, sir.”

Doyle placed the receiver on the console table for a moment, pinched the bridge of his nose, and sighed.

Angie and I looked at Poole and Broussard. Broussard shrugged. Poole shook his head in disgust.

“Uh, Command, this is Sixty-seven. Over.”

Doyle picked up the receiver. “Go ahead.”

“Yeah, Command, well, um-”

“The man you’re following is not Mullen. Affirmative?”

“Affirmative, Command. Individual was dressed like suspect, but-”

“Out, Sixty-seven.”

Doyle tossed the receiver into the radio, shook his head. He leaned back in his chair, looked at Poole.

“Where’s Gutierrez?”

Poole folded his hands on his lap. “Last I checked, he was in a room at the Prudential Hilton. Arrived last night from Lowell.”

“Who’s on him?”

“A four-man team. Dean, Gallagher, Gleason, and Halpern.”

Doyle cross-checked the names with the list by his elbow which gave their unit numbers. He flicked a switch on the radio.

“Unit Forty-nine, this is Command. Come in. Over.”

“Command, this is Forty-nine. Over.”

“What is your location? Over.”

“ Dalton Street, Command, by the Hilton. Over.”

“Forty-nine, where is”-Doyle consulted the list by his elbow-“unit Seventy-three? Over.”

“Detective Gleason is in the lobby, Command. Detective Halpern is covering the rear exit. Over.”

“And where is the suspect? Over.”

“Suspect is in his room, Command. Over.”

“Confirm that, Forty-nine. Over.”

“Affirmative. Will get back to you. Over and out.”

While we waited for an answer no one spoke. We didn’t even look at each other. The same way you can watch a football game, and know that even though your team has a six-point lead with four minutes to go that they’re somehow going to blow it, so the five of us in the rear of the command post seemed to feel any edge we may have had slipping out under the door into the gathering dark. If Mullen had so easily given four experienced detectives the slip, then how many other times had he done it over the last few days? How many times had the police been sure they were watching Mullen, when in fact they were tailing someone else? Mullen, for all we knew, could have been making visits to Amanda McCready. He could have been establishing his escape route out of these hills tonight. He could have been buying off cops to look the other way or picking which ones he’d have removed from the equation sometime after eight in the pitch black of the hills at night.

Mullen, if he’d known we were on him from the get-go, could have been showing us everything he wanted us to see, and, while we were looking at that, the things he didn’t want us to see were going on behind our backs.

“Command, this is Forty-nine. We’ve got a problem. Gutierrez is gone. I repeat: Gutierrez is gone. Over.”

“How long, Forty-nine? Over.”

“Hard to say, Command. His rental car is still parked in the garage. Last physical observation occurred at oh-seven-hundred hours. Over.”

“Command out.”

Doyle seemed to consider crushing the receiver in his hand for a moment, but then he laid it gently and precisely on the corner of the console table.

Broussard said, “He probably had another car placed in the garage a day or two before he checked in.”

Doyle nodded. “When I check with the other teams, how many of Olamon’s men, do you think, will be unaccounted for?”

No one had an answer, but I don’t think he’d expected one.

18

If you head south out of my neighborhood and cross the Neponset River, you end up in Quincy, long thought of by my father’s generation as a way station for the Irish prosperous enough to escape Dorchester but not quite wealthy enough to reach Milton, the tony two-toilet-Irish suburb a few miles northwest. As you drive south along Interstate 93, just before you reach Braintree, you’ll see a cluster of sandy brown hills rising to the west that always seem on the verge of sudden crumbling.

It was in these hills that the grand old men of Quincy ’s past discovered granite so rich with black silicates and smoky quartz that it must have shimmered at their feet like a diamond stream. The first commercial railway in the country was constructed in 1827, with the first rail clamped to the land with swinging spikes and metal bolts in Quincy, up in the hills, so that granite could be transported down to the banks of the Neponset River, where it was loaded onto schooners and transported to Boston or down to Manhattan, New Orleans, Mobile, and Savannah.

This hundred-year granite boom created buildings erected to withstand both time and fashion-imposing libraries and seats of government, towering churches, prisons that smothered noise, light, and hopes of escape, the fluted monolithic columns in custom houses across the country, and the Bunker Hill Monument. And what was left in the wake of all this rock lifted from the earth were holes. Deep holes. Wide holes. Holes that have never been filled by anything but water.

Over the years since the granite industry died, the quarries have become the favored dumping ground for just about everything: stolen cars, old refrigerators and ovens, bodies. Every few years when a kid vanishes after diving into them or a Walpole lifer tells police he dumped a missing hooker over one of the cliffs, the quarries are searched and newspapers run photos of topographical maps and underwater photography that reveal a submerged landscape of mountain ranges, rock violently disrupted and disgorged, sudden jagged needles rising from the depths, jutting crags of cliff face appearing like ghosts of Atlantis under a hundred feet of rain.

Sometimes, those bodies are found. And sometimes, they’re not. The quarries, given to underwater storms of black silt and sudden illogical shifts in their landscape, rife with undocumented shelves and crevices, yield their secrets with all the frequency of the Vatican.

As we trudged up the old railway incline, snapping branches out of our faces, trampling weeds and stumbling over rocks in the dark, slipping on sudden smooth stones and cursing under our breath, I found myself thinking that if we were pioneers trying to pass through these hills to reach the reservoir on the other side in the Blue Hills, we’d be dead by now. Some bear or pissed-off moose or Indian war party would have killed us just for disturbing the peace.

“Try and be a little louder,” I said, as Broussard slipped in the dark, banged his shin on a boulder, and straightened up long enough to kick it.

“Hey,” he said, “I look like Jeremiah Johnson to you? Last time I was in the woods, I was drunk, I was having sex, and I could see the highway from where I was.”

“You were having sex?” Angie said. “My God.”

“You have something against sex?”

“I have something against bugs,” Angie said. “Ick.”

“Is it true that if you have sex in the woods, the smell attracts bears?” Poole said. He supported himself on a tree trunk for a moment, sucked in the night air.

“There aren’t any bears left around here.”

“You never know,” Poole said, and looked off into the dark trees. He placed the gym bag of money by his feet for a moment, removed a handkerchief from his pocket, dabbed at the sweat on his neck, wiped his reddening face. He blew air out of his cheeks and swallowed a few times.

“You okay, Poole?”

He nodded. “Fine. Just out of shape. And, oh, yeah, old.”

“Want one of us to carry the bag?” Angie asked.

Poole grimaced at her and picked up the bag. He pointed up the slope. “‘Once more unto the breach.’”

“That’s not a breach,” Broussard said. “That’s a hill.”

“I was quoting Shakespeare, you vulgarian.” Poole came off the tree and began trudging up the hill.

“Then you should have said, ‘My kingdom for a horse,’” Broussard said. “Would have been more appropriate.”

Angie took a few deep breaths, caught Broussard’s eyes as he did the same. “We’re old.”

“We’re old,” he agreed.

“Think it’s time we hung ’em up?”

“Love to.” He smiled, leaned over, and took another breath. “My wife? Got in a car accident just before we were married, fractured some bones. No health insurance. You know what a fracture cost to fix? Man, I’ll be able to retire about the same time I’m chasing perps with a walker.”

“Somebody say a walker?” Poole said. He looked up at the steep slope. “That’d be sweet.”

As a kid I’d taken this path several times to reach the watering holes of Granite Rail or Swingle’s Quarry. It was supposedly off-limits, of course, surrounded by fences and patrolled by rangers for the MDC, but there were always jagged doors cut through the chain link if you knew where to look, and if you didn’t, you brought the equipment to make your own. The rangers were in short supply, and even with a small army they’d have been hard-pressed to patrol the dozens of quarries and the hundreds of kids who made their way up to them on a blistering summer day.

So I’d climbed this ridge before. Fifteen years ago. In the daylight.

It was a little different now. For one, I wasn’t in the shape I’d been in when I was a teenager. Too many bruises and too many bars and far too many on-the-job collisions with people and pool tables-and, once, both a windshield and the road waiting on the other side-had given my body the creaks and aches and constant dull throbs of either a man twice my age or a professional football player.

Second, like Broussard, I wasn’t exactly Grizzly Adams. My exposure to a world without asphalt and a good deli was limited. Once a year, I took a hiking trip with my sister and her family up Washington ’s Mount Rainier; four years ago I’d been coerced into a camping trip in Maine by a woman who’d fancied herself a naturalist because she shopped at army-navy stores. The trip had been scheduled for three days, but we’d lasted one night and a can of insect repellent before we drove to Camden for white sheets and room service.

I considered my companions as we climbed the slope toward Granite Rail Quarry. My guess was none of them would have made it through the first night of that camping trip. Maybe with sunlight, proper hiking boots, a sturdy staff, and a first-rate ski lift, we’d have made respectable progress, but it was only after twenty minutes of thumping and banging up the hill, our flashlights trained on the imprints and the occasional embedded railroad tie of a railway that had stopped running almost a century ago, that we finally got a whiff of the water.

Nothing smells so clean and cold and promising as quarry water. I’m not sure why this is, because it’s merely decades of rain piled up between walls of granite and fed and freshened by underground springs, but the moment the scent found my nostrils, I was sixteen again and I could feel the plunge in my chest as I jumped over the edge of Heaven’s Peak, a seventy-foot cliff in Swingle’s Quarry, saw the light-green water yawn open below me like a waiting hand, felt weightless and bodiless and pure spirit hanging in the empty, awesome air around me. Then I dropped, and the air turned into a tornado shooting straight up from the advancing pool of green, and the graffiti exploded from the shelves and walls and cliffs all around me, burst forth in reds and blacks and golds and blues, and I could smell that clean, cold, and suddenly frightening odor of a century’s raindrops just before I hit the water, toes pointed down, wrists tucked tight against my hips, dropped deep below the surface where the cars and the refrigerators and the bodies lay.

Over the years, as the quarries have claimed one young life every four years or so, not to mention all the corpses dumped over the cliffs in the dead of night and discovered, if at all, years later, I’ve read the newspapers as editorialists, community activists, and grieving parents ask, “Why? Why?”

Why do kids-quarry rats, we called ourselves in my generation-feel the need to jump from cliffs as high as one hundred feet into water two hundred feet deep and mined with sudden outcroppings, car antennas, logs, and who knows what else?

I have no idea. I jumped because I was a kid. Because my father was an asshole and my home was a constant police action, and most of the time finding a place to hide was how my sister and I spent our lives, and that didn’t seem much like living. Because often, as I stood on those cliffs and looked over the edge at an overturned bowl of green that turned and revealed itself the more I craned my neck, I felt a cold sizzle in my stomach and an awareness of every limb, every bone, and every blood vessel in my body. Because I felt pure in the air and clean in the water. I jumped to prove things to my friends and, once those things had been proven, because I was addicted to it, needed to find higher cliffs, longer drops. I jumped for the same reason I became a private detective-because I hate knowing exactly what’s next.

“I need to catch a breath,” Poole said. He grabbed a thick vine growing out of the ground in front of us and twisted with it toward the ground. The gym bag fell from his hand, and his foot slipped in the dirt, and he fell on top of the bag, clenching the vine tightly in his hand.

We were about fifteen yards from the top. I could see the faintest green shimmer of water, like a wisp of cloud, reflecting off the dark cliffs and hovering in the cobalt pitch of sky just beyond the last ridge.

“Sure, buddy, sure.” Broussard stopped and stood by his partner as the older man placed his flashlight on his lap and gasped for breath.

In the dark, Poole was as white as I’d ever seen him. He shone. His raspy breath clawed its way into the night, and his eyes swam in their sockets, seemed to float in search of something they couldn’t locate.

Angie knelt by him and put a hand under his jaw, felt his pulse. “Take a deep breath.”

Poole nodded, his eyes bulging, and sucked air.

Broussard lowered himself to his haunches. “You okay, buddy?”

“Fine,” Poole managed. “Aces.”

The shine on his face found his throat and dampened his collar.

“Too fucking old to be humping my ass up some”-he coughed-“hill.”

Angie looked at Broussard. Broussard looked back at me.

Poole coughed some more. I tilted my flashlight, saw tiny dots of blood speckle his chin.

“Just a minute,” he said.

I shook my head and Broussard nodded, pulled his walkie-talkie from his jacket.

Poole reached up and grasped his wrist. “What are you doing?”

“Calling it in,” Broussard said. “We got to get you off this hill, my man.”

Poole tightened his grip on Broussard’s wrist, coughed so hard I thought he’d lurch into a convulsion for a minute.

“You don’t call anything in,” he said. “We’re supposed to be alone.”

“ Poole,” Angie said, “you’re in some trouble here.”

He looked up at her and smiled. “I’m fine.”

“Bullshit,” Broussard said, and looked away from the blood on Poole ’s chin.

“Really.” Poole shifted on the ground, wrapped the inside of his forearm around the vine. “Go over the hill, children. Go over the hill.” He smiled, but the corners of his mouth twitched against his shiny cheeks.

We looked down at him. He looked like he was one arch of the back or roll of the eyes from a headstone. His flesh was the color of raw scallop and his eyes wouldn’t stay focused. His breathing sounded like rain through a window screen.

His grip on Broussard’s wrist was still as tight as a jailer’s, though. He glanced at the three of us and seemed to guess what we were thinking.

“I’m old and in debt,” he said. “And I’ll be fine. You don’t find that girl, she won’t be.”

Broussard said, “I don’t know her, Poole. Get it?”

Poole nodded and tightened his grip on Broussard’s wrist until the flesh in his hand turned red. “’Preciate that, son. Really do. What’s the first thing I taught you?”

Broussard looked away, and his eyes glistened in the light bouncing from Angie’s flashlight, off his partner’s chest and into his pupils.

“What’s the first thing I taught you?” Poole said.

Broussard cleared his throat, spit into the woods.

“Huh?”

“Close the case,” Broussard said, and his voice sounded as if Poole ’s hand had left his wrist and found his throat.

“Always,” Poole said. He rolled his eyes in the direction of the ridge behind him. “So, go close it.”

“I-”

“Don’t you dare pity me, kid. Don’t you dare. Take the bag.”

Broussard lowered his chin to his chest. He reached under Poole and pulled the bag out, slapped the dirt off the bottom.

“Go,” Poole said. “Now.”

Broussard pulled his wrist from Poole ’s fingers and stood up. He looked off into the dark woods like a kid who’s just been told what alone means.

Poole glanced at me and Angie and smiled. “I’ll survive. Save the girl, call for evac.”

I looked away. Poole, to the best of my knowledge, had just suffered either a small heart attack or a stroke. And the blood that had shot from his lungs didn’t exactly give cause for optimism. I was looking down at a man who, unless he got immediate help, would die.

Angie said, “I’ll stay.”

We looked at her. She’d remained on her knees by Poole since he’d sat down, and she ran a palm over his white forehead, ran it back through the bristles of his hair.

“The hell you will,” Poole said, and swatted at her hand. He tilted his head, looked up into her face. “That child is going to die tonight, Miss Gennaro.”

“Angie.”

“That child is going to die tonight, Angie.” He gritted his teeth for a moment and grimaced at something shooting up his sternum, swallowed hard to force it back down. “Unless we do something. We need every person we have to get her out of here in one piece. Now”-he struggled with the vine, pulled himself up a bit-“you’re going up to those quarries. And so are you, Patrick.” He turned his head to Broussard. “And you most definitely fucking are. So go. Go now.”

None of us wanted to. That was obvious. But then Poole held out his arm and tilted the wrist up toward us until we could all read the illuminated hands of his watch: 8:03.

We were late.

“Go!” he hissed.

I looked at the top of the hill, then off into the dark woods behind Poole, then down at the man himself. Splayed there, legs spread and one foot lolling off to the side, he looked like a scarecrow tossed from his perch.

“Go!”

We left him there.

We scrambled up the hill, Broussard taking the lead as the path was narrowed by thickets of weeds and brambles. Except for the sounds of our progress, the night was so still it would have been easy to believe we were the only creatures out in it.

Ten feet from the top, we met a chain-link fence twelve feet high, but it didn’t prove much of an obstacle. A section of it as wide and tall as a garage door had been cut out, and we walked through the hole without pausing.

At the top of the hill, Broussard stopped long enough to engage his walkie-talkie and whisper into it. “Have reached the quarry. Sergeant Raftopoulos is ill. On my signal-repeat, on my signal-send evac to the railroad slope fifteen yards from the top. Wait for my signal. Copy.”

“Affirmative.”

“Out.” Broussard placed the walkie-talkie back in his raincoat.

“What now?” Angie said.

We stood on a cliff about forty feet above the water. In the dark, I could see the silhouettes of other cliffs and crags, bent trees, and jutting rock shelves. A line of cut, strewn, and disrupted granite rose off to our immediate left, a few jagged peaks another ten to fifteen feet higher than the one on which we stood. To our right, the land rolled flat for about sixty yards, then curved and became jagged and erratic again, erupting into the dark. Below, the water waited, a wide circle of light gray against the black cliff walls.

“The woman who called Lionel said wait for instructions,” Broussard said. “You see any instructions?”

Angie shone her flashlight at our feet, bounced it off the granite walls, arced it off the trees and bushes. The dancing light was like a lazy eye that gave us fractured glimpses into a dense, alien world that could alter itself dramatically within inches-go from stone to moss to battered white bark to mint-green vegetation. And flowing through the tree line like reams of dental floss were silver stripes of chain link.

“I don’t see any instructions,” Angie said.

Bubba, I knew, was out there somewhere. He could probably see us right now. Maybe he could see Mullen and Gutierrez and whoever was working with them. Maybe he could see Amanda McCready. He’d approached from the Milton side and cut through Cunningham Park and up along a path he’d found years before, when he’d gone there to dump hot weapons, or a car, or a body-whatever it was guys like Bubba dumped in the quarries.

He’d have a target scope on his rifle equipped with a light amplification device, and through the scope we’d all look like we stood in a misty seaweed world, moved within a photograph that was still developing before his eyes.

The walkie-talkie on Broussard’s hip went off, and the squawk was like a scream in the midst of all that quiet. He fumbled with it and brought it up to his mouth.

“Broussard.”

“This is Doyle. Sixteenth Precinct just received a call from a woman with a message for you. We think it’s the same woman who called Lionel McCready.”

“Copy. What’s the message?”

“You’re to walk to your right, Detective Broussard, up onto the southern cliffs. Kenzie and Gennaro are to walk to their left.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it. Doyle out.”

Broussard clipped the walkie-talkie back on his hip, looked off at the line of cliffs on the far side of the water. “Divide and conquer.”

He looked at us, and his eyes were small and empty. He looked much younger than usual, nerves and fear stripping ten years from his face.

“Be careful,” Angie said.

“You too,” he said.

We stood there for another few seconds, as if by not moving we could stave off the inevitable, the moment when we’d discover whether Amanda McCready was alive or dead, the moment when all this hoping and planning would be out of our hands and whoever was hurt or lost or killed wouldn’t be up to us any longer.

“Well,” Broussard said. “Shit.” He shrugged and then walked off along the flat path, the flashlight beam bouncing in front of him through the dust.

Angie and I moved back from the edge about ten feet and followed the stone until a gap appeared and another granite slab rose six inches on the other side. I gripped her hand and we stepped over the gap and up onto the next slab, followed that stone another thirty feet until we met a wall.

It rose a good ten feet above us, and its creamy beige color was mixed with swirls of chocolate. It reminded me of a marble cake. A six-ton marble cake, but still.

We shone our flashlights to the left of it and found nothing but sheer mass back about thirty feet and into the trees. I brought the light back to the section in front of me, found cuts in the rock, as if layers had been chipped away in places like shale. A small lip about a foot wide opened like a smile two and a half feet up the face, and four feet above that I saw another, wider smile.

“Done much rock climbing lately?” I asked Angie.

“You’re not thinking…?” Her light beam danced across the rock face.

“Don’t see any alternative.” I handed her my flashlight and raised the toe of my shoe until it found the first small lip. I looked back over my shoulder at Angie. “I wouldn’t stand directly behind me, if I were you. I might be coming back down real quick.”

She shook her head and stepped to my left, kept both flashlights shining on the rock as I flexed the toe of my shoe against the lip and pushed up and down a couple of times to see if the smile crumbled. When it didn’t, I took a deep breath and pushed up off it, grabbed for the higher shelf. I got my fingers in there, and they slid on dust and rock salt and then popped back out again, and I bounced back off the rock face and fell on my ass.

“That was good,” Angie said. “You definitely have a genetic predisposition toward all things athletic.”

I stood and wiped the dust off my fingers, smeared it on my jeans. I scowled at Angie and tried again, and again I fell back on my ass.

“It’s getting nervous, though,” Angie said.

The third try, I actually held my fingers in the shelf for a good fifteen seconds before I lost my grip.

Angie’s lights shone down in my face as I looked up at the beast slab of stubborn granite.

“May I?” she said.

I took the flashlights from her, shone them on the rock. “Be my guest.”

She walked backward several feet and peered at the rock. She squatted and rose up and down on her haunches several times, stretched her torso from the small of her back, and flexed her fingers. Before I even knew what her plan was, she rose, took off, and ran full speed at the rock face. A few inches before she would have smacked into it like Wile E. Coyote into a painted-on door, her foot dug into the lower shelf, her right hand grabbed the upper one, and her small body vaulted up another two feet as her left arm slapped over the top.

She hung there for a good thirty seconds like that, pressed flat into the rock as if she’d been hurled there.

“Now what are you going to do?” I said.

“I thought I’d just lie here awhile.”

“That sounds like sarcasm.”

“Oh, you recognize it?”

“One of my talents.”

“Patrick,” she said, in a tone that reminded me of my mother and several nuns I’ve known, “get under me and push.”

I shoved one flashlight into my belt buckle, so that the light shone up into my face, and the other in my back pocket, stood under Angie, got both hands under her heels, and pushed up. Both flashlights together were probably heavier than she was. She shot up the rock face and I extended my arms until they were straight above my head and her heels left the palms. She turned around on top of the rock, looked down at me from her hands and knees, and extended her hand.

“Ready, my Olympian?”

I coughed into my hand. “Bitch.”

She withdrew the hand and smiled. “What was that?”

“I said I have to switch the other flashlight to my back pocket.”

“Oh.” She lowered the hand again. “Of course.”

After she’d pulled me up, we shone the lights across the top of the rock. It ran unbroken for at least twenty yards and was as smooth as a bowling ball. I lay on my stomach and stuck my head and flashlight over the edge, watching the cliff face drop straight and smooth another sixty-five feet to the water.

We were about midway up the north side of the quarry. Directly across the water was a row of cliffs and shelves, littered with graffiti and even a stray climber’s piton. The water, when under my beam, shimmered against the rock like heat waves off a summer road. It was the pale green I remembered, slightly milkier, but I knew the color was deceptive. Divers looking for a body in this water last summer had been forced to abandon their search when a high concentration of silt deposits combined with the natural lack of visibility in depths of more than one hundred and fifty feet made it impossible to see more than two to three feet in front of their faces. I brought my beam back across the water toward our side, skipped over a crumpled license plate floating in the green, a chunk of log that had been gnawed open in the center by animals until it resembled a canoe, and then the edge of something round and the color of flesh.

“Patrick,” Angie said.

“Wait a sec. Shine your light down here.” I darted my beam back to my right, back to where I’d seen the curve of flesh, found only more green water.

“Ange,” I said. “Now, for Christ’s sake.”

She lay on the rock beside me and flashed her light beside my own. Having to travel sixty-five feet down weakened the light, and the soft green of the water didn’t help much either. Our circles of light ran parallel like a pair of eyes and swayed back and forth across the water, then up and down, in tight squares.

“What did you see?”

“I don’t know. Could have been a rock…”

The coffee-brown bark of the log floated under my beam, then the license plate again, crumpled as if by thick angry hands.

Maybe it had been a rock. The white light, green water, and surrounding black could be playing tricks with my eyes. If it had been a body, we’d have found it by now. Besides, bodies don’t float. Not in the quarries.

“I got something.”

I tilted my wrist, followed Angie’s shaft of light, and the twin beams bathed the curved head and dead eyes of Amanda McCready’s doll, Pea. It floated on its back in the green water, its flower-print dress soiled and wet.

Oh, Jesus, I thought. No.

“Patrick,” Angie said, “she could be down there.”

“Wait-”

“She could be down there,” she repeated, and I heard a kicking sound as she rolled onto her back and pushed one shoe off her left heel.

“Angie. Wait. We’re supposed to-”

On the other side of the quarry, the tree line behind the cliffs exploded. Gunfire ripped through the branches, and light popped and erupted in sudden blasts of yellow and white.

“I’m pinned down! I’m pinned down!” Broussard’s voice screamed over the walkie-talkie. “Need immediate support! Repeat: Need immediate support!”

A chip of marble jumped off the cliff and into my cheek, and then suddenly the trees behind us buzzed and sheared their branches, and sparks and metallic pings popped off the rock face.

Angie and I rolled back from the edge and I grabbed my walkie-talkie. “This is Kenzie. We’re taking fire. Repeat: We are taking fire from the south side of the quarry.”

I rolled back farther into the darkness, saw my flashlight where I’d left it on the edge, still pointing its shaft of light out over the quarry. Whoever was shooting from the other side of the water was probably using the flashlight as a homing beacon.

“You hit?”

Angie shook her head. “No.”

“Be right back.”

“What?”

Another barrage of bullets hammered the rocks and trees behind us, and I held my breath, waited for a pause. When it came in a roar of silence, I scrambled through the dark and swung the back of my hand into the flashlight, sent it over the edge and dropping toward the water.

“Christ,” Angie said, as I scrambled back to her. “What do we do?”

“I don’t know. If they got LAD scopes on their rifles, we’re dead.”

The shooter opened up again. Leaves in the trees behind Angie leaped into the night and bullets spit into the trunks, snapped thin branches. The gunfire paused for a half second as the shooter realigned his aim, and then metal slapped the cliff face below us, just on the other side of the lip, hammering the rock like a hailstorm. One shift of the gun an inch or two up in the shooter’s arms, and the bullets would streak over the cliff top and into our faces.

“Need evac!” Broussard screamed over the walkie-talkie. “Immediately! Drawing fire from both sides!”

“Evac en route,” a calm, cold voice replied.

I depressed the transmit button as the gunfire stopped again. “Broussard.”

“Yeah. You two okay?”

“Pinned.”

“Me too.” From his end, I heard a sudden stream of bullets and when I looked across the quarry I could see the steady white flash of muzzle fire in the trees.

“Son of a bitch!” Broussard shouted.

Then the sky opened up and poured white light as two helicopters streaked over the center of the quarry, lights powerful enough to bathe a football stadium strapped to their noses. For a moment, I was blinded by the sheer mass of the sudden white glow. Everything lost its color and turned white with the light: white tree line, white cliff face, white water.

The fury of white was disrupted by a long, dark object as it arced from the tree line on the other side, somersaulted in the air, end over end, and then dropped over the cliff and toward the water. I followed its descent enough to identify it as a rifle before it disappeared from view, but still more gunfire burst from the tree line across the water from us.

And then it stopped. I searched the white light and just glimpsed the butt end of another rifle as it dropped through the night toward the water.

One helicopter banked above the tree line on Broussard’s side and I heard the chatter of automatic fire, heard Broussard scream over the walkie-talkie, “Hold your fire! Hold your fire, you fucking lunatic!”

The green treetops were shredding themselves in the white light, popping and snapping into the air, and then the chatter of the weapon fired from the helicopter stopped as the second helicopter banked and pointed its light directly in my face. The wind from its rotor blades found my body and knocked me off my feet, and Angie grabbed the walkie-talkie and said, “Back off. We’re fine. You are in the line of fire.”

The white light disappeared for a moment, and when my vision cleared and the wind lessened, I saw that the helicopter had drifted up about forty feet, hovered over the quarry, and dipped its light toward the water.

All gunfire had stopped. The fury of mechanical noise, though, had been replaced by the whine of copter turbines and the chop of rotors.

I looked into the pool of white and saw the green water churn, the chunk of log and license plate bounce off Amanda’s doll. I turned back toward Angie in time to see her kick her right shoe off her foot and pull her sweatshirt over her head at the same time. She wore only a black bra and blue jeans as she shivered in the crisp air and blew color into her cheeks.

“You’re not going down there,” I said.

“You’re right.” She nodded and bent toward her sweatshirt, and then she burst past me and by the time I spun toward her, she was airborne, kicking her legs and throwing her chest out in front of her. The helicopter canted to its right and Angie’s body twisted in the light and then straightened.

She dropped like a missile.

In the white light, her body was dark. With her hands clamped tight to her thighs, she looked like a slim statue as she plummeted.

She hit the water like a butcher knife, sliced in clean, and disappeared.

“We’ve got one in the water,” someone said over the walkie-talkie. “We’ve got one in the water.”

As if certain I’d follow her lead, the helicopter swung back in toward the cliff, turned to its right, and hovered there, jerking slightly from side to side but forming an immediate wall in front of me.

The trick to jumping off quarry cliffs has always been one of speed and lunging. You have to jump out as far as possible so that the air and gravity’s whims don’t push you back into the walls and outcroppings as you fall. With the helicopter in front of me, even if I could manage to dive below its legs, the downdraft would swat me into the cliff, leave me plastered there like a stain.

I lay on my stomach and watched for Angie. The way she’d hit the water, even if she’d begun kicking as soon as her head went under, she’d still dropped deep. And with these quarries, anything could have been lying in wait as soon as she hit the water: logs, an old refrigerator perched on a submerged shelf.

She surfaced fifteen yards from the doll, looked around wildly, and dove under again.

On the south side of the quarry, Broussard appeared on the top of a ragged outcropping of rocks. He waved his arms and the helicopter on that side swung in toward him. Broussard reached up and a scream of turbine-like the wail of a dentist’s drill-pierced the night as the helicopter lowered its legs toward Broussard. He reached out for the leg but a breeze pushed the entire carriage away from him in a lurch.

The same gust of wind buffeted the helicopter in front of me, and it almost drifted into the side of the cliff. It pulled back and banked to its right, turned in the center of the quarry, and started coming back as I kicked off my shoes and removed my jacket.

Below, Angie surfaced again and swam over to the doll. She turned her head, looked up at the helicopters, and went under.

Across the quarry, the other helicopter swung in toward Broussard. He stepped back on the craggy outcropping, seemed to lose his footing, but then he got his arms up and wrapped around the leg as the helicopter swayed back from the cliff and turned its nose out over the water. Broussard’s legs kicked at the air, and his body dipped and rose, dipped and rose, and then he was pulled up into the cabin.

The helicopter on my side came straight at me, and I realized almost too late that it was trying to land. I scooped up shoes and jacket and stumbled back from the ledge and then to my left as the front of the legs dipped toward rock, then jerked back and swung its tail rotor to the left.

When it came back at a slightly higher elevation, the blast from the rotors was strong enough to knock me down, and the whine of the turbine dug against my eardrums like a metal pick.

As I scrambled to my feet, the helicopter bounced once, then twice off the smooth stone. I could see the pilot’s face tighten in the cockpit as he fought for purchase, and the nose dipped and the tail rose and for a second I thought the rotors would scrape the crop of rocks that separated the cliff top from the tree line.

A cop in a dark blue jumpsuit and black helmet jumped from the cabin and kept his head low and his knees bent as he ran across the rock toward me.

“Kenzie?” he shouted.

I nodded.

“Come on.” He grabbed my arm and pushed my head down as the other helicopter shot away from the water and off toward the slope where we’d left Poole. There was no way they’d land over there, I knew. It was too tight, no clearing to speak of. Their only hope of getting him out of there was to drop a man and a basket over the side and pull Poole up and out.

The cop shoved me into the cabin as the rotors continued to whip overhead, and as soon as I was inside, the machine lurched off the rock and dropped over the side.

I could see Angie below us as we swooped down toward her. She held Amanda’s doll in one hand and dropped below the surface. As the helicopter slid over the surface, the water began to churn and swirl.

“Go back up!” I screamed.

The co-pilot looked back at me.

I jerked my thumb toward the ceiling. “You’ll drown her! Go back up!”

The co-pilot nudged the pilot and the pilot pulled back on the throttle and my stomach slid into my intestines as the helicopter banked to the right and a graffiti-strewn cliff loomed through the cockpit window and then broke away from us as we rose and turned in a full circle and hovered from a height of about thirty feet over the last place we’d seen Angie.

She came up and flailed at the eddies engulfing her, spit water from her mouth, and turned onto her back.

“What’s she doing?” the cop beside me said.

“Going to shore,” I said, as Angie backstroked toward the rocks, the doll arcing with the windmill motion of her left arm.

The cop nodded, his rifle aimed at the tree line.

Angie’s high school had no swim team, so she competed for the Girls Clubs of America, won a silver medal when she was sixteen in a regional competition. Even with the years of smoking, she still had the stroke. Her body cut cleanly through the water, barely disturbing it, leaving so little in her wake that she could have been an eel as she slid toward shore.

“She’s going to have to walk back,” the co-pilot shouted. “We can’t land down there.”

Angie sensed a small outcropping of jagged rocks just before she would have crashed into them. She turned her body and floated the rest of the way to the rocks, placed the doll gingerly in a crevice between them, then pulled herself up on top.

The pilot swung the helicopter down by the rocks and spoke through a megaphone mounted above the light: “Miss Gennaro, we cannot attempt evacuation. The walls are too close and there’s no purchase.”

Angie nodded and waved tiredly, her body white in the harsh spotlight, strings of her long black hair clamped to her cheeks.

“Directly behind those rocks,” the pilot called over the megaphone, “is a trail. Follow it down and keep turning left. You’ll end up on Ricciuti Drive. There’ll be someone there to meet you.”

Angie gave him a thumbs-up and sat down on the rocks, inhaled deeply, and placed the doll on her lap.

She shrank to nothing but a pale dot in a wall of black as the helicopter banked once again and shot up over the quarry walls, and the land raced far too quickly underneath as we dipped over the old railway route and then headed west for the ski slopes in the Blue Hills.

“The hell was she looking for down there?” The cop beside me lowered his rifle.

“The girl,” I said.

“Hell,” the cop said, “we’re going back in with divers.”

“At night?” I said.

The cop looked through his visor at me. “Probably,” he said, with a bit of hesitation. “Definitely in the morning.”

“I think she was hoping to find her before it got to that point,” I said.

The cop shrugged. “Man, if Amanda McCready’s in that quarry, only God decides whether we find her corpse or not.”

19

We landed on the bunny slope of the Blue Hills Reservation, dropped down neatly between the ski lift lines, and watched as the second helicopter did the same, settled gently about twenty yards away.

Several police cars and ambulances, two MDC ranger cars, and a few trooper units greeted us.

Broussard jumped out of the second helicopter and raced toward the first police car, pulled the uniformed cop from the driver’s seat.

I jogged over as he started the engine. “Where’s Poole?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “He wasn’t where we left him. He wasn’t anywhere on the trail. I think he either tried to make it back down on his own or came up to the top when he heard the shots.”

Major Dempsey came rushing across the grass toward us. “Broussard, what the hell happened up there?”

“Long story, Major.”

I climbed in beside Broussard.

“Where’s the child?”

“There was no kid up there,” Broussard said. “It was a setup.”

Dempsey leaned in the window. “I heard the girl’s doll was floating in the water.”

Broussard looked at me, eyes wild.

“Yeah,” I said. “Didn’t see her body, though.”

Broussard dropped the shift into DRIVE. “Got to find Poole, sir.”

“Sergeant Raftopoulos called in two minutes ago. He’s on Pritchett Street. Says we got some DOAs.”

“Who?”

“Don’t know.”

Dempsey leaned back from the window. “I have a ranger unit going over to Ricciuti Drive to get your partner, Mr. Kenzie.”

“Thanks.”

“Who fired all the ordnance up there?”

“Don’t know, sir. They pinned my ass down, though.”

The sudden whine of a turbine screeched into the field, and Dempsey had to shout to be heard.

“They can’t get out!” Dempsey yelled. “They’re locked in! There’s no way out!”

“Yes, sir.”

“No sign of the girl?” Dempsey seemed to think that if he asked the question enough, sooner or later he’d get the answer he was hoping for.

Broussard shook his head. “Look, sir, with all due respect, Sergeant Raftopoulos had some sort of heart attack on the trail. I want to get to him.”

“Go.” Dempsey stepped aside and waved several cars into line behind us as Broussard punched the gas and drove down the slope, pinned the wheel at a line of trees and spun onto a dirt path, swung left a few seconds later, and sped down a crater-ravaged trail toward the expressway off-ramp that would lead around a rotary and onto Pritchett Street.

Two more dusty paths and we broke onto Quarry Street and raced down the southern side of the hills, with red and blue lights bouncing and swerving behind us in the rearview mirror.

Broussard didn’t slow as he shot through a stop sign at the end of Quarry Street. He fishtailed over the shoulder and turned into the rotary, actually giving the gas pedal a deeper push. All four tires fought him for a second. The heavy car seemed to jerk in against itself and buckle, as if it would suddenly turn on its side, but then the wheels caught and the powerful engine moaned and we shot off the rotary. Broussard pinned the wheel again, and we tore over another shoulder, spewed grass and dirt up onto the hood, and burst past an abandoned mill on our right, saw Poole sitting against the rear quarter panel of the Lexus RX 300 on the left side of the road about fifty yards past the mill.

Poole ’s head lolled against the fender. His shirt was open to the navel, and he’d placed one hand against his heart.

Broussard slammed the car to a stop and jumped out, slid on the dirt, and dropped to his knees by Poole.

“Partner! Partner!”

Poole opened his eyes, smiled weakly. “Got lost.”

Broussard felt his pulse, then put a hand to his heart, pushed up Poole ’s left eyelid with his thumb. “Okay, buddy. Okay. You’re gonna be…you’re gonna be fine.”

Several police cars pulled past us. A young cop stepped out of the first one, a Quincy unit, and Broussard said, “Open your back door!”

The cop fumbled with the flashlight in his hand, dropped it to the dirt. He reached down to pick it up.

“Open your fucking door!” Broussard screamed. “Now!”

The young cop managed to kick the flashlight under the car before he reached back and opened the door.

“Kenzie, help me lift him.”

I got a grip on Poole ’s lower legs, and Broussard eased behind him and wrapped his arms around his chest, and we carried him to the back of the police car and slid him onto the seat.

“I’m fine,” Poole said, and his eyes rolled to the left.

“Sure you are.” Broussard smiled. He turned his head to look at the young cop, who appeared very nervous. “You drive fast?”

“Uh, yes, sir.”

Behind us, several troopers and Quincy cops approached the front of the Lexus, guns drawn.

“Step out of the car now!” one trooper shouted, pointing his weapon at Gutierrez’s windshield.

“Which hospital is closer?” Broussard asked. “Quincy or Milton?”

“Uh, from here, sir, it’s Milton.”

“How fast can you get there?” Broussard asked the cop.

“Three minutes.”

“Make it two.” Broussard slapped the cop’s shoulder and shoved him toward the driver’s door.

The cop hopped behind the wheel. Broussard squeezed Poole ’s hand and said, “See you in a bit.”

Poole nodded sleepily.

We stepped back and Broussard shut the back door.

“Two minutes,” he repeated to the cop. The wheels of the unit spewed gravel and kicked up clouds of dust as the cop blew out onto the road, turned on his lights, and sped down the asphalt so fast he could have been shot from a rocket booster.

“Holy shit,” another cop said. He stood at the front of the Lexus. “Holy shit,” he said again.

Broussard and I walked toward the Lexus and Broussard grabbed a pair of troopers, pointed at the abandoned mill building. “Secure that building. Now.”

The troopers didn’t even question. They placed hands to the guns on their hips and ran back up the road toward the mill.

We reached the Lexus, worked our way through the small crowd of cops blocking the front bumper, and looked through the windshield at Chris Mullen and Pharaoh Gutierrez. Gutierrez was in the driver’s seat, Mullen riding shotgun. The headlights were still on. The engine was running. A single hole formed a small spiderweb in the windshield in front of Gutierrez. An identical hole was bored through the glass in front of Mullen.

The holes in their heads were pretty similar, too-both the size of a dime, both puckered and white around the edges, both spilling a thin stream of blood down the men’s noses.

By the looks of it, Gutierrez had taken the first shot. His face registered nothing except a sense of impatience, and both his hands were empty and lying palms up on the seat. The keys were in the ignition, the shift in PARK. Chris Mullen’s right hand gripped the gun in his waistband, and the look on his face was a sudden frozen seizure of fear and surprise. He’d had about half a second to know he was going to die, maybe less. But enough time for everything to turn slow-motion on him, a thousand terrified thoughts scrambling through his angry brain in the time it took for him to register the bullet that had killed Pharaoh, reach for his gun, and hear the spit of the next bullet punch through the windshield.

Bubba, I thought.

Fifty yards in front of the Lexus, the abandoned mill with its sagging widow’s walk would have provided a perfect sniper’s perch.

In the shafts of light cast by the car’s headlamps, I could see the two Staties approaching it slowly, knees bent slightly, guns drawn and aimed up at the widow’s walk. One of them pointed to the other, and they approached the side door. One threw it open, and the other stepped in front of it, gun pointed at chest level.

Bubba, I thought, I hope you didn’t do this just for fun. Tell me you have Amanda McCready.

Broussard followed my gaze. “How much you want to bet the angle of trajectory tells us the bullets were fired from that building?”

“No bet,” I said.

Two hours later, they were still sorting out the mess. The night had turned suddenly cold, and a light sleet fell and splattered windshields and stuck in our hair like lice.

The troopers who’d entered the mill had come back out with a Winchester Model 94 lever-action rifle they’d found, with LAD target scope attached. The rifle had been dumped in a barrel of ancient oil on the second floor, just to the right of the window that led to the widow’s walk. The serial numbers had been filed off, and the first guy from Forensics who looked at it laughed when someone suggested the possibility of prints.

More troopers were sent into the mill to look for further evidence, but in two hours they hadn’t found shell casings or anything else, and Forensics had been unable to get any prints off the railing of the widow’s walk or the frame of the window leading out there.

The ranger who’d met Angie on the back side of the hill leading to Swingle’s Quarry had given her a bright orange raincoat to cover herself and a pair of thick socks for her feet, but still she shivered in the night, kept rubbing her dark hair with a towel even though it had dried or frozen hours ago. Indian summer, it appeared, had gone the way of the Massachusetts Indian.

Two divers had attempted a search of the Granite Rail Quarry but reported visibility at absolute zero below thirty feet, and once the weather kicked in, the slit deposits loosened from the granite walls had turned even the shallow water into a sandstorm.

The divers quit at ten without finding anything but a pair of men’s jeans hanging from a shelf about twenty feet below the water line.

When Broussard had reached the south side of the quarry, almost directly across from the cliff where Angie and I had seen the doll, a note had been waiting for him, placed neatly under a small boulder and illuminated by a pencil-thin flashlight hung from a branch above it.

Duck.

As Broussard reached for the note, the trees erupted with gunfire, and he dove out from the tree line onto the cliff plateau, grappling for his gun and walkie-talkie, leaving the money bag and his flashlight back at the tree line. A second barrage of bullets drove him to the edge of the cliff, where he lay in darkness, his only safety, and trained his gun on the tree line but didn’t fire for fear the muzzle flashes would reveal his exact position.

A search of Broussard’s last position found the note, the kidnapper’s pencil light, Broussard’s flashlight, and the bag, which was open and empty. Over a hundred spent shells had been found in the trees and ledges directly behind Broussard’s cliff in the last hour and the trooper who radioed it in said:

“We’re gonna find a lot more. Looks like the shooters went house back here. Looks like Grenada, for Christ’s sake.”

The troopers and rangers on our side of the quarry had called down to report finding evidence of at least fifty rounds fired into our cliff plateau or the trees behind us.

The consensus was pretty much summed up by a trooper we heard over the radio. “Major Dempsey, sir, they weren’t supposed to walk back out of here. No way in hell.”

All roads into and out of the area remained locked down, but based on the fact that the shots were fired from the southern side of Granite Rail Quarry, troopers, rangers, and local police with hounds were sent to concentrate their search for the suspects there, and even from the street on the northern side we could occasionally see the symphony of lights playing off the treetops.

Poole had suffered what doctors believed was a myocardial infarction, exacerbated by his walk downhill to Quarry Street. Once there, Poole, already disoriented and possibly delirious, had apparently seen Gutierrez and Mullen in the Lexus heading for Pritchett Street and had made his way over there in time to find their corpses and call in from the car phone in the Lexus.

Last we’d heard, Poole was in ICU at Milton Hospital, his condition critical.

“Anybody done the math yet?” Dempsey asked us. We were leaning against the hood of our Crown Victoria, Broussard smoking one of Angie’s cigarettes, Angie shivering and slurping coffee from a cup with the seal of the MDC on it as I ran a hand up and down her back, trying to push some heat back into her blood.

“Which math?” I said.

“The math that puts Gutierrez and Mullen down on the road at about the same time you three were under fire.” He chewed a red plastic toothpick, touched it occasionally with his thumb and index, but never removed it from his mouth. “’Less they had a helicopter, too, and I don’t think they did somehow… You?”

“I don’t think they had a helicopter,” I said.

He smiled. “Right. So, barring that, there’s really no way they could have been on top of those hills and tooling around down here in their Lexus a minute or so later. Just seems-I dunno-impossible. You follow?”

Angie’s teeth chattered as she said, “So who else was up there?”

“That’s the question, isn’t it? Among others.” He looked back over his shoulder at the dark shape of the hills rising on the other side of the expressway. “Not to mention, where’s the girl? Where’s the money? Where’s the person or persons who unloaded a Schwarzenegger movie’s worth of firepower up there? Where’s the person or persons who DOA’d Gutierrez and Mullen so smoothly?” He put his foot up on the fender, touched the toothpick again, and looked up at the cars racing past on the expressway just on the other side of the Lexus. “Press is going to have a field day.”

Broussard took a long pull of his cigarette, and exhaled loudly. “You’re playing CYOA, aren’t you, Dempsey.”

Dempsey shrugged, his owl eyes still on the expressway.

“CYOA?” Angie chattered.

“Cover Your Own Ass,” Broussard said. “Major Dempsey does not want to be known as the cop who lost Amanda McCready, two hundred thousand dollars, and two lives in one night. Right?”

Dempsey turned his head until the toothpick pointed directly at Broussard. “I would not want to be known as that cop, no, Detective Broussard.”

“So I will be.” Broussard nodded.

“You did lose the money,” Dempsey said. “We let you play it your way, and this is how it turned out.” He raised his eyebrows at the Lexus as two coroner’s assistants pulled Gutierrez’s body from the driver’s seat and laid it in the black bag they’d spread on the road. “Your Lieutenant Doyle? He’s been on the phone since eight-thirty with the Police Commissioner himself, trying to explain. Last time I saw him, he was trying to stick up for you and your partner. I told him it was a waste of time.”

“What exactly,” Angie said, “was he supposed to do when they opened up on him like that? Have the presence of mind to grab the bag and dive off the cliff with it?”

Dempsey shrugged. “That would have been one alternative, sure.”

“I don’t fucking believe this,” Angie said. Her teeth stopped chattering. “He risked his life for-”

“Miss Gennaro.” Broussard stopped her with a hand on her knee. “Major Dempsey is not saying anything Lieutenant Doyle isn’t going to say.”

“Listen to Detective Broussard, Miss Gennaro,” Dempsey said.

“Someone’s got to take the fall for this cluster fuck,” Broussard said, “and I’m elected.”

Dempsey chuckled. “You’re the only one running for the office.”

He left us there and walked over to a group of troopers, speaking into his walkie-talkie as he looked back up at the quarry hills.

“This isn’t right,” Angie said.

“Yes,” Broussard said, “it is.” He flicked his cigarette, smoked down to the filter, into the street. “I fucked up.”

“We fucked up,” Angie said.

He shook his head. “If we still had the money, they could live with Amanda being still missing or dead. But without the money? We look like clowns. And that’s my fault.” He spit into the street, shook his head, and kicked the tire at his feet with the back of his heel.

Angie watched a Forensics tech slide Amanda’s doll into a plastic bag, seal it, and write on the bag with black marker.

“She’s in there, isn’t she?” Angie looked up at the dark hills.

“She’s in there,” Broussard said.

20

When dawn arrived, we were still there as the tow truck pulled the Lexus down Pritchett Street and turned into the rotary toward the expressway.

Troopers moved in and out of the hills, returning with bags filled with shell casings and several shards of bullets recovered from rock face and dug out from tree trunks. One of them had also recovered Angie’s sweatshirt and shoes, but no one seemed to know who that trooper was or what he’d done with them. Over the course of our vigil, a Quincy cop had placed a blanket over Angie’s shoulders, but still she shivered and her lips often looked blue in the combination of streetlights, headlamps, and lights set up to illuminate the crime scene.

Lieutenant Doyle came down from the hills around one and beckoned Broussard with a crooked finger. They walked up the road to the yellow crime scene tape strung around the mill building, and once they’d stopped and squared their shoulders toward each other, Doyle exploded. You couldn’t hear the words, but you could hear volume, and you could see as he jabbed his index finger in Broussard’s face that a “Shucks, we tried” attitude wasn’t informing his mood. Broussard kept his head down through most of it, but it went on a while, a good twenty minutes at least, and Doyle seemed only to get more agitated. When he was spent, Broussard looked up, and Doyle shook his head at him in such a way that even from a distance of fifty yards you could feel the cold finality in it. He left Broussard standing there and walked into the mill building.

“Bad news, I take it,” Angie said, as Broussard bummed another of her cigarettes from the pack sitting on the hood of the car.

“I’m to be suspended sometime tomorrow pending an IAD hearing.” Broussard lit the cigarette and shrugged. “My last official duty will be to inform Helene McCready that we failed to recover her daughter.”

“And your lieutenant,” I said. “The one who approved this operation. What’s his culpability?”

“None.” Broussard leaned against the bumper, sucked back on the cigarette, exhaled a thin stream of blue smoke.

“None?” Angie said.

“None.” Broussard flicked ash into the street. “I take the fall and all the responsibility, admit to covering up pertinent information so I could get all the glory for the collar, and I won’t lose my badge.” He shrugged again. “Welcome to department politics.”

Angie said, “But-”

“Oh, yeah,” Broussard said, and turned to look at her. “The lieutenant made it very clear that if you speak to anyone about this entire affair, he’ll-let me see if I got this-’bury you up to your eyelids in the Marion Socia murder.’”

I looked off at the mill building door where I’d last seen Doyle. “He’s got shit.”

Broussard shook his head. “He never bluffs. If he says he can get you for it, he can.”

I thought about it. Four years ago, Angie and I had killed a pimp and crack dealer named Marion Socia in cold blood under the southeast expressway. We’d used unregistered guns and wiped them clean of prints.

But we’d left a witness, a gangbanger-to-be named Eugene. I never knew his last name, and I’d been pretty sure at the time that if I didn’t kill Socia he’d kill Eugene. Not then, but soon. Eugene, I decided, must have taken a few pinches over the years-a career with Shearson Lehman hadn’t seemed in the kid’s future-and during one of those pinches he must have offered us up in return for a lighter sentence. Given the utter lack of evidence tying us to Socia’s death in any other regard, I’m sure the DA had decided not to follow up, but someone had tucked the information away and passed it along to Doyle.

“He’s got us by the balls, is what you’re saying.”

Broussard glanced at me, then at Angie, and smiled. “Euphemistically speaking, of course. But, yeah. He owns you.”

“Comforting thought,” Angie said.

“This week’s been full of comforting thoughts.” Broussard tossed his cigarette. “I’m going to go find a phone, call my wife, tell her the good news.”

He walked off in the direction of the cops and vans circled around Gutierrez’s Lexus, his shoulders hunched, hands dug in his pockets, his steps just a bit uncertain, as if the ground felt different underfoot than it had half an hour ago.

Angie shuddered against the chill and I shuddered with her.

The divers went back to the quarry as morning rose in gradations of bruised purple and deep pink over the hills, and yellow tape and sawhorses were used to block off Pritchett and Quarry streets as the cops prepared for morning rush hour. A contingent of troopers formed a human barrier to the hills themselves. At 5 A.M., troopers were left stationed at the access points of all major roads, but traffic was allowed to flow through checkpoints, and the highway on and off ramps were opened. Pretty soon, as if they’d been waiting just around the bend, TV news vans and print reporters camped out on the expressway, clogged the breakdown lane, and shone their lights down on us and across at the hills. Several times a reporter called down to Angie to ask why she wasn’t wearing shoes. Several times Angie answered with her head down and her middle finger rising up from where her hands lay on her lap.

At first the reporters had shown up because word had leaked that someone had unloaded a few hundred rounds from an automatic weapon in the Quincy quarries and two corpses had been found on Pritchett Street in what looked like a professional execution. Then, somehow, Amanda McCready’s name slid down off the hills with the dawn breeze, and the circus began.

One of the reporters on the expressway recognized Broussard, and then the rest of them did, and pretty soon we felt like galley slaves as they shouted down to us.

“Detective, where is Amanda McCready?”

“Is she dead?”

“Is she in the quarry?”

“Where’s your partner?”

“Is it true Amanda McCready’s kidnappers were shot last night?”

“Is there any truth to the rumor that ransom money was lost?”

“Was Amanda’s body retrieved from the quarry? Is that why you’re not wearing shoes, ma’am?”

As if on cue, a trooper crossed Pritchett Street with a paper bag and handed it to Angie. “Your stuff, ma’am. They sent it down with some pancake slugs.”

Angie kept her head down and thanked him, removed her Doc Martens from the bag, and put them on.

“The sweatshirt’s going to be a harder act to pull off,” Broussard said, with a small smile.

“Yeah?” Angie slid off the hood and turned her back to the reporters as one of them tried to vault the guardrail and a trooper pushed him back with an extended nightstick.

Angie dropped the blanket and raincoat off her shoulders, and several cameras swung our way at the news of her bare flesh and black bra straps.

She looked at me. “Should I do a slow strip, move my hips a bit?”

“It’s your show,” I said. “I think you have everybody’s attention.”

“Got mine,” Broussard said, staring openly at the press of Angie’s breasts against black lace.

“Oh, joy.” She grimaced and pulled the sweatshirt over her head, pulled it down her torso.

Someone on the expressway applauded, and someone else whistled. Angie kept her back to them as she pulled thick strands of her hair from the collar.

“My show?” she said to me, with a sad smile and small shake of her head. “It’s their show, man. All theirs.”

Poole’s status was changed from critical to guarded shortly after sunrise, and, with nothing to do but wait, we left Pritchett Street and followed Broussard’s Taurus over to Milton Hospital.

At the hospital, we argued with the admitting nurse over how many of us could go into ICU when none of us were Poole ’s blood relatives. A doctor passed us and took one look at Angie and said, “Are you aware your skin is blue?”

After another small argument, Angie followed the doctor behind a curtain to be checked for hypothermia, and the admitting nurse grudgingly allowed us into ICU to see Poole.

“Myocardial infarction,” he said, as he propped himself up on the pillows. “Hell of a word, huh?”

“It’s two words,” Broussard said, and reached out awkwardly and gave Poole ’s arm a small squeeze.

“Whatever. Friggin’ heart attack was what it was.” He hissed against a sudden pain as he shifted again.

“Relax,” Broussard said. “Christ’s sake.”

“The fuck happened up there?” Poole said.

We told him the little we knew.

“Two shooters in the woods and one on the ground?” he said when we finished.

“That’s the way it’s looking,” Broussard said. “Or one shooter with two rifles in the woods and one on the widow’s walk.”

Poole made a face like he bought that theory about as much as he believed JFK was killed by a lone gunman. He moved his head on the pillow, looked at me. “You definitely saw two rifles get dumped over the cliff?”

“I’m pretty sure,” I said. “It was nuts out there.” I shrugged, then nodded. “No, I’m sure. Two rifles.”

“And the shooter at the mill leaves his gun behind?”

“Yup.”

“But not the shell casings.”

“Right.”

“And the shooter or shooters in the woods get rid of the rifles but leave shell casings everywhere.”

“That is correct, sir,” Broussard said.

“Christ,” he said. “I don’t get this.”

Angie came into the ward then, dabbing at her arm with a cotton swab, flexing the forearm up against the biceps. She came over to Poole ’s bed and smiled down at him.

“What’d the doctor say?” Broussard asked.

“Low-grade hypothermia.” She shrugged. “He shot me up with chicken soup or something, said I’d keep my fingers and toes.”

Color had returned to her flesh-not nearly as much as usual, but enough. She sat on the bed beside Poole and said, “The two of us, Poole -we look like a couple of ghosts.”

His lips cracked when he smiled. “I hear you emulated the famous cliff divers of the Galapagos Islands, my dear.”

“ Acapulco,” Broussard said. “There are no cliff divers in the Galapagos.”

“ Fiji, then,” Poole said, “and stop correcting me. Again, kids, what the hell is going on?”

Angie patted his cheek lightly. “You tell us. What happened to you?”

He pursed his lips for a moment. “I’m not real sure. For whatever reason, I found myself walking down the hill. Problem was, I left my walkie-talkie and my flashlight behind.” He raised his eyebrows. “Bright, wouldn’t you say? And when I heard all the gunfire, I tried to head back up to where I’d come from, but no matter what I did, it seemed like I kept moving away from the noise, instead of toward it. Woods,” he said with a shake of his head. “Next thing I know I’m at the corner of Quarry Street and the off-ramp from the expressway, and I see the Lexus shoot by. So I walk after it. Time I get there, our friends have received their head taps and I’m feeling kind of dizzy.”

“You remember calling it in?” Broussard asked.

“I did?”

Broussard nodded. “On the car phone.”

“Wow,” Poole said. “I’m pretty smart, huh?”

Angie smiled and took a handkerchief from the cart by Poole ’s bed, wiped his forehead with it.

“Christ,” Poole said, his tongue thick.

“What?”

His eyes rolled away from us for a moment, then snapped back. “Huh? Nothing, just these drugs they got in me. Hard to concentrate.”

The admitting nurse parted the curtain by Broussard. “You have to go. Please.”

“What happened up there?” Poole slurred.

“Now,” the nurse said, as Poole ’s eyes rolled to the left and he smacked his dry lips, batted his eyelashes. “Mr. Raftopoulos is not up to this.”

“No,” Poole said. “Wait.”

Broussard patted his arm. “We’ll be back, buddy. Don’t you worry.”

“What happened?” Poole asked again, his voice fading into sleep as we stepped back from the bed.

Good question, I thought, as we walked out of ICU.

As soon as we got back to the apartment, Angie hopped in a warm shower and I called Bubba.

“What?” he answered.

“Tell me you have her.”

“What? Patrick?”

“Tell me you have Amanda McCready.”

“No. What? Why would I have her?”

“You took out Gutierrez and-”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Bubba,” I said, “you did. You had to.”

“Gutierrez and Mullen? No way, dude. I spent two hours with my face in the dirt at Cunningham Park.”

“You weren’t even there?”

“I got hit. Someone was waiting, Patrick. I took a fucking sledgehammer or something in the back of my head, knocked me cold. I never even made it out of the park.”

“All right,” I said, and felt clouds of oil swimming through my head, “tell me again. Slow. You got to Cunningham Park -”

“At about six-thirty. I take my gear, I cut through the park toward the trees. I’m just about to go into the trees and make my way to the hills when I hear something. I start to turn my head and fucking-crack-someone hits me in the back of the head. Which, you know, just annoys me at first, but fucks up my vision too, and I’m starting to duck and turn, and crack again. I go to one knee, and I take a third hit. I think there might have been a fourth, but next thing I know I’m waking up in a pile of blood and it’s like eight-thirty. Time I get into the trees again, the woods are crawling with Staties. I go back, go to Giggle Doc’s.”

Giggle Doc was the ether-snorting doctor Bubba and half the mob guys in the city used to repair injuries they couldn’t report.

“You okay?” I said.

“Got some serious ringing in my head and things are still going black and then clearing, but I’ll be all right. I want this motherfucker, Patrick. No one knocks me down, you know?”

I knew. Of all the things I’d heard in the last ten hours, this was by far the most depressing. Anyone fast enough and smart enough to take Bubba out of the equation was very, very good at his job.

Another thing: If you were to deal with Bubba in that way, why leave him alive? The kidnappers had killed Mullen and Gutierrez and tried to kill Broussard, Angie, and me. Why hadn’t they just shot Bubba from a distance and been done with him?

“Giggle Doc said one more swing probably would have severed the tendons in back of my skull. Man,” he said, “I am fucking pissed.”

“As soon as I know who it was,” I said, “I’ll pass it along.”

“I’ve been sending out my own questions, you know? I heard about the Pharaoh and Mullen from Giggle Doc, so I’ve got Nelson making some phone calls. Heard the cops lost the money, too.”

“Yup.”

“And no girl.”

“No girl.”

“You picked a fight with some serious motherfuckers this time, dude.”

“I know.”

“Hey, Patrick?”

“Yeah.”

“Cheese would never be stupid enough to send someone to take a pipe to my head.”

“Not knowingly. Maybe he didn’t expect you to be there.”

“Cheese knows how tight me and you are. He’s got to half figure you’d bring me in for backup on something like this.”

He was right. Cheese was too smart at covering his bases not to expect Bubba might be involved. And Cheese also had to know that Bubba was capable of rolling a grenade into a group of Cheese’s men just on the off chance he’d kill the guy who’d piped him. So, if Cheese had given the order…again, why hadn’t he made it a termination contract? With Bubba dead, Cheese wouldn’t have to sweat reprisal. But by leaving him alive, Cheese’s only alternative, if he wanted to have any organization left by the time he got out of stir, was to hand over at least one of the players in the woods that night to Bubba. Unless he had other options I couldn’t envision.

“Christ!” I said.

“Got another mind-fuck for you,” Bubba said.

I wasn’t sure I could handle one more twist in my already knotted brain, but I said, “Shoot.”

“There’s a rumor going around about Pharaoh Gutierrez.”

“I know. He was teaming up with Mullen to take over Cheese’s action.”

“No, not that one. Everyone knows that one. Thing I’m hearing is that Pharaoh wasn’t one of us.”

“Then what was he?”

“A cop, Patrick,” Bubba said, and I felt everything in my brain slide to the left. “Word is he was DEA.”

21

“DEA?” Angie said. “You’re kidding.”

I shrugged. “Just what Bubba heard. You know street info: could be total bullshit, could be total truth. Too soon to tell.”

“So, what? Gutierrez was undercover for six years, working Cheese Olamon’s operation, and then he gets involved in the kidnapping of a four-year-old and he doesn’t pass that info on to his superiors?”

“Doesn’t add up, does it?”

“No. But what else is new?”

I leaned back in the kitchen chair, resisted an urge to punch the wall. This was one of the most infuriating cases I’d ever worked. Absolutely nothing made sense. A four-year-old girl disappears. Investigation leads us to believe the child was kidnapped by drug dealers who’d been ripped off by the mother. A ransom demand for the stolen money arrives from a woman who seems to work for the drug dealers. The ransom drop is an ambush. The drug dealers are killed. One of the drug dealers may or may not be an undercover operative for the federal government. The missing girl remains missing or at the bottom of a quarry.

Angie reached across the table and put her warm hand on my wrist. “We have to at least try to get a few hours’ sleep.”

I turned my wrist, took her hand in mine. “Is there one single thing about this case that makes sense to you?”

“Now that Gutierrez and Mullen have been whacked? No. There’s no one else in Cheese’s organization who could pick up the slack. Hell, there’s no one in his organization who’s smart enough to have pulled this off.”

“Wait a minute…”

“What?”

“You just said it yourself. There’s a power vacuum in Olamon’s organization now. What if that was the point?”

“Huh?”

“What if Cheese knew Mullen and Gutierrez were planning a coup? Or maybe he knew Mullen was, at least, and he’d heard whispers that Gutierrez wasn’t who he claimed to be?”

“So Cheese set all this up-the kidnapping, the ransom demands, et cetera-just so he could take out Mullen and Gutierrez?” She dropped my hand. “You’re serious?”

“It’s a theory.”

“An idiotic one,” she said.

“Hey.”

“No, think about it. Why go to all this trouble when he could have hired a couple of jack boys to pop Mullen and Gutierrez while they slept?”

“But he’s also pissed at Helene, wants his two hundred grand back.”

“So he tells Mullen to kidnap the kid, set up this elaborate child-for-money ruse, and then he has someone whack Mullen while it’s going down?”

“Why not?”

“Because then where’s Amanda? Where’s the money? Who was firing from those trees last night? Who knocked Bubba out? How did Mullen not know he was being set up? Do you realize how many people in Cheese’s organization would have had to be in on this huge, complicated conspiracy to pull it off? And Mullen wasn’t stupid. He was the smartest guy in Cheese’s crew. You don’t think he would have sniffed out a plan from the inside to kill him?”

I rubbed my eyes. “Christ. My head hurts.”

“Mine, too. And you’re not helping.”

I scowled at her and she smiled.

“Okay,” she said, “back to square one. Amanda is abducted. Why?”

“Two hundred grand her mother stole from Cheese.”

“Why didn’t Cheese just send someone around to threaten her? I’m pretty sure she would have buckled. They’d know that, too.”

“It could have taken them three months just to figure out the money wasn’t impounded by the police in the raid on the bikers.”

“Okay. But then they’d have moved fast. Ray Likanski had black eyes the day we met him.”

“You think he got them from Mullen?”

“Mullen would have given him a lot worse than black eyes if he thought he’d ripped him off. See, that’s what I’m saying. If Mullen thought Likanski and Helene had ripped the organization off, he wouldn’t kidnap Helene’s kid. He’d just kill Helene.”

“So maybe it wasn’t Cheese who had Amanda abducted?”

“Maybe not.”

“And the two hundred grand was a coincidence?” I tilted my head, cocked an eyebrow at her.

“You’re saying that’s a big coincidence.”

“I’m saying that’s a coincidence the size of Vermont. Particularly when the note found in Kimmie’s underwear said the two hundred grand equals a child’s return.”

She nodded, pinched her coffee cup handle, and turned the cup back and forth on the table. “Okay. So we’re back to Cheese. And all those questions about why he’d go to all this trouble.”

“Which, I agree, makes no sense and doesn’t sound like Cheese’s MO.”

She looked up from her coffee cup. “So where is she, Patrick?”

I touched her arm, slid my hand under the cuff of her bathrobe. “She’s in the quarry, Ange.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“Someone abducts that girl, ransoms her, and kills her. Simple as that?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because she’d seen her kidnappers’ faces? Because whoever was up in the quarries last night smelled police, knew we were trying to play both ends up the middle? I don’t know. Because people kill kids.”

She stood up. “Let’s go see Cheese.”

“What about sleep?”

“We can sleep when we’re dead.”

22

The sleet that had visited us briefly last night had returned this morning, and by the time we reached Concord Prison it sounded like nickels pelting the hood.

This time I wasn’t with two members of law enforcement, so Cheese was brought out into the visitors’ room and faced us through a pane of thick glass. Angie and I each picked up a phone in our cubicle and Cheese reached for his.

“Hey, Ange,” he said. “Looking fine.”

“Hey, Cheese.”

“Maybe, I get out of here someday, we could have a chocolate malt or something?”

“A chocolate malt?”

“Sure.” He rolled his shoulders. “A root beer float. Something like that.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Sure, Cheese. Sure. Give me a call when you’re released.”

“Goddamn!” Cheese slapped the glass with his thick palm. “You know that.”

“Cheese,” I said.

He raised his eyebrows.

“Chris Mullen’s dead.”

“I heard. Terrible shame.”

Angie said, “You seem to be handling it well.”

Cheese leaned back in his seat, appraised us for a moment, scratched his chest idly. “This business, you know? Motherfuckers die young.”

“Pharaoh Gutierrez, too.”

“Yeah.” Cheese nodded. “Sad about the Pharaoh. Motherfucker could dress. Know what I’m saying?”

I said, “Rumor I hear is Pharaoh wasn’t just working for you.”

Cheese cocked an eyebrow and seemed momentarily bewildered. “Come again, my brother?”

“I hear Pharaoh was a Fed.”

“Shit.” Cheese smiled broadly and shook his head, but his eyes remained wide and slightly unfocused. “You believe everything you hear on the street, you should-I dunno-become a motherfucking cop or something.”

It was a weak-ass analogy and he knew it. So much of who Cheese was depended on everything coming out of his mouth smooth, fast, and funny, even the threats. And it was pretty obvious by his grasping speech that the possibility of Pharaoh being a cop had never occurred to him until now.

I smiled. “A cop, Cheese. In your organization. Think what that’ll do to your cred.”

Cheese’s eyes regained their cast of bemused curiosity, and he leaned back in his chair, settled back into himself. “Your boy Broussard, he come to see me about an hour ago, tells me Mullen and Gutierrez are no more out of the kindness of his heart. Said he thinks I aced my own boys. Said he gonna make me pay. Said I’m responsible for him getting suspended, his old-coot partner getting sick. Pissed off the Cheese, you want to know the truth.”

“Sorry to hear that, Cheese.” I leaned in toward the glass. “Someone else is real pissed off, too.”

“Yeah? Who’s that?”

“Brother Rogowski.”

Cheese’s fingers stopped scratching his chest and the front legs of his chair came forward, touched the ground. “Why’s Brother Rogowski irate?”

“Someone from your team piped him in the back of the head several times.”

Cheese shook his head. “Not my team, baby. Not my team.”

I looked at Angie.

“That’s unfortunate,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Too bad.”

“What?” Cheese said. “You know I’d never raise a hand to Brother Rogowski.”

“’Member that guy?” Angie said.

“Which?” I said.

“The one a few years back, bigwig in the Irish mob, you know him-” She snapped her fingers.

“Jack Rouse,” I said.

“Yeah. He was, like, the Irish godfather or something, wasn’t he?”

“Wait,” Cheese said. “No one knows what happened to Jack Rouse. Just he pissed off the Patrisos or something.”

He looked at us through the glass as we both shook our heads slowly.

“Wait. You’re saying Jack Rouse got clipped by-”

“Sssh,” I said, and held a finger up to my lips.

Cheese placed the phone on the table for a minute and looked up at the ceiling. When he looked back at us, he seemed to have shrunk by a foot, and the dampness in his bangs plastered the hair to his forehead and made him look ten years younger. He brought the phone back up to his lips.

“The bowling alley rumor?” he whispered.

A couple of years ago, Bubba, a hit man named Pine, myself, and Phil Dimassi had met Jack Rouse and his demented right hand, Kevin Hurlihy, in an abandoned bowling alley in the leather district. Six of us had gone in, four of us had walked out. Jack Rouse and Kevin Hurlihy, tied, gagged, and tortured by Bubba and a few bowling balls, never stood a chance. The hit was sanctioned by Fat Freddy Constantine, head of the Italian Mafia here, and those of us who walked back out knew that no one would find the corpses and no one would ever be dumb enough to go looking.

“It’s true?” Cheese whispered.

I gave Cheese the answer in my dead gaze.

“Bubba’s gotta know I had nothing to do with him getting piped.”

I looked at Angie. She sighed, looked at Cheese, and then down at the small shelf below the glass.

“Patrick,” Cheese said, and all the pseudo-Superfly intonations had left his voice, “you have to let Bubba know.”

“Know what?” Angie said.

“That I had nothing to do with this.”

Angie smiled and shook her head. “Yeah, sure, Cheese. Sure.”

He whacked the glass with the back of his hand. “You listen to me! I had nothing to do with this.”

“Bubba doesn’t see it that way, Cheese.”

“So, tell him.”

“Why?” I said.

“Because it’s true.”

“I don’t buy that, Cheese.”

Cheese pulled his chair forward, squeezed the phone so hard I expected it to crack in half. “Fucking listen to me, you piece of shit. That psychotic thinks I piped him, I might as well shiv some guard, make sure I stay locked in solitary for life. That man is a walking fucking death sentence. Now you tell him-”

“Fuck you, Cheese.”

“What?”

I said it again, very slowly.

Then I said, “I came to you two days ago and begged for the life of a four-year-old girl. Now she’s dead. Because of you. And you want mercy? I’m going to tell Bubba you apologized for having him piped.”

“No.”

“Tell him you said you were sorry. You’ll make it up to him somehow.”

“No.” Cheese shook his head. “You can’t do that.”

“Watch me, Cheese.”

I took the phone away from my ear and reached out to hang it up.

“She’s not dead.”

“What?” Angie said.

I put the phone back to my ear.

“She’s not dead,” Cheese said.

“Who?” I said.

Cheese rolled his eyes, tilted his head back in the direction of the guard standing watch by the door.

“You know who.”

“Where is she?” Angie said.

Cheese shook his head. “Give me a few days.”

“No,” I said.

“You don’t have a choice.” He looked back over his shoulder, then leaned in close to the window and whispered into the phone. “Someone will contact you. Trust me. I got to clear some things first.”

“Bubba’s very angry,” Angie said. “And he has friends.” She glanced around the prison walls.

“No shit,” Cheese said. “His pals, the fucking Twoomey brothers, just got dropped for a bank job in Everett. They’ll be rotating in here next week for processing. So stop trying to scare me. I’m scared. Okay? But I need time. Call off the dog. I’ll send a message to you, I promise.”

“How do you know for sure she’s alive?”

“I know. Okay?” He gave us a rueful smile. “You two don’t have a clue what’s really going on. Do you know that?”

“We know it now,” I said.

“You let Bubba know I’m clean when it comes what happened to him. You want me alive. Okay? Without me, that girl will be gone. Gone-gone. You understand? Gone, baby, gone,” he sang.

I leaned back in my chair, studied him for a minute. He looked sincere, but Cheese is good at that. He’s made a career out of knowing exactly which things can hurt people most and then identifying the people who want those things. Need them. He knows how to dangle bags of heroin in front of addicted women, make them blow strangers for it, and then only give them half of what he promised. He knows how to dangle half-truths in front of cops and DAs and get them to sign on the dotted line, before he delivers a facsimile of what he originally promised.

“I need more,” I said.

The guard rapped the door and said, “Sixty seconds, Inmate Olamon.”

“More? The fuck you need?”

“I want the girl,” I said. “I want her now.”

“I can’t tell-”

“Fuck you.” I banged on the glass. “Where is she, Cheese? Where is she?”

“If I tell you, they’ll know it came from me, and I’ll be dead by the morning.” He backed up as he spoke, palms-up in front of him, terror filling his fat face.

“Give me something hard. Something I can follow up, then.”

“Independent corroboration,” Angie said.

“Independent what?”

“Thirty seconds,” the guard said.

“Give us something, Cheese.”

Cheese looked over his shoulder desperately, then at the walls holding him in, the thick glass between us.

“Come on,” he begged.

“Twenty seconds,” Angie said.

“Don’t. Look-”

“Fifteen.”

“No, I-”

“Tick-tock,” I said. “Tick-tock.”

“The bitch’s boyfriend,” Cheese said. “You know?”

“He blew town,” Angie said.

“Then find him,” Cheese hissed. “It’s all I got. Ask him what his part was the night the kid vanished.”

“Cheese-” Angie started.

The guard loomed up behind Cheese, put his hand on his shoulder.

“Whatever you think happened,” Cheese said, “you’re not even in the ballpark. You guys are so offtrack, you might as well be in motherfucking Greenland. Okay?”

The guard reached over him and pulled the phone from his hand.

Cheese stood up, allowed himself to be tugged toward the door. When the guard opened the door, Cheese looked back at us, mouthed one word:

“ Greenland.”

He raised his eyebrows up and down several times, and then the guard pushed him through the door and out of our sight.

The next day, shortly after noon, divers in Granite Rail Quarry found a torn piece of fabric impaled on a sliver of granite that jutted out like an ice pick from a shelf along the southern wall, fifteen feet below the waterline.

At three o’clock, Helene identified the fabric as a scrap of the T-shirt her daughter wore the night she disappeared. The scrap had been torn from the rear of the T-shirt, up by the collar, and the initials A. McC. were written on the fabric with a felt-tip pen.

After Helene identified the shirt fabric in the living room of Beatrice and Lionel’s house, she watched Broussard as he placed the pink scrap back in the evidence bag, and the glass of Pepsi she’d been holding shattered in her hand.

“Jesus,” Lionel said. “Helene.”

“She’s dead, isn’t she?” Helene squeezed her hand into a fist and drove the shards of broken glass deeper into her flesh. Blood fell in fat parachutes to the hardwood floor.

“Miss McCready,” Broussard said, “we don’t know that. Please let me see your hand.”

“She’s dead,” Helene repeated, louder this time. “Isn’t she?” She pulled her hand away from Broussard, and blood sprayed the coffee table.

“Helene, for God’s sake.” Lionel put one hand on his sister’s shoulder and reached for her damaged hand.

Helene spun away from him and lost her balance, fell to the floor, and sat there cradling her hand and looking up at us. Her eyes found mine, and I remembered telling her in Wee Dave’s house that she was stupid.

She wasn’t stupid, she was anesthetized-to the world at large, the real danger her child had been in, even the shards of glass digging into her flesh, her tendons and arteries.

The pain was coming, though. It was finally coming. As she held my gaze, her eyes paled and widened and the truth found them. It was a horrible awakening, a nuclear fusion of clarity that found her pupils, and with it came the awareness of what her neglect had cost her daughter, of how vile and acute the pain had probably been for her child, the nightmares shoved into her small skull with pistons.

And Helene opened her mouth and howled without making a sound.

She sat on the floor, blood pouring from her torn hand onto her jeans. Her body shook with abandonment and grief and horror, and her head dropped back to her shoulders as she looked up at the ceiling, and tears poured from her eyes and she rocked on her haunches and continued to howl without making a sound.

At six that night, before we’d had a chance to talk to him, Bubba and Nelson Ferrare walked into a bar Cheese owned in Lower Mills. They told the three skagheads and the bartender to take a lunch break, and ten minutes later most of the bar blew out into the parking lot. An entire booth cleared the front door and totaled a local alderman’s Honda Accord, which had been illegally parked in a handicap spot. Firefighters who arrived on the scene had to don oxygen masks. The blast had been so powerful it had all but blown itself out, and hardly anything was aflame in the bar itself, but in the basement, firefighters met a blazing pyre of uncut heroin; after the first two through the basement door began vomiting, the firemen pulled back and let the heroin burn until they were properly protected.

I would have tried to get a message to Cheese to let him know Bubba had acted on his own, but at six-thirty Cheese slipped on a freshly mopped floor at Concord Prison. It was a hell of a slip. Cheese somehow managed to lose his balance so completely, he fell over the guardrail on the third tier and dropped forty feet to a stone floor, landed on his oversized, trash-talking yellow head, and died.