She jerked in my arms one last time and then she seemed to almost float back down to the floor.
“We’re going to lift her,” the EMT told me. “Gently, but fast. On three. One…”
Four cops appeared in the doorway, hands on their weapons.
“Two,” the EMT said. “Get the fuck out of the doorway! We got an injured woman coming through.”
The second EMT pulled an oxygen mask out of his bag, held it at the ready.
The cops backed off onto the porch.
“Three.”
We lifted her, and her body felt far too light in my arms, as if it had never moved or jumped or danced.
We settled her onto the stretcher and the second EMT clamped the oxygen mask down over her face and yelled, “Coming through,” and they pulled her down the hall and onto the porch.
Phil and I followed and the moment I stepped out onto the icy porch I heard the sounds of at least twenty weapons being cocked and aimed in my direction.
“Put the guns down and drop to your fucking knees!”
I knew better than to argue with nervous cops.
I placed my gun and Dunn’s on the porch and knelt over them and held my hands up.
Phil was too worried about Angie to think that they could be talking to him too.
He took two steps after her stretcher and a cop clubbed his collarbone with a shotgun butt.
“He’s the husband,” I said. “He’s the husband.”
“Shut the fuck up, asshole! Keep your fucking hands in the air. Do it! Do it! Do it!”
I did. I remained kneeling as the cops moved cautiously closer and the bitter air found my bare feet and thin shirt and the paramedics lifted Angie into the back of the ambulance and took her away.
35
By the time the cops sorted everything out, Angie was in her second hour of surgery.
Phil was allowed to leave around four, after he’d called City Hospital, but I had to stick around and walk four detectives and a nervous young ADA through everything.
Timothy Dunn’s body had been found stuffed naked into a trash barrel by the swing sets in the Ryan Playground. The assumption was that Evandro had lured him there by doing something suspicious enough to catch Dunn’s eye, but not so obvious as to be taken as a direct threat or sign of danger.
A white sheet was found hanging from the basketball hoop that would have been directly in Dunn’s field of vision from his unmarked cruiser. A man hanging a sheet to a hoop at 2:00 A.M. on an icy night could conceivably have been odd enough to draw a young cop’s curiosity, but not a call for backup.
The sheet froze to the pole and hung there, a diamond of white against a pewter sky.
Dunn had been approaching the playground steps when Evandro came up behind him and buried the stiletto in his right ear.
The man who shot Angie had come in through the back door. His footprints—size eight—were found all over the back yard, but disappeared on Dorchester Avenue. The alarms Erdham had installed were rendered useless by the blackout, and all the man had to do was pick a second-rate bolt lock on the back door and walk on in.
Both Angie’s shots had missed him. One was found in the wall by the door. The other had ricocheted off the oven and shattered the window over the sink.
Which left only Evandro to explain.
Cops, when one of their own has been killed, are scary people to be around. The anger that commonly seethes just under their surfaces comes fully to the fore and you pity the poor bastard they arrest next.
Tonight was even worse than usual because Timothy Dunn had been related to a decorated brother cop. A promising cop himself, he’d also been young and innocent, stripped of his blues and stuffed in a barrel.
As Detective Cord—a white-haired man with a kind voice and merciless eyes—interviewed me in the kitchen, Officer Rogin—a balled-up bull of a cop—circled Evandro’s body, opening and closing his fists.
Rogin struck me as the kind of guy who becomes a cop for the same reason a lot of guys become jail guards—because they’re sadists who need socially acceptable outlets.
Evandro’s corpse was as I’d left it, defying the laws of physics and gravity as I’d come to know them by remaining on one knee, hands by his sides, looking down.
He was heading for rigor that way, and it pissed Rogin off. He looked at Evandro for a long time and breathed through his nostrils and balled his fists, as if by standing there long enough, exuding enough menace, he’d resurrect Evandro long enough to shoot him again.
It didn’t happen.
So Rogin took a step back and kicked the corpse in the face with a steel-toed shoe.
Evandro’s corpse flipped onto its back and the shoulders bounced off the floor. One leg collapsed under him, his head lolled to the left, and his eyes stared at the oven.
“Rogin, the fuck you doing?”
“Nice going, Hughie.”
“You’re going on report,” Detective Cord said.
Rogin looked at him and it was clear they had a history.
Rogin shrugged elaborately and spit on Evandro’s nose.
Showed him,” a cop said. “Fucker won’t have the nerve to die on you twice, Rogin.”
And then the house was cored by a deep quiet. Rogin blinked uncertainly at something in the hallway.
Devin entered the kitchen with his eyes on Evandro’s corpse, his face pink with cold. Oscar and Bolton came in behind him, and stayed a few steps back.
Devin kept his eyes on the corpse for a full minute, during which no one spoke. I’m not sure anyone breathed.
“Feel better?” He looked up at Rogin.
“Sergeant?”
“Do you feel better now?”
Rogin wiped a hand on his hip. “I’m not sure what you mean, sir.”
“Pretty simple question,” Devin said. “You just kicked a corpse. Do you feel better?”
“Ahm…” Rogin looked at the floor. “Yeah. I do.”
Devin nodded. “Good,” he said softly. “Good. I’m glad you have a sense of accomplishment, Officer Rogin. That’s important. What else have you accomplished tonight?”
Rogin cleared his throat. “I established a crime-scene perimeter—”
“Good. That’s always good.”
“And I, ahm—”
“Clubbed a guy on the porch,” Devin said. “Correct?”
“I thought he was armed, sir.”
“Understandable,” Devin said. “Tell me, did you engage in a search for the second shooter?”
“No, sir. That was—”
“Did you, perhaps, provide a blanket for the naked body of Officer Dunn?”
“No.”
“No. No.” Devin nudged Evandro’s corpse with his toe, stared down at it with pure apathy. “Did you take any steps to ascertain the location of the second shooter or interview neighbors or conduct a house-to-house search?”
“No. But again, I—”
“So, outside of kicking a corpse and clubbing a defenseless man and stretching out some yellow crime-scene tape, you haven’t accomplished much, have you, Officer?”
Rogin studied something on the stove. “No.”
“What was that?” Devin said.
“I said no, sir.”
Devin nodded and stepped over the corpse until he was standing beside Rogin.
Rogin was a tall man and Devin wasn’t, so Rogin had to lean down when Devin beckoned him to do so. He bent his head and Devin turned his lips toward his ear.
“Leave my crime scene, Officer Rogin,” Devin said.
Rogin looked at him.
Devin whispered, but the whole kitchen could hear:
“While your arms are still attached to your shoulders.”
“We fucked up,” Bolton said. “Actually I fucked up.”
“No,” I said.
“This is my fault.”
“This is Evandro’s fault,” I said. “And his partner’s.”
He leaned his head back against the wall in An
gie’s hallway. “I was over-eager. They offered bait, and I bit. I never should have left you alone.”
“You couldn’t have predicted a blackout, Bolton.”
“No?” He raised both hands, then dropped them in disgust.
“Bolton,” I said, “Grace is safe. Mae is safe. Phil is safe. They’re the civilians in all this. Not me and Angie.”
I started to walk down the hall toward the living room.
“Kenzie.”
I looked back at him.
“If you and your partner aren’t civilians and you’re not cops, what are you?”
I shrugged. “Two idiots who aren’t half as tough as we thought we were.”
Later, in the living room, a mottled gray light told us morning was advancing.
“You tell Theresa?” I asked Devin.
He stared out the window. “Not yet. I’m heading over there in a few minutes.”
“I’m sorry, Devin.” It wasn’t much, but it was all I could think to say.
Oscar coughed into his fist, looked at the floor.
Devin ran his finger over the window ledge, stared at the dust he came back with. “My son turned fifteen yesterday,” he said.
Devin’s ex-wife, Helen, and their two children lived in Chicago with her second husband, an orthodontist. Helen had custody, and Devin had lost visitation rights after an ugly Christmas incident four years ago.
“Yeah? How’s Lloyd doing these days?”
He shrugged. “He sent me a picture a few months back. He’s big, got hair so long I couldn’t see his eyes.” He studied his hard, scarred hands. “He plays drums in some local band. Helen says his grades are suffering.”
He looked back out at the street, and the mottled gray seemed to dampen and stretch his skin. When he spoke again, his voice was tremulous.
“I figure there’s a lot worse things to be than a musician, though. You know, Patrick?”
I nodded.
Phil had taken my Crown Victoria to the hospital, so Devin drove me over to the garage where I store my Porsche as the morning lightened around us.
Outside the garage, he sat back in his seat and closed his eyes as the heat sputtering from his cracked exhaust pipe enveloped the car.
“Arujo and his partner rigged a phone to a computer modem in an abandoned house in Nahant,” he said. “Rigged it so they could call from a pay phone down the street and the call would be traced back to the computer phone. Pretty smart.”
I waited as he rubbed his face with his hands and closed his eyes tighter, as if warding off a fresh wave of hurt.
“I’m a cop,” he said. “It’s everything I am. I have to do my job. Professionally.”
“I know.”
“Find this guy, Patrick.”
“I will.”
“By any means necessary.”
“Bolton—”
He held up a hand. “Bolton wants this to end, too. Don’t call attention to yourself. Don’t be seen. From me and Bolton’s end, we offer you privacy. You won’t be watched.” He opened his eyes, turned on the seat, looked at me for a long time. “Don’t let this guy write books from prison or give interviews to Geraldo.”
I nodded.
“They’ll want to study his brain.” He picked at a loose piece of vinyl peeling from his cracked dashboard. “They can’t do that if there’s no brain left to study.”
I patted his arm once and got out of the car.
Angie was still in surgery when I called the hospital. I asked them to page Phil, and when he got on the phone he sounded washed out.
“What’s going on?” I said.
“She’s still in there. They won’t tell me anything.”
“Stay calm, Phil. She’s strong.”
“You coming here?”
“Soon,” I said. “I have to see someone first.”
“Hey, Patrick,” he said carefully, “you stay calm, too.”
I found Eric at his apartment in the Back Bay.
He answered the door in a tattered bathrobe and gray sweatpants, and his face was drawn, three days’ worth of gray stubble along his jawline. His hair wasn’t tied back into a ponytail and it made him look ancient as it flowed around his ears and over his shoulders.
“Talk to me, Eric.”
He glanced at the gun in my waistband. “Leave me alone, Patrick. I’m tired.”
Behind him I could see discarded newspapers on the floor, a pile of plates and cups in the sink.
“Fuck you, Eric. We have to talk.”
“I’ve already talked.”
“With the FBI, I know. You failed your polygraph, Eric.”
He blinked. “What?”
“You heard me.”
He scratched his leg, yawned, and looked at a point over my shoulder. “Polygraphs aren’t admissable in court.”
“This isn’t about court,” I said. “This is about Jason Warren. This is about Angie.”
“Angie?”
She’s got a bullet in her, Eric.”
“She…?” He held a hand out in front of him as if not sure what to do with it. “Jesus, Patrick, is she going to be okay?”
“I don’t know yet, Eric.”
“You must be losing your mind.”
“I’m completely fucking deranged right now, Eric. Take that into consideration.”
He winced, and a tide of something bitter and hopeless washed through his eyes.
He turned his back to me, leaving the door open, and walked back into his apartment. I followed him through the wreckage of a living room strewn with books and empty pizza boxes, bottles of wine and empty beer cans.
In the kitchen he poured himself a cup of coffee and the coffee maker was stained by days of splattered coffee he’d neglected to wipe off. It was also unplugged. God knew how old the coffee was.
“Were you and Jason lovers?” I said.
He sipped his cold coffee.
“Eric? Why’d you leave U/Mass?”
“You know what happens to male professors who sleep with male students?” he said.
“Professors sleep with students all the time,” I said.
He smiled and shook his head. “Male professors sleep with female students all the time.” He sighed. “And in the current political atmosphere on most campuses, even that’s becoming dangerous. In loco parentis. Not a terribly threatening phrase unless it’s applied to twenty-one-year-old men and women in the one country where the last thing we would want of our children is that they actually grow up.”
I found a clean spot of counter, leaned against it.
Eric looked up from his coffee cup. “But, yes, Patrick, a prevailing attitude exists that it’s okay for male professors to sleep with female students as long as those students aren’t currently taking those professors’ classes.”
“So where’s the problem?”
“The problem is gay professors and gay students. That sort of relationship, I promise you, is still frowned on.”
“Eric,” I said, “give me a break. This is Boston academia we’re talking about here. The most strongly fortified bastion of liberalism in America.”
He laughed softly. “You think so, don’t you?” He shook his head again, a strange smile playing on thin lips. “If you had a daughter, Patrick, and let’s say she’s twenty, she’s smart, she’s at Harvard or Bryce or B.U., and you found out she was fucking a professor, how would you feel?”
I met his hollow gaze. “I’m not saying I’d like it, Eric, but I wouldn’t be surprised. And I’d figure she’s an adult, it’s her choice.”
He nodded. “Same scenario, but it’s your son and he’s fucking his male professor?”
That stopped me. It stirred some deeply repressed part of myself that was more Puritan than Catholic, and the image I had in my head—of a young man in a tiny cramped bed with Eric—revolted me for just a moment before I got control of it, started to distance myself from the image, grasp on to the intellectual handholds of my own social liberalism.
?
??I’d—”
“See?” He was smiling brightly, but his eyes were still hollow and unhinged. “The thought repulsed you, didn’t it?”
“Eric, I—”
“Didn’t it?”
“Yes,” I said quietly. And wondered what that made me.
He held up a hand. “It’s okay, Patrick. I’ve known you for ten years, and you’re one of the least homophobic straight men I know. But you’re still homophobic.”
“Not when it comes to—”
“You and your gay friends,” he said, “you’re fine. I grant you that. But when it comes to the possibility of your son and his gay friends…”
I shrugged. “Maybe.”
“Jason and I had an affair,” he said and poured his coffee into the sink.
“When?” I said.
“Last year. It ended. It only lasted a month in the first place. I was a family friend, and I felt like I was betraying Diandra. Jason, for his part, I think wanted to be with someone closer to his own age, and he still had a pretty powerful attraction to women as well. But the breakup was very amicable.”
“Did you tell the FBI this?”
“No.”
“Eric, for Christ’s sake, why not?”
“It’ll destroy my career,” he said. “Remember your reaction to my hypothetical. No matter how liberal you think academia is, the trustees of most colleges are straight white males. Or their country-club wives. And as soon as they think a fag professor is turning their children or their friends’ children into fag students, they’ll ruin him. Bank on it.”
“Eric, it’s going to come out. The FBI, Eric. The FBI. They’re going through your life right now with magnifying glasses. They’ll turn over the right rock sooner or later.”
“I can’t admit this, Patrick. I can’t.”
“What about Evandro Arujo? Did you know him?”
He shook his head. “No. Jason was scared, Diandra was scared, so I called you in.”
I believed him. “Eric, please consider talking to the Feds.”
“Will you be telling them what I told you?”
I shook my head. “I don’t work that way. I’ll tell them, for what it’s worth, that I don’t think you’re a suspect, but I don’t think it’ll change their minds without proof.”
He nodded and walked out of the kitchen to the door. “Thanks for coming by, Patrick.”