Lippman, Laura (27 page)

Infante thanked Mr. Parrish and let himself into the unlocked house, which still held the smell of the fire. He didn’t see why the structure had to be condemned; the damage had been largely contained to the bedroom. The landlord probably stood to make more money on the insurance claim that way.

The door to the bedroom was swollen and stuck, but he managed to open it by throwing his full weight behind his shoulder. Tolliver had said that Tony Dunham had been dead before he burned, killed by smoke inhalation, but it was hard to forget that his flesh had sizzled and popped like barbecue for a time. That smell remained, too. Infante stood in the doorway, trying to imagine it. You would have to have some big balls to try killing someone this way—tossing the ashtray on the rug, waiting for the fire to engage. As Tolliver said, you couldn’t throw a second cigarette down if it didn’t get going. And if the guy woke up, you’d better be able to persuade him that it was an accident and you just walked in, a nervy chance to take if he was already smacking you regular. You also needed the discipline not to reach for a single cherished possession, to let it all go. You had to stand there until you were almost choking from the smoke, then close the door, wash your face to clear it of the watery tears caused by the fire, then go back and wait until you were sure that no one could save the man on the other side.

The woman up in Baltimore, whatever her name was—she could do that, he was sure of it. But he also was convinced that she wasn’t Penelope Jackson. It was the only real fact he had.
I don’t know Penelope Jackson
, she had said. But wouldn’t a true stranger have modified the name?
I don’t know
a
Penelope Jackson, I don’t know
any
Penelope Jackson
. Then how the fuck did you come to have her car? She had managed to avoid answering that question by offering them the solution to an infamous crime, then setting up a police officer as the perp. She had thrown a lot of things at them—to what end? What didn’t she want them to see?

He left the house, left Reynolds Street. It was a sad house, even before the fire. A house where two unhappy people had coexisted with frustration and disappointment. A house of quarrels and insults. He could tell because he had lived in such a house, twice. Well—once, his second marriage. His first marriage had been okay, until it wasn’t. Tabby had been a sweet girl. If he met her now…But he could never meet her again, not the Tabby he had first glimpsed in the Wharf Rat twelve years ago. She was lost to him, replaced by a woman who knew Kevin Infante as a cheat and a runaround. He ran into Tabby sometimes—Baltimore was small that way—and she was always polite, civil, as was he. Friendly, even, laughing about their marriage as if it were nothing more than an accident-plagued road trip, a merry misadventure. A decade out, they could be generous to their younger selves.

Yet there was a film in her eyes that would never quite disappear, a sheen of disappointment. He would give anything to see Tabby one more time as she had regarded him that first night in the Wharf Rat, when he was still someone she could admire and respect.

ONE OF THE PAMPHLETS from the Best Western lobby said there was some sort of fort over on St. Simons Island, and he decided to kill time there until Mullet Bay, the restaurant-bar where Penelope Jackson had worked, began prepping for the dinner rush. He was used to historical disappointments—he had seen the Alamo when he was just ten years old—but there was no structure at all where Fort Frederica once stood. He was staring at a sea of weeds known as the Bloody Marsh when his cell rang.

“Hey, Nancy.”

“Hey, Infante.” He knew that tone. He was more attuned to Nancy’s tones than he had been to either wife’s. She was going to drop some bad news on him.

“Out with it, Nancy.”

“Our gal has decided she wants to talk. Today.”

“I’m back tonight. Can’t it wait?”

“I thought so, but Lenhardt says we gotta humor her. He’s going to send me in there with her. I think he’s worried about media, once her mom gets here. No one expected her to get out of Mexico so fast, with so little notice, and…well, we can’t control the mom as easily. We’ve got no charge hanging over her head. She can talk to whoever she wants to.”

Free, white, and twenty-one
, as Tolliver might say.

“Yeah, it could be a clusterfuck.” It was amazing that they had flown beneath the radar as long as they had, their only bit of luck. “Fuck, though. When does the mom get in?”

“Ten P.M., right behind you. That’s another thing…”

“Aw, c’mon. I’ve got to pick her up? Did I get demoted in the last twenty-four hours?”

“Sarge thought it would be nice if someone met her, and we don’t know how long this thing will go. Nice and…well, prudent. We want to keep her in our sights, you know?”

“Yeah.”

Infante snapped his phone shut in disgust and returned to staring at the marsh. The battle hadn’t apparently been all that bloody. British troops had repelled a Spanish invasion during something called the War of Jenkins’ Ear. What a small-stakes name for a war, but then he was fighting his own meaningless battle, wasn’t he, wandering around Georgia while his former partner vaulted into the lead position, conducted an interview that should have been his.
The War of Infante’s Left Testicle
. It was worse, in a way, knowing that Nancy hadn’t backstabbed him or maneuvered this. She had never been the scheming type. He wondered if maybe-Heather knew he had gone to Georgia and that’s why she was suddenly keen to tell all.

Fuck, he hated Brunswick.

“The thing is, we could really use your help.”

Willoughby heard the words, made sense of them, yet couldn’t quite process his way to an answer. He was too taken with the speaker, enthralled and delighted by her mere presence.
An old-fashioned girl
. Willoughby knew he was being sexist, but he couldn’t help thinking of the young detective that way. She was so curvy, a nineteenth-century body type here in the early days of the twenty-first, with such pretty red cheeks and slippery blond hair falling out of a careless topknot. There had been women in the department when he was there. By the late 1980s, some had even made homicide. But they sure hadn’t looked like this one.

“I was up until almost four A.M.,” the detective, Nancy, was saying earnestly, “going over what’s filtered out about the case and what was kept in the file. But it’s so much to take in at once, I thought you could help me focus on the key details.”

She pushed two printouts toward him. Not just typed but color-coded, red and blue. Red for what was known publicly, blue for what had been kept back. It seemed a little girly to him, but maybe all police did such things now that they had computers. Certainly he would never have dared using a system like this in his day, given how his coworkers were always on the alert for any sign of weakness or softness in him. Effeteness was the precise word, but if he had ever uttered it aloud, his colleagues would have seized upon it as evidence that he was, in fact, effete.

“Four A.M.?” he murmured. “And here it is only noon. You must be exhausted.”

“I have a six-month-old son. Exhausted is my natural state. Actually, I got four straight hours, so I feel relatively well rested.”

Willoughby pretended to study the papers in front of him, but he didn’t want to focus, didn’t want to surrender to those red and blue sirens. There was a whirlpool beneath this placid assortment of old facts. He had no desire to get sucked into this again, to think about all the ways he had failed. Not that anyone had ever rebuked him or suggested he was at fault in any way. His superiors, much as they had wanted a resolution in the Bethany matter—and that was the word they had come to use over time,
matter
—understood that it was bad luck, one of those rare cases that could have come straight from
The Twilight Zone
. Not even Dave, in the end, had faulted him. And by the time Willoughby left the department, he had in many ways carved out the image he’d wanted. One of the guys. Tough. Dogged. Never soft, much less effete.

Yet it had long gnawed at him that he’d never made significant inroads into learning what happened to the Bethany girls. And now here was this young woman—gosh, she was pretty, and a new mother, too, imagine that—telling him that a police had been accused, one of their own. One of
his
own, practically a contemporary. He didn’t remember Stan Dunham, and this Nancy girl said he had retired from the theft division in 1974, but still: This would be so embarrassing. He knew how it would look, if the Jane Doe girl—the woman—was telling the truth.
Right under their own noses, all these years
. There might be suggestions of a cover-up, a conspiracy. People loved conspiracies.

“This,” he said, pointing his finger at a line in blue ink, a line that had been capitalized and highlighted. “You got it. This is what you want. Only a very few people could talk about this in any detail—me, Miriam, Dave, the young cop who was with us that night, whoever had access to the evidence room.”

“That’s not a small number of people. Plus, the accused is a police, someone who might have had sources inside the department.”

“You’re thinking she’s not who she says she is, but that Stan still might be involved.”

“Everything’s in play right now. Information, it’s—” She paused, gathering her thoughts. “It’s alive, in its own way. It grows, it changes. Since I started working cold cases and spending more and more time with case files and computers, I think about information differently. It’s like a Lego set, you know? There are different ways to put it together, but some pieces will never join, no matter how you pound on them.”

The tea on the table between them had grown cold, but he took a sip anyway. He had insisted on making the tea, injecting a lot of ceremony into two mugs and two bags of Lipton, and she had indulged him in his wish, probably thinking he was lonely and wanted to draw out the visit. He wasn’t lonely, far from it, and he didn’t want her to stay one minute longer than necessary. His eyes slid toward his wife’s old desk and he heard a bird’s mournful coo somewhere in the eaves of Edenwald.
Too late. Too late
.

“The thing about
this
,” Willoughby said, “is that the person who took the girls doesn’t necessarily know about it and almost certainly doesn’t remember it. It wouldn’t have mattered to him. But a girl—a girl would remember it. You would, wouldn’t you? At that age?”

“Well, I was more of a tomboy, as you might guess, but yeah, I would remember.”

“So work your way to that. Get her good and drunk on her own words. That’s all you need to do. But you know that, right? You say you were in homicide, before your maternity leave.” He found himself blushing, as if it were impolite to remind this woman that she had bodily functions, that she had reproduced. “You know your way around an interrogation. In fact, I bet you’re darn good at it.”

It was her turn to drink cold tea, to stall a little. When he was younger, he might not have been drawn to her. In his twenties he had liked the women of his class, as his own snobbish mother might have said, the thin-to-the-point-of-brittle women, Katharine Hepburn types, with those pelvis-forward walks and hips that could cut you. Evelyn had been such a woman, elegant at every angle. But softness had its virtues, and this Nancy Porter had such a doll-like face, with those red cheeks and pale blue eyes. Peasant stock, his mother would have said, but his family tree could have used some sturdier genes.

“We thought—
they
thought—Sergeant Lenhardt, who supervises Infante, and the commissioner himself—we thought you should be present.”

“Watching, you mean?”

“Maybe even…talking.”

“Is that legal?”

“Sometimes retired police still work for the department. Sort of a noncommissioned, consultancy gig. We could make that happen.”

“Dear—”

“Nancy.”

“I wasn’t being a sexist—I lost your name for a second and was trying to cover up. That’s how it works, don’t you see? I’m in my sixties. I forget things. I’m not as sharp as I was. I don’t remember every detail. Right now you know this case better than I do. I have nothing to contribute.”

“Just your presence might make her think twice about trying to fake us out. With Infante in Georgia and the mother due to arrive tonight—”

“Miriam is coming? You found Miriam?”

“In Mexico, just as you said. She kept a bank account in Texas, and we got the contact info from them. Lenhardt found her last night, but we never thought she’d get here so fast. He tried to talk her out of coming at all. She’ll have to travel all day, but once she’s here, I don’t see how we can keep her away. It wasn’t our idea to sit down today, but my boss says it may be an opportunity, after all.”

“You mean, if she’s a fake, she may fool Miriam and begin gleaning information from her, almost without her knowing.” He shook his head. “She won’t fool Miriam. No one could fool Miriam about anything.”

“We’re not too worried about that. If it comes to it, we’ll always have epithelial cells. But if we could eliminate her definitively, trip her up on the facts, that wouldn’t be a bad thing.”

“Epi…?”

“DNA. I’m just being fancy using a scientific term, and not even accurately.”

“DNA. Of course. The policeman’s new best friend.” He took another sip of cold tea. So Miriam hadn’t told them, and they hadn’t asked. She assumed and they assumed, and why wouldn’t they? Things had gone unsaid, inferences had been made. His fault, he supposed, and he had considered undoing it so many times over the years. But he had owed Dave that much.

He pushed the papers away with enough force that some skidded off the slick surface of his mahogany coffee table. A table that, he noticed now, in the presence of this vibrant young woman, was dusty and overwaxed.

“You can’t imagine being through with something like this, can you? You think the juices can always be engaged. The old cliché is that warhorses react when they smell smoke. But does that mean the horse wants to go to war or that he wants to avoid it? I’ve always thought it might be the latter. I did some good work as a detective. When I retired, I made peace with the fact that this one case would remain open, that some things cannot be known. I even—don’t laugh—thought about supernatural explanations. Alien abductions. Why not?”