She took a breath to answer, but he cut her off. “He lost it in the pool. During pool time.”
Laney pressed the phone so firmly against her ear that it was heat on top of heat, the electromagnetic waves pulsing through her head. She said—and no, she did not raise her voice—“I told them not to force pool time on him. I told them.”
“Laney!” And yes, he did raise his voice. “They’re kicking him out of camp! That prick in charge told me he almost called the cops on Alfie. He said Alfie was so out of control, he scratched another kid who tried to help him.”
“What?” And now her voice was up too, sharp. “Let them! Let that fucker call the cops! We told them not to make Alfie go in; we told them! I’ll be home as soon as I can.”
“Oh? And when will that be, Laney? Huh? Is that the beach in the background? Are you on the beach? You’re still in drag, aren’t you? So what, you need to get back, change, sign out, and then it’s rush hour. You won’t be home for at least four hours, so don’t give me that shit.”
“Theo.”
“No! I’m dealing with it. I’m going to get him, and—” He stopped, and she closed her eyes, held her breath. And what? And what? “Laney, he was wailing when they called me. He was hysterical. I couldn’t get him to stop crying on the phone.” His voice was quiet now, defeated.
“Baby, I’m coming home. I’ll be home as soon as I can. Okay? Okay? We’ll have pizza tonight, okay? And we’ll take him out for ice cream?”
In the silence, she heard him breathe, heard his keys clink, his car door close, the engine come to life. “School doesn’t start for another three weeks,” Theo said.
And what he wasn’t saying sat there, pulsing in the air between Long Island and Brooklyn. No camp now and no school meant no painting.
“I’ll see if I can take some days off,” Laney said.
“Yeah.” Theo ended the call, and she squinted into the shimmering brightness above the water.
She’d have to take the days. It was all there was to it. August would be difficult, what with her being low on seniority and all the older cops hoarding summer vacation days since January. She’d have to barter with someone. If she had to, she’d go sick. Her phone vibrated again and this time it was Harry, asking where she’d gone off to.
As she left the beach and walked toward Harry’s car, a tall man with a crew cut and white button-down shirt, now without his briefcase, passed her and paused, his eyes narrowing with recognition.
Who knows, if she had gotten into the unmarked Impala right then, subsequent events might have turned down a different path and maybe more people would be alive four years later. But her phone rang again, and she answered, ignoring Harry’s car and marching down the block, her words unheard by either of the men watching her and her stiff, furious stride communicating something different to each.
CHAPTER
20
THE CAMP DIRECTOR had called her, castigating her for Alfie’s behavior as if she were herself a delinquent, and it was his call that both ratcheted her frustration level and simultaneously kept the watchful man in the button-down shirt from pegging her as a cop.
By the time she finally slid into Harry’s car and slammed the door behind her, the man had moved on, having his own business to conduct, and therefore didn’t see her getting into the Impala.
With sickening clarity, Laney entertained a quick fantasy of teleporting to the camp director’s office and punching his lights out. Not that she was a violent person, but man was she steamed.
She plucked the rosettes out of her hair and tousled the strands into their usual disorder, then fiddled with the vents to send the air conditioning at her face.
“You all right?” Harry asked.
“Yes,” she said. Harry was a great partner, but her private life was private. Besides, she never knew how to explain Alfie. “I’m going to bang the rest of the day,” she said, not meeting his eyes. If their sergeant had a problem with letting her leave early, she’d make up a doctor appointment. Fake the flu.
They stopped at a light, and Harry glanced at her. “Don’t worry about signing out,” he said. “Just go, and I’ll sign you out at six.” Which meant she wouldn’t have to make it official. Could pretend to be on the street, gathering evidence. She nodded a quick, sharp nod, not trusting her voice.
He smiled and winked. “Hey, you must be hungry.” He reached behind the seats and brought out a brown paper bag, stained at the bottom with greasy circles. “Meat piroshki,” he said, then fished out a cruller-sized lump of fried dough wrapped in wax paper and handed it to her. “And cherry cheese for me.”
She held the warm pastry in her hands, realizing she was starved, absolutely famished, not having eaten since cereal at six AM and it already late afternoon.
“Thanks,” she said. She bit into the soft, buttery dough and wiped at the drippings as they dribbled down her chin. She felt stronger already, capable of handling the difficult evening ahead.
“Good job before,” he said, through a mouthful of pastry.
She shook her head. “I’m not getting anywhere close to Orlov. I’ve been thinking I’ll start asking Bunny about him,” she said.
Harry drove ahead without comment.
“What?” she asked. “You don’t think I should?”
He made a turn onto a one-lane street and stopped behind an idling furniture truck. “I think that’s a good idea.”
They watched two men unload a white leather couch and disappear into a building.
“What did you think of the guy with the briefcase?” Harry asked mildly. “He almost smashed Malyish’s face.” He tapped the steering wheel. “He was pissed at someone, for sure.”
He put away his mostly uneaten lunch and wiped his hands. Fidgeted as the two men came out of the building, into the truck, and maneuvered a recliner out of its depths. The twitchiness was unusual for him, and she was about to ask if the greasy pastry was already on the way out when he said, “Might be worth following him.”
She bit off another chunk of the meat pie. “Okay,” she said around the melting dough. “I’ll walk around aimlessly until I automagically bump into white John Doe again.”
Harry shrugged. “Get your friend Bunny to point you in the right direction.”
The delivery truck finally moved on, and Harry stepped on the gas.
“I think if I ask her about both John Doe and Viktor Orlov, my cover is blown.” She frowned at him. “Don’t you think?”
“Look, we been trying to pin this Viktor guy for how long now? Five months? Six? Nobody’s talking because they’re all related to him one way or another. I figure we need to diversify. See if Bunny gives you anything on John Doe. Something tells me he’s not family. Doesn’t have the look, you know? If she doesn’t, we bring her in for all those drug buys. Also, since she hooked you up with the sellers, we can probably try to pin sales on her.”
Laney busied her hands with the radio taped to her bra strap. True, Bunny broke the law regularly and with adamant indifference. True, Bunny was not her friend. Not even Kendra’s friend. Dammit, though.
“John Doe could be Orlov’s family too, you know,” Laney said.
“I doubt it,” Harry said. “Anyway, we won’t know until we know, right?”
Right. But fuck if she’d let Bunny go to prison for sales.
CHAPTER
21
SYLVAN’S HIGH SCHOOL occupied an old mansion on an estate willed to the town back in the thirties. The building, a Georgian sprawl of brick and window with five dormant chimneys rising from the slate roof, had been a country home for a wealthy New York family, the countless bedrooms converted into classrooms. The landscaping still featured limestone statuary, benches, urns, and flowering trees.
This February morning, two days after Alfie’s disappearance, the trees stood bare and forlorn, their branches shivering with ice drops, and the statues wore snow bonnets. Students ran past the stone benches and into the warmth of the building as soon as t
he buses disgorged them onto the cobbled pathways.
Laney perched on one of those benches, heedless of the wet gusts and the frozen slush around her bare ankles. She’d spent the night on the couch, too tired to make it to bed, falling in and out of dread-filled sleep, her mind churning through every event that brought her to her empty house and the empty room where her child should have been. She wore last night’s clothes and had forgotten her warm, furry boots—purchased with Alfie in tow at the mall; everything brought him to mind, her entire life was steeped with him—had instead walked to the school in the low-heeled pumps she’d worn to Noonan’s, only noticing this when she was already encamped on the bench and her feet numb. She didn’t care.
She wasn’t sure what she sought (or whom she stalked), but she suspected she’d know when she saw it. Or him. From her vantage point, directly across the main entrance, she scrutinized every student who rushed inside. One of them knew Alfie. One of them had been the last to see him before he disappeared. One of them knew and wasn’t talking.
Taken to its logical conclusion, this meant Alfie was involved in something that couldn’t be discussed. At least not by a student to a parent. Certainly not by a student to the police.
She ran her fingers through her hair, dislodging icicles that had formed at her nape and crown. The last bus pulled away from the curb and drove around the circular driveway, heading back to the garage. The driver, Vincent, also a retired cop, waved, and she waved back. He’d always been kind to her, willing to pick up her shifts when she had to take unexpected days. She wished, with a desperation born of sleep deprivation and fear, that she was the one driving bus number 182 around that circular driveway. She wished she was warm, her furry boots hugging her feet, her son in a classroom and their little home waiting for them, vindaloo in the Crock-Pot, Netflix queued for their next movie. Her descent into this fantasy was akin to dreaming. For a moment she experienced an absolute calm so complete that when she drifted back to her cold reality, she felt strengthened, clearheaded.
She reached for her phone and checked her messages. Only one, from Mike. I’m sorry.
She then checked her Notes app, making sure the codes he’d given her hadn’t evaporated in the night, hadn’t been part of another fantasy. There’d been a paranoid, shaken look in his eyes that infected her, ratcheting up her already inflamed imagination. Mike had done some digging into Owen Hopper’s life since he’d been released and found that the man they sent to prison four years ago no longer had anything to lose. And even less to live for.
She breathed in sharply and looked upward at the heavy sky. A large, dark bird (crow? hawk? buzzard? she couldn’t tell) spiraled above the tree line. Whatever might be said of how Hopper’s case turned out, he wasn’t innocent. He’d been guilty. He’d done plenty to deserve, if not what he got, then surely a portion. Lie down with dogs, as her father used to say. But dammit. Dammit, dammit.
Laney tucked her phone into her pocket and was about to walk home when a side door opened and a boy in a fur ear-flapped hat and olive parka edged out, paused, approached her. Even with the hat down to his eyebrows, she recognized him. It was the boy from the other morning. The one who’d exchanged a baggie of something for cash in the hallway. Jordan Rogers. JP Spankthemonkey. Her son’s friend.
He stood over her, looking down, his face wan and drawn, freckly, a lick of red hair curving out from under that gray fake fur.
“Mrs. Bird?” he asked. He sounded raspy, his voice not yet a man’s but not a child’s either.
She met his eyes and kept quiet. Always better to wait it out, let the other person—be it suspect, victim, dealer, or lawyer—do the talking.
The boy sat next to her and looked away. The effort of speaking—or maybe the cold—had reddened his cheeks.
“I think I know where Alfie is,” he said.
She leaned toward him, her hand almost gripping his, then dropping to her lap. “Where is he?”
“There’s this man. I don’t know his real name. He told us to call him Mr. Blue.”
“Where is he?” Laney repeated, louder.
“I don’t want my parents to know,” the boy whispered, his face almost completely red now.
She never wanted to shake another person more than she wanted to shake this kid.
“Is Alfie in danger?” she asked, surprised by how level and sane she sounded.
The boy glanced at her, shook his head. He was nearly crying. “I don’t know,” he said. “Mr. Blue always gave us things, but he didn’t, you know … He didn’t want— He didn’t ask us to—” Jordan twisted his fingers together, untwisted. “I saw Alfie get into Mr. Blue’s car on Tuesday. It was raining, so I figured he was just getting a ride home.” He squeezed his eyes shut as if trying to excise the memory. “Please don’t tell my mom.”
Laney gritted her teeth in frustration. “Do you have an address for Mr. Blue?”
The boy nodded. “Number forty-two in the Mountain View apartments.”
She jumped and ran, wavering between dashing home, grabbing her gun, and getting into her car or running directly to the police station.
In the end, somehow, sanity prevailed, and she called Ed Boswell, yelling out Mr. Blue’s address as she sprinted home.
CHAPTER
22
MOUNTAIN VIEW WAS a rambling housing development overlooking the Hudson River. It had been started in the eighties and half completed before the money stopped, the resulting clutch of buildings clinging to the hills while the woods encroached on empty lots. At one point, an enterprising band of renters had hacked trails through the new forest, but now even those were overgrown and treacherous.
Laney had careened into the townhouse driveway within ten minutes of leaving her house, two patrol cars sirening in immediately behind. They were in a cul-de-sac, the townhouses flanking number forty-two vacant. She banged on the door as Ed walked up the front steps behind her. Beyond the door, all was silence.
“Who told you about this place?” Ed asked. A second policeman, younger, was now standing at the foot of the stairs, staring at her with curiosity.
Even in her frantic state, something cautioned her against revealing Jordan’s role just yet. He’d explicitly asked her to protect him, and a (surely misguided) parental impulse made her cagey. She did not yet know how anything or anyone connected. Getting him in trouble with his parents or even the police was one thing, and she cared diddly squat about that, but placing him in Mr. Blue’s line of vengeance? That needed thought. And more facts.
“A boy,” she said. “A kid said he knew Alfie and that they used to come here with an older man. A Mr. Blue. He said he saw Alfie get into this man’s car on Tuesday afternoon.”
Ed waited a beat. Then, “Who’s the kid, Laney?”
She glanced at the young cop, back at Ed. “I need to tell you later. I’ll explain.”
He frowned but didn’t press, because now something else caught their attention. In the initial rush of finding the unit and knocking, or maybe due to a particularly muscular gust of wind, they hadn’t registered the odor clinging to the air around them. She’d encountered this smell only a few times in her career, and it was never a good experience. She didn’t need to ask Ed if he made the same connection because his whole posture changed, his shoulders hunched, and his eyes darted along the perimeter of the house.
As if by silent agreement, they descended the steps and began circling the building, Ed’s flashlight out and directed at every window.
Number forty-two was half of the townhouse, one bedroom in back, a living room and eat-in kitchen in front, the windows haphazardly covered with blankets and sheets. The second, mirror half was tenantless—nothing on the windows and thick dust on the floors. Each half had its own garage, down a steep incline at the side in what would normally be a basement.
And it was as they strode down that incline that the stench intensified, and Ed was already pulling his phone out of his pocket even as his flashlight pointed at the narrow
garage door windows. Laney had to stand on her toes to see, and what she saw made her chest so tight that dark spots floated before her eyes and she had to grip the rough wood of the door to keep from stumbling.
Inside was no car, no furniture, no suitcases or shelving or paint cans or any other detritus to be expected in a normal, lived-in garage. No, in this space, illuminated only by the dull winter sun and Ed’s flashlight, was a bulging shape, covered by a blue tarp. The shape had leaked. The shape had shoes—leather oxfords, one pointing toward the door, one heels-up.
Ed, on his phone, said, “Hey, this is Detective Boswell. Good, yeah. I need a warrant. Now.”
He gripped Laney’s shoulder and turned her so their eyes met.
“You all right?” he asked.
She nodded, though she had to clench her teeth to keep them from chattering. She’d seen dead bodies before, enough to understand that the amount of leakage happening in that garage meant the body had been there a long time. Certainly longer than two days. But the enormity of realizing her boy had been here, had been coming here, repeatedly, while that … while a corpse decomposed beneath him ravaged her, floored her. She didn’t trust herself to speak.
“You know that’s not Alfie, yes? It’s not him.”
She nodded again.
“I’m going to get the manager and the keys. By the time I come back, we’ll have the warrant. Stay with Officer Ryan.”
While Boswell was gone, one more police car arrived, followed by an ambulance and the medical examiner’s team in a white van.
When the detective returned at last with the manager and keys, Laney had to step back. She hadn’t realized she was pressed against the garage door, as if trying to get through by osmosis.
The manager searched through several sets of keys before finding the one to number forty-two, and they stood in silence, flurries dampening their clothes and hair as he struggled with the lock.
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