Gone, Baby, Gone

by Dennis Lehane

  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 & 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 ca
b 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—”