Final Cut

by Colin Campbell

  “So, you’re going to have to move for the time being.”

  Helen ignored her drink.

  “No. I’ll just move the boat. That’s the beauty of life on the ocean wave. You’re mobile. I can moor her down at Hingham Shipyard.”

  McNulty shook his head.

  “They know your boat. How hard you think it’ll be to find?”

  “Why would they want to find me?”

  “Not you. The boat. Because they won’t believe I’d just leave you.”

  Helen took a drink and softened her eyes.

  “And you wouldn’t, would you? Just leave me.”

  McNulty let out a sigh.

  “I’ve left people before. I’m not doing it again.”

  Helen leaned forward.

  “Somebody you haven’t told me about.”

  McNulty looked her in the eye.

  “Somebody I’ll never tell you about.”

  Helen met his gaze and let her eyes take in everything about him. She looked at the sadness in his eyes and the weight on his shoulders. She watched him fiddle with his iced tea then stroke the dog as a distraction. She spoke softly.

  “That bad, huh?”

  He frowned.

  “It’s always bad. You know that.”

  “This is before the massage girls.”

  McNulty didn’t speak. Helen took a stab in the dark.

  “Back when you were a kid?”

  McNulty flinched, took a sip of iced tea, then put the drink down.

  “I need you somewhere safe while I sort this shit out.”

  Helen raised her eyebrows.

  “While you sort this shit out?”

  McNulty stood up.

  “If you want a job done right.”

  Helen stood up too.

  “And you don’t like bullies.”

  McNulty didn’t answer. He snapped his fingers and the dog ran to his side. It scratched its ear twice then trotted to the open door. Helen put the drinks on the galley counter then turned to McNulty.

  “What are you going to do?”

  McNulty stood in the doorway.

  “I’m going to meet the parents.”

  THIRTY-FIVE

  The house on Bay View Street told McNulty two things. That Jenny Eynon came from a good family and that the only view you’d get of the bay was if you hired a helicopter to help you see over the industrial gas tanks across the Southern Artery highway. Traffic on the four-lane blacktop hummed and buffeted in a constant flow of heavy trucks and business cars that sped past the garden fence. Bay View Street itself looked like any other tree-lined suburban street. It had just been dumped at the back of the highway from hell, that’s all. If anybody lost their dog here it would likely end up roadkill under a Home Depot delivery truck.

  “Stay.”

  McNulty waved a stern finger at the dog but the command was redundant. He left the dog in the car with the window open just enough for fresh air but not enough for him to jump through. He’d seen enough roadkill for one week. He crossed the sidewalk to the straggly hedgerow and scanned the green-painted frame house from an angle, so he could see two sides at once. He checked the windows and curtains and doors. Standard procedure. If he’d still been a cop.

  The sun baked off the highway around the back and reflected off the side windows. They were all closed. He wouldn’t be able to see movement inside unless he wore Polaroid sunglasses. The windows at the front were all open for fresh air—away from the exhaust fumes that had killed the garden. A “For Sale” sign leaned at an awkward angle. It looked as sad and forlorn as the attempt at gardening. A woman moved past a window upstairs. Good. There was somebody home.

  McNulty got his story straight in his head, let out a deep breath to avoid the traffic fumes, then climbed the steps to the front door.

  “And she’s never gone missing before?”

  McNulty used his most convincing quiet and concerned tone, which was a good thing and a bad thing. It kept the woman calm but it sounded like funeral talk. Consoling a grieving mother, which the woman almost certainly was. Mrs. Eynon was about the same age as Helen Kozora but grief and worry had aged her. She looked twenty years older as she shook her head.

  “Never.”

  Mrs. Eynon might be grieving but she hadn’t forgotten her manners. Tea and cookies were on the kitchen table. It was the least she could do for somebody helping look for her daughter. McNulty hadn’t exactly lied when he said he’d come from The Quincy Sun to follow up on the missing girls. He had a notepad and pen and made copious notes. He’d started by recapping what he already knew. Jenny had been missing for two weeks. She’d never gone missing before. She’d been seeing a boy the mother didn’t approve of. Some late nights. Then gone.

  “How old was the boy?”

  Mrs. Eynon looked up from the tray of cookies.

  “He wasn’t a boy. He was a young man.”

  McNulty scribbled a note.

  “Roughly how old?”

  “Early twenties.”

  McNulty nodded his understanding.

  “Too old for a thirteen-year-old.”

  “Yes. That’s why I wasn’t happy.”

  “Not because he was from out of town?”

  Mrs. Eynon looked McNulty in the eye.

  “Let me tell you something. Quincy is a small place. Everyone’s from out of town. This young man wasn’t as far out as you.”

  McNulty softened his eyes.

  “Ma’am. I’m from a long way out of town. Where was he from?”

  Mrs. Eynon shrugged.

  “Boston maybe. Somewhere like that. Just not Quincy.”

  “You ever meet him?”

  “No. She didn’t bring him home. Saw him in passing is all.”

  “Did she have a picture of him?”

  Mrs. Eynon shook her head.

  “She didn’t keep pictures.”

  McNulty didn’t believe that. All teenage girls kept pictures. It was just a question of where.

  “Not on her mobile?”

  “Mobile?”

  McNulty corrected himself.

  “Her cell phone.”

  Mrs. Eynon let out a sigh.

  “She kept her cell private. Even from us.”

  “Did the police call it?”

  “Yes. They said it was turned off.”

  Of course it was. McNulty chastised himself. First thing the

  police would do was ring the girl’s phone. Next thing would be to track it using the phone’s GPS, even if it was turned off. The fact that they hadn’t found her suggested the phone had been smashed or the SIM card taken out. Either scenario was a bad sign.

  “Do you mind if I take a look in her room?”

  Mrs. Eynon sat up straight, as if her focus had wandered and now she was back.

  “The police searched the house when I made the report.”

  Again, standard procedure, but the initial search would have been to make sure the girl wasn’t hiding in the house, or worst-case scenario, that she hadn’t hanged herself in the attic. McNulty had seen that happen before. A nationwide search back in England one time had ended with a secondary house search. Turned out the kid had committed suicide behind some packing boxes in the attic. McNulty wasn’t looking for a suicide. He was looking for photos.

  “It would help give me a feeling about Jenny.”

  McNulty’s using her daughter’s name sent a shiver through Mrs. Eynon. Her shoulders sagged and her face crumpled. She nodded while fighting back tears, then stood up. She couldn’t speak so she waved McNulty to follow her.

  Searching a teenage girl’s bedroom is always best done alone. Parents find it upsetting but mainly they cramp your style. Cops aren’t interior decorators. They don’t search tidily. Thankfully Mrs. Eynon didn’t want to watch so she left McNulty and went downstairs to wash the dishes.

  It only took McNulty five minutes to find what he was looking for. The
girl hadn’t been very imaginative with her hiding place. She’d maybe seen some of the movies McNulty had seen because they always hid the photos in the same place: Scotch-taped to the underside of the bedside cabinet drawer. No doubt she had photos of the boyfriend on her phone as well, but these photos must have been too sensitive to risk on an electronic device that her friends or parents might see. These were four-by-six prints of photos taken on her phone. The sort of thing a processing lab could knock out with your holiday snaps. Like Bridgewater Photo Lab.

  Jenny Eynon might have only been thirteen years old but she already had the body of a young woman. Smooth unblemished skin and firm little breasts. Her nipples hadn’t fully developed yet and were just flat pink circles. Pubic hair was non-existent. The reason McNulty could see all that was because the photos were clear and intimate and proved the girl was sexually active. Very active. It was the person she was being active with that brought McNulty up short.

  With some of the angles it was difficult to see. McNulty hadn’t previously seen certain body parts of the man in the photos. The clothes were vaguely familiar but they weren’t seen in too many of the snapshots. Buttocks and balls and angry veined erections weren’t part of his everyday interaction with the man in the pictures. McNulty let out a sigh and shuffled the photos into a neat pile.

  “Serves you right, you motherfucker.”

  The last time McNulty had seen Brad Semenoff, he was being zipped into a body bag. Immediately before that he’d seen the second AC’s skin being peeled off under a passing car. As far as McNulty was concerned, Semenoff had got off lightly. More to the point, the photos proved where the girl had ended up—shackled to the chair at South Shore Hardcore. What they also showed was that the second AC had been involved in the grooming of the girls being used in the porn movies. And what that suggested was that South Shore Hardcore was using Titanic Productions’ cameras, as well as their film stock.

  McNulty put the photos in his pocket and tidied the bedroom. There was no need for the girl’s mother to know about them until the police made it all official. He went downstairs and thanked her for the tea. He told her that the search had helped bring Jenny into focus, then he went to the door. Mrs. Eynon let him out and walked him to the car. If she’d stayed in the house McNulty might not have found the next piece to the puzzle. He thanked her again and unlocked the car. Yorkie was jumping up and down wagging his tail. Mrs. Eynon looked at the dog.

  “What are you doing with Suzy’s dog?”

  THIRTY-SIX

  Traffic on the Southern Artery continued to buffet the back of the house but everything was calm and still out front. Except for the tension that had just ratcheted up to a ten. McNulty let the dog out and it ran straight to Mrs. Eynon like she was the first familiar face it had ever seen. McNulty would have felt jealous if he hadn’t been trying to get rid of the dog since day one. He watched the woman who was worrying about her missing daughter blossom like a dying flower that was suddenly given water.

  “Who’s Suzy?”

  Mrs. Eynon didn’t know Suzy’s last name but she did have a story to tell. For a housewife home alone in a quiet suburban street that meant more tea and cookies. For the dog it meant water and a doggy chew.

  “I think she’s alone quite a lot. That’s why she comes around here.”

  Mrs. Eynon stroked the dog as it lay next to the kitchen table. McNulty took a sip of his tea but ignored the cookies. This was big news. He wanted to give it his undivided attention.

  “Were they close friends?”

  As soon as he said it he knew the phrasing was bad. Speaking in the past tense about both girls. If Mrs. Eynon noticed she didn’t show it.

  “As much as Jenny had close friends. They saw a lot of each other over the last few weeks.”

  She realized that the last two weeks had been after Jenny went missing.

  “The few weeks leading up to Jenny’s leaving.”

  She didn’t say, went missing or disappeared. That sounded too final. Saying her daughter had left didn’t feel as serious. Deep inside she knew how serious this was but every little hope helped to get her through the day. Downplaying the vanishing made it more palatable. McNulty slipped into inquiring officer mode, asking soft questions then putting meat on the bones. He was careful not to box the woman into a corner where she’d have to admit that her daughter had been taken and that this Suzy could be her last hope of finding her.

  Suzy was about Jenny’s age, maybe fourteen, but didn’t go to the same school. Her clothes were clean but threadbare and she had an undernourished off-color look that wasn’t exactly sickly but was far from healthy. Jenny had first met her walking the dog beyond the gasworks near Hole Point. Mrs. Eynon had got the impression that Suzy lived across the bay somewhere, but she couldn’t say where. There had been some talk of a broken home and of her mother being away a lot, leaving Suzy to fend for herself. There was a brief and intense girly friendship during which they had seen each other almost every day. That lasted until Jenny started seeing the boy who had split the family.

  “Have you seen Suzy since Jenny left?”

  McNulty had learned from his previous mistake. Talk about the daughter as if she’d gone on an unauthorized trip. Mrs. Eynon shook her head.

  “Now you mention it. No.”

  She thought about that for a moment.

  “And she used to come around all the time.”

  McNulty scribbled a few words in his notepad.

  “Did she ever mention where they went? People they met?”

  The mother was on safer ground with that one.

  “No.”

  “You didn’t see them with any pamphlets or flyers. You know, places to visit?”

  “No.”

  McNulty turned his attention to the dog.

  “When Suzy was walking the dog. Did it have a collar and leash?”

  Mrs. Eynon thought about that with a comical look of concentration. She took a deep breath, then let out a long slow sigh that obviously helped her visualize the dog walker because her face lit up.

  “Yes, she did. I remember because she was very particular about not letting the dog run across the highway.”

  That led seamlessly to the next question.

  “Did it have a nametag?”

  Another deep breath but this time to no avail.

  “I think so, but I can’t be sure.”

  That negated his next question but he asked it anyway.

  “So you didn’t see an address on the collar?”

  Again, the shake of the head.

  “Sorry.”

  McNulty closed the notepad and was preparing to bid farewell for a second time when the woman waved a hand toward the window. She pointed at a telegraph pole at the end of the garden. A torn leaflet was stapled to the wood. It fluttered in the breeze from the traffic.

  “But you’ve seen the flyers.”

  McNulty could just make out the picture of a dog on the tattered paper. Mrs. Eynon lowered her hand.

  “Number of dogs go missing round here, everybody’s got them tagged.”

  McNulty looked nonplussed. The only tagging he knew of was when criminals on bail had security bracelets on their ankles.

  “Tagged?”

  She held a finger to her throat.

  “Implants. Injected into the neck. Got all their information right there. You just need the thingy to read it.”

  McNulty looked down at the dog and ruffled its fur.

  “Who’s got a reader around here?”

  Mrs. Eynon got up and fetched a folded newspaper from the living room. She put the copy of The Quincy Sun on the table.

  “Classifieds. Look for the local vet.”

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Getting the address from the vet was easier than finding the address once he’d got it. McNulty felt like he’d wandered into one of those spy movies where the secret agent has a microchip implanted under the skin. As if the do
g were Jason Bourne, or Snake Plissken, except without the explosive detonator. The vet scanned the soft tissue of Yorkie’s neck just behind the head. The readout showed the address as Snug Harbor Elementary School across the Town River on Palmer Street. That was the easy part. Trying to find where Suzanne Cipolletti lived at the school was a different matter. In the end the dog provided the answer to that as well.

  Mrs. Eynon had been right; Suzy lived across the bay somewhere. When McNulty pulled into the circle driveway out front of the school he could see the industrial gas tanks just beyond Hole Point. The school was closed. McNulty didn’t understand the public holiday system in America, but the kids were probably enjoying their day off. No kids meant no staff, so there was nobody to ask where the living quarters were or even who would be living on-site. As far as he could see it wasn’t a boarding school. The obvious choice would be the janitor or whatever they called the caretaker at an elementary school.

  It was another beautiful day. Walking around the school buildings would have been peaceful and therapeutic under different circumstances. The grounds were clean and well kept. The sports fields at the back extended the full width of the peninsular and were bordered by lush trees and vegetation. Everything was neatly trimmed and tidy along the edge of the playing fields but a bit more rustic in the deeper woods. The school buildings clung to the southern tip of the grounds. Soccer pitches and a baseball diamond stretched to the north. There was no caretaker’s cottage at one side like in Yorkshire. As far as McNulty could see nobody lived here at all. Then Yorkie got excited and ran off across the playing fields.

  The house was hidden in the woods at the far corner of the school grounds. Now that McNulty knew it was there, he could see the track along the edge of the woods from the school. The wooden shack was in keeping with Mrs. Eynon’s description of the girl’s clothing. Faded and worn. The caretaker’s house had seen better days. It had also looked more lived in than it did right now because one thing was for sure: Nobody was living in it today.