Gone, Baby, Gone (42 page)

“Well, sure, you could help. Mind if I ask you a bunch of boring questions I’m sure you’ve been asked a thousand times already?”

She shook her head quickly. “No. Not at all. If it can help, I’ll answer questions all night. Why don’t I make some tea?”

“That’d be great, Mrs. McCready.”

While Matt continued to color, we drank tea and Ryerson asked Beatrice a string of questions that had long ago been answered: about the night Amanda disappeared, about Helene’s mothering skills, about those early crazy days after Amanda had first disappeared, when Beatrice organized searches, established herself as media contact, plastered the streets with her niece’s picture.

Every now and then Matt would show us his progress on the picture, the skyscrapers with rows of misaligned window squares, the clouds and dogs he’d added to the paper.

I began to regret coming here. I was a spy in their home, a traitor, hoping to gather evidence that would send Beatrice’s husband and Matt’s father to prison. Just before we left, Matt asked Angie if he could sign her cast. When she said of course, his eyes lit up and he took an extra thirty seconds finding just the right pen. As he knelt by the cast and signed his full name very carefully, I felt an ache creep behind my eyes, a boulder of melancholia settle in my chest at the thought of what this kid’s life would be like if we were right about his father, and the law stepped in and blew this family apart.

But still, the overriding concern remained strong enough to stanch even my shame.

Where was she?

Goddammit. Where
was
she?

Once we’d left, we stopped at Ryerson’s Suburban as he peeled the cellophane from another thin cigar, used a sterling silver cutter to snip the end. He looked back at the house as he lit it.

“She’s a nice lady.”

“Yes, she is.”

“Great kid.”

“He’s a great kid, yeah,” I agreed.

“This sucks,” he said, and puffed at the cigar as he held the flame to it.

“Yes, it does.”

“I’m going to go stake out Ted Kenneally’s store. It’s, what, like a mile from here?”

Angie said, “More like three.”

“I didn’t ask her the address. Shit.”

“There’s only a few antique stores in Southie,” I said. “Kenneally’s is on Broadway, right across from a restaurant called Amrheins.”

He nodded. “Care to join me? Could be the safest place for both of you right now with Broussard out there on the loose.”

Angie said, “Sure.”

Ryerson looked at me. “Mr. Kenzie?”

I looked back at Beatrice’s house, the yellow squares of light in the living room windows, thought of the occupants on the other side of those squares, the tornado they weren’t even aware of circling their lives, gathering strength, blowing and blowing.

“I’ll meet you guys.”

Angie gave me a look. “What’s up?”

“I’ll meet you,” I said. “I got to do something.”

“What?”

“Nothing big.” I put my hands on her shoulders. “I’ll meet you. Okay? Please. Give me some room here.”

After a long look in my eyes, she nodded. She didn’t like it, but she understands my stubbornness as she understands her own. And she knows how useless it is to argue with me at certain times, the same way I recognize those moments in her.

“Don’t do anything stupid,” Ryerson said.

“Oh, no,” I said. “Not me.”

It was a long shot, but it paid off.

At two in the morning, Broussard, Pasquale, and a few other members of the DoRights football squad left the Boyne. By the way they hugged in the parking lot, I could tell they’d heard about Poole’s death, and their pain was genuine. Cops, as a rule, don’t hug, unless one of them has gone down in the line.

Pasquale and Broussard talked for a bit in the parking lot after the others drove off, and then Pasquale gave Broussard a last hard hug, rapped his fists on the big man’s back, and they separated.

Pasquale drove off in a Bronco, and Broussard made his way with the careful, self-conscious steps of a drunk to a Volvo station wagon, backed out onto Western Avenue, and headed east. I stayed way back on the mostly empty avenue, and almost missed him when his taillights disappeared at the Charles River.

I speeded up because he could have turned onto Storrow Drive, cut over to North Beacon, or gone either east or west on the Mass Pike at that juncture.

From the avenue, as I craned my head, I picked up the Volvo as it slipped under a wash of light heading for the westbound tollbooths on the pike.

I forced myself to slow down and passed through the toll about a minute after he had. After about two miles, I picked up the Volvo again. It traveled in the left lane, doing about sixty, and I hung back a hundred yards and matched its speed.

Boston cops are required to live in the greater metro area, but several I know get around that by subletting their Boston apartments to friends or relatives while they live farther out.

Broussard, I discovered, lived way out. After over an hour and a departure from the turnpike onto a series of small dark country roads, we ended up in the town of Sutton, nestled in the shadows of the Purgatory Chasm Reservation and far closer to both the Rhode Island and Connecticut borders than it was to Boston.

When Broussard turned off into a steep, sloping driveway that led up to a small brown Cape, its windows obscured by shrubs and small trees, I kept going, drove until I’d reached a crossroad where the road ended at a towering forest of pine. I turned around, my lights arcing through the deep dark, so much blacker than city dark, each beam of light seeming to promise sudden revelations of creatures foraging through the night, stopping my heart with glowing green eyes.

I turned back and found the house again, drove another eighty yards until my lights illuminated a shuttered home. I pulled down a drive littered with the mulch of last autumn’s leaves, buried the Crown Victoria behind a stand of trees, and sat in it for a bit, as the crickets and the wind rustling the trees made the only sounds in what seemed the heart of the heart of pure stillness.

I woke the next morning to two gorgeous brown eyes staring in at me. They were soft and sad and deep as shafts in a copper mine. They didn’t blink.

I jumped a bit in my seat as the long white-and-brown nose tilted toward my window, and my movement startled the curious animal. Before I was even sure I’d seen it, the deer hopped over the lawn and into the trees, and its white tail flashed once between two trunks and was gone.

“Jesus,” I said aloud.

Another flash of color caught my eye, this one on the other side of the trees directly in front of my windshield. It was a rush of tan, and as I looked through the opening to my right, Broussard’s Volvo sped past on the road. I had no idea if he was heading down the road for milk or all the way back to Boston, but in either case, I wasn’t going to miss the opportunity.

I took a set of lock picks from the glove compartment, slung my camera over my shoulder, shook the cobwebs from my head, and left the car. I walked up the road, staying close to the soft shoulder, the first warm day of the year beaming down on me from a sky so blue with oxygen and free of smog I had a hard time believing I was still in Massachusetts.

As I neared Broussard’s driveway, a tall, slim woman with long brown hair holding a child by the hand stepped out at the bottom from around a corner of thick pine. She bent with the child as he picked up the newspaper at the base of the drive and handed it to her.

I was too close to stop, and she looked up and covered her eyes against the sun, smiled uncertainly at me. The child holding her hand was maybe three, and his bright blond hair and pale white skin didn’t seem a match for either the woman or Broussard.

“Hi.” The woman rose and took the child with her, perched him on her hip as he sucked his thumb.

“Hi.”

She was a striking woman. Her wide mouth cut unevenly across her face, rose a bit on the left side, and there was something sensual in the skew, the hint of a grin that had discarded all illusions. A cursory glance at her mouth and cheekbones, the sunrise glow of her skin, and I could have easily mistook her for a former model, some financier’s trophy wife. Then I looked in her eyes. The hard, naked intelligence there unsettled me. This was not a woman who’d allow herself to be put on a man’s arm for show. In fact, I was certain this woman didn’t allow herself to be
put
anywhere.

She noticed the camera. “Birds?”

I looked at it, shook my head. “Just nature in general. Don’t see much of it where I’m from.”

“Boston?”

I shook my head. “Providence.”

She nodded, glanced at the paper, shook off the dew. “They used to wrap them in plastic to keep the moisture off,” she said. “Now I have to hang it in the bathroom for an hour just to read the front page.”

The boy on her hip placed his face sleepily to her breast, stared at me with eyes as open and blue as the sky.

“What’s the matter, sweetie?” She kissed his head. “Tired?” She stroked his slightly chubby face, and the love in her eyes was a palpable, daunting thing.

When she looked back over at me, the love cleared, and for a moment I sensed either fear or suspicion. “There’s a forest.” She pointed down the road. “Right down there. It’s part of the Purgatory Chasm Reservation. Get some beautiful pictures there, I bet.”

I nodded. “Sounds great. Thanks for the advice.”

Maybe the child sensed something. Maybe he was just tired. Maybe just because he was a little kid and that’s what little kids do, he suddenly opened his mouth and howled.

“Oh-ho.” She smiled and kissed his head again, bounced him on her hip. “It’s okay, Nicky. It’s okay. Come on. Mommy’ll get you something to drink.”

She turned up the sloping driveway, bouncing the boy on her hip, caressing his face, her slim body moving like a dancer’s in her red-and-black lumberjack shirt and blue jeans.

“Good luck with nature,” she called over her shoulder.

“Thanks.”

She turned a bend in the driveway and I lost sight of her and the child behind the same thicket that obscured most of the house from the road.

But I could still hear her.

“Don’t cry, Nicky. Mommy loves you. Mommy’s going to make everything all right.”

“So he has a son,” Ryerson said. “So what?”

“First I heard of it,” I said.

“Me, too,” Angie said, “and we spent a lot of time with him back in October.”

“I have a dog,” Ryerson said. “First time you’ve heard about it. Right?”

“We’ve known you less than a day,” Angie said. “And a dog isn’t a child. You have a son and you spend a lot of time on stakeouts with people, you’re going to mention him. He mentioned his wife a lot. Nothing big, just ‘Got to call my wife.’ ‘My wife is going to kill me for missing another dinner.’ Et cetera. But never, not once, did he mention a child.”

Ryerson looked in his rearview at me. “What do you think?”

“I think it’s odd. Can I use your phone?”

He handed it back to me and I dialed, looked out at Ted Kenneally’s antiques store, the
CLOSED
sign hanging in the window.

“Detective Sergeant Lee.”

“Oscar,” I said.

“Hey, Walter Payton! How’s the body?”

“Hurts,” I said. “Like hell.”

His voice changed. “How’s that other thing?”

“Well, I got a question for you.”

“A rat-out-my-own-people sort of question?”

“Not necessarily.”

“Shoot. I’ll decide if I like it.”

“Broussard’s married, right?”

“To Rachel, yeah.”

“Tall brunette?” I said. “Very pretty?”

“That’s her.”

“And they have a kid?”

“’Scuse me?”

“Does Broussard have a son?”

“No.”

I felt a lightness eddy in my skull, and the throbbing aches from yesterday’s football game disappeared.

“You’re sure?”

“’Course I’m sure. He can’t.”

“He can’t or he decided not to?”

Oscar’s voice became slightly muffled, and I realized he’d cupped the phone with his hand. His voice was a whisper. “Rachel can’t conceive. It was a big problem for them. They wanted kids.”

“Why not adopt?”

“Who’s gonna let an ex-hooker adopt kids?”

“She was in the life?”

“Yeah, that’s how he met her. He was on Homicide track until then, man, just like me. It killed his career, got him buried in Narco until Doyle bailed him out. But he loves her. She’s a good woman, too. A great woman.”

“But no kid.”

His hand left the phone. “How many times I got to tell you, Kenzie? No friggin’ kid.”

I said thanks and goodbye, hung up, and handed the phone back to Ryerson.

“He doesn’t have a son,” Ryerson said. “Does he?”

“He has a son,” I said. “He definitely has a son.”

“Then where’d he get him?”

It all fell into place then, as I sat in Ryerson’s Suburban and looked out at Kenneally’s Antiques.

“How much you want to bet,” I said, “that whoever Nicholas Broussard’s natural parents are, they probably weren’t real good at the job?”

“Holy shit,” Angie said.

Ryerson leaned over the steering wheel, stared out through the windshield with a blank, stunned look on his lean face. “Holy shit.”

I saw the blond boy riding Rachel Broussard’s hip, the adoration she’d poured on his tiny face as she’d caressed it.

“Yeah,” I said. “Holy shit.”

32

At the end of an April day, after the sun has descended but before night has fallen, the city turns a hushed, unsettled gray. Another day has died, always more quickly than expected. Muted yellow or orange lights appear in window squares and shaft from car grilles, and the coming dark promises a deepening chill. Children have disappeared from the streets to wash up for dinner, to turn on TVs. The supermarkets and liquor stores are half empty and listless. The florists and banks are closed. The honk of horns is sporadic; a storefront grate rattles as it drops. And if you look closely in the faces of pedestrians and drivers stopped at lights, you can see the weight of the morning’s unfulfilled promise in the numb sag of their faces. Then they pass, trudging toward home, whatever its incarnation.