Now, as the Wednesday evening rush-hour traffic dwindled to some distant beeps and engine revs on the avenue below, Angie and I sat in our office in the belfry of St. Bartholomew’s Church in Dorchester and listened to Amanda’s aunt and uncle plead her case.
“Who’s Amanda’s father?” Angie said.
The weight seemed to resettle onto Lionel’s shoulders. “We don’t know. We think it’s a guy named Todd Morgan. He left the city right after Helene got pregnant. Nobody’s heard from him since.”
“The list of possible fathers is long, though,” Beatrice said.
Lionel looked down at the floor.
“Mr. McCready,” I said.
He looked at me. “Lionel.”
“Please, Lionel,” I said. “Have a seat.”
He fitted himself into the small chair on the other side of the desk after a bit of a struggle.
“This Todd Morgan,” Angie said, as she finished writing the name on a pad of paper. “Do police know his whereabouts?”
“Mannheim, Germany,” Beatrice said. “He’s stationed in the army over there. And he was on the base when Amanda disappeared.”
“Have they discounted him as a suspect?” I said. “There’s no way he would have hired a friend to do it?”
Lionel cleared his throat, looked at the floor again. “The police said he’s embarrassed by my sister and doesn’t think Amanda is his child anyway.” He looked up at me with those lost, gentle eyes of his. “They said his response was: ‘If I want a rug rat to shit and cry all the time, I can have a German one.’”
I could feel the wave of hurt that had washed through him when he’d had to call his niece a “rug rat,” and I nodded. “Tell me about Helene,” I said.
There wasn’t much to tell. Helene McCready was Lionel’s younger sister by four years, which put her at twenty-eight. She’d dropped out of Monsignor Ryan Memorial High School in her junior year, never got the GED she kept saying she would. At seventeen, she ran off with a guy fifteen years older, and they’d lived in a trailer park in New Hampshire for six months before Helene returned home with a face bruised purple and the first of three abortions behind her. Since then she’d worked a variety of jobs—Stop & Shop cashier, Chess King clerk, dry cleaner’s assistant, UPS receptionist—and never managed to hold on to any for more than eighteen months. Since the disappearance of her daughter, she’d taken leave from her part-time job running the lottery machine at Li’l Peach, and there weren’t any indications she’d be going back.
“She loved that little girl, though,” Lionel said.
Beatrice looked as if she were of a different opinion, but she kept silent.
“Where is Helene now?” Angie said.
“At our house,” Lionel said. “The lawyer we contacted said we should keep her under wraps as long as we can.”
“Why?” I said.
“Why?” Lionel said.
“Yeah. I mean, her child’s missing. Shouldn’t she be making appeals to the public? Canvassing the neighborhood at least?”
Lionel opened his mouth, then closed it. He looked down at his shoes.
“Helene is not up to that,” Beatrice said.
“Why not?” Angie said.
“Because—well, because she’s Helene,” Beatrice said.
“Are the police monitoring the phones at her place in case there’s a ransom demand?”
“Yes,” Lionel said.
“And she’s not there,” Angie said.
“It got to be too much for her,” Lionel said. “She needed her privacy.” He held out his hands, looked at us.
“Oh,” I said. “Her privacy.”
“Of course,” Angie said.
“Look”—Lionel kneaded his cap again—“I know how it seems. I do. But people show their worry in different ways. Right?”
I gave him a halfhearted nod. “If she’d had three abortions,” I said, and Lionel winced, “what made her decide to give birth to Amanda?”
“I think she decided it was time.” He leaned forward and his face brightened. “If you could have seen how excited she was during that pregnancy. I mean, her life had purpose, you know? She was sure that child would make everything better.”
“For her,” Angie said. “What about the child?”
“My point at the time,” Beatrice said.
Lionel turned to both women, his eyes wide and desperate again. “They were good for each other,” he said. “I believe that.”
Beatrice looked at her shoes. Angie looked out the window.
Lionel looked back at me. “They were.”
I nodded, and his hound dog’s face sagged with relief.
“Lionel,” Angie said, still looking out the window, “I’ve read all the newspaper reports. Nobody seems to know who would have taken Amanda. The police are stymied, and according to reports, Helene says she has no ideas on the subject either.”
“I know.” Lionel nodded.
“So, okay.” Angie turned from the window and looked at Lionel. “What do you think happened?”
“I don’t know,” he said, and gripped his hat so hard, I thought it might come apart in those big hands. “It’s like she was sucked up into the sky.”
“Has Helene been dating anybody?”
Beatrice snorted.
“Anybody regular?” I said.
“No,” Lionel said.
“The press is suggesting she hung around with some unsavory characters,” Angie said.
Lionel shrugged, as if that was a matter of course.
“She hangs out at the Filmore Tap,” Beatrice said.
“That’s the biggest dive in Dorchester,” Angie said.
“And think how many bars contend for that honor,” Beatrice said.
“It’s not that bad,” Lionel said, and looked to me for support.
I held out my hands. “I carry a gun on a regular basis, Lionel. And I get nervous going into the Filmore.”
“The Filmore’s known as a druggies’ bar,” Angie said. “Supposedly they move coke and heroin in and out of there like buffalo wings. Does your sister have a drug problem?”
“You mean, like heroin?”
“They mean like anything,” Beatrice said.
“She smokes a little weed,” Lionel said.
“A little?” I asked. “Or a lot?”
“What’s a lot?” he said.
“Does she keep a water bong and a roach clip on her nightstand?” Angie said.
Lionel squinted at her.
“She’s not addicted to any particular drug,” Beatrice said. “She dabbles.”
“Coke?” I said.
She nodded and Lionel looked at her, stunned.
“Pills?”
Beatrice shrugged.
“Needles?” I said.
“Oh, no,” Lionel said.
Beatrice said, “Not as far as I know.” She thought about it. “No. We’ve seen her in shorts and tank tops all summer. We’d have seen tracks.”
“Wait.” Lionel held up a hand. “Just wait. We’re supposed to be looking for Amanda, not talking about my sister’s bad habits.”
“We have to know everything about Helene and her habits and her friends,” Angie said. “A child goes missing, usually the reason is close to home.”
Lionel stood up and his shadow filled the top of the desk. “What’s that mean?”
“Sit down,” Beatrice said.
“No. I need to know what that means. Are you suggesting my sister could have had something to do with Amanda’s disappearance?”
Angie watched him steadily. “You tell me.”
“No,” he said loudly. “Okay? No.” He looked down at his wife. “She’s not a criminal, okay? She’s a woman who’s lost her child. You know?”
Beatrice looked up at him, her face inscrutable.
“Lionel,” I said.
He stared down at his wife, then looked at Angie again.
“Lionel,” I said again, and he turned to me. “You said yourself
it’s like Amanda disappeared into thin air. Okay. Fifty cops are looking for her. Maybe more. You two have been working on it. People in the neighborhood…”
“Yeah,” he said. “Lots of them. They’ve been great.”
“Okay. So where is she?”
He stared at me as if I might suddenly pull her out of my desk drawer.
“I don’t know.” He closed his eyes.
“No one does,” I said. “And if we’re going to look into this—and I’m not saying we will…”
Beatrice sat up in her chair and looked hard at me.
“But if, we have to work under the assumption that if she has been abducted, it was by someone close to her.”
Lionel sat back down. “You think she was taken.”
“Don’t you?” Angie said. “A four-year-old who ran off on her own wouldn’t still be out there after almost three full days without having been seen.”
“Yeah,” he said, as if facing something he’d known was true but had been holding at bay until now. “Yeah. You’re probably right.”
“So what do we do now?” Beatrice said.
“You want my honest opinion?” I said.
She cocked her head slightly, her eyes holding steadily with my own. “I’m not sure.”
“You have a son who’s about to enter school. Right?”
Beatrice nodded.
“Save the money you would have spent on us and put it toward his education.”
Beatrice’s head didn’t move; it stayed cocked slightly to the right, but for a moment she looked as if she’d been slapped. “You won’t take this case, Mr. Kenzie?”
“I’m not sure there’s any point to it.”
Beatrice’s voice rose in the small office. “A child is—”
“Missing,” Angie said. “Yes. But a lot of people are looking for her. The news coverage has been extensive. Everyone in this city and probably most of the state knows what she looks like. And, trust me, most of them have their eyes peeled for her.”
Beatrice looked at Lionel. Lionel gave her a small shrug. She turned from him and locked eyes with me again. She was a small woman, no more than five foot three. Her pale face, sparkled with freckles the same color as her hair, was heart-shaped, and there was a child’s roundness to her button nose and chin, the cheekbones that resembled acorns. But there was also a furious aura of strength about her, as if she equated yielding with dying.
“I came to you both,” she said, “because you find people. That’s what you do. You found that man who killed all those people a few years ago, you saved that baby and his mother in the playground, you—”
“Mrs. McCready,” Angie said, holding up a hand.
“Nobody wanted me to come here,” she said. “Not Helene, not my husband, not the police. ‘You’d be wasting your money,’ everyone said. ‘She’s not even your child,’ they said.”
“Honey.” Lionel put his hand on hers.
She shook it off, leaned forward until her arms were propped on the desk and her sapphire eyes were holding mine.
“Mr. Kenzie, you can find her.”
“No,” I said softly. “Not if she’s hidden well enough. Not if a lot of people who are just as good at this as we are haven’t been able to find her either. We’re just two more people, Mrs. McCready. Nothing more.”
“Your point?” Her voice was low again, and icy.
“Our point,” Angie said, “is what help could two more sets of eyes be?”
“What harm, though?” Beatrice said. “Can you tell me that? What harm?”
2
From a detective’s perspective once you rule out running away or abduction by a parent, a child’s disappearance is similar to a murder case: If it’s not solved within seventy-two hours, it’s unlikely it ever will be. That doesn’t necessarily mean the child is dead, though the probability is high. But if the child is alive, she’s definitely worse off than when she went missing. Because there’s very little gray area in the motivations of adults who encounter children who aren’t their own; you either A, help that child or, B, exploit her. And while the methods of exploitation vary—ransoming children for money, using them for labor, abusing them sexually for personal and/or profit concerns, murdering them—none of them stems from benevolence. And if the child doesn’t die and is eventually found, the scars run so deep that the poison can never be removed from her blood.
In the last four years, I’d killed two men. I’d watched my oldest friend and a woman I barely knew die in front of me. I’d seen children desecrated in the worst possible ways, met men and women who killed as if it were a reflex action, watched relationships burn in the violence with which I’d actively surrounded myself.
And I was tired of it.
Amanda McCready had been missing for at least sixty hours by this point, maybe as long as seventy, and I didn’t want to find her stuffed in a Dumpster somewhere, her hair matted with blood. I didn’t want to find her six months down the road, vacant-eyed and used up by some freak with a video camera and a mailing list of pedophiles. I didn’t want to look in a four-year-old’s eyes and see the death of everything that had been pure in her.
I didn’t want to find Amanda McCready. I wanted someone else to.
But maybe because I’d become as caught up in this case over the last few days as the rest of the city, or maybe because it had happened here in my neighborhood, or maybe just because “four-year-old” and “missing” aren’t words that should go together in the same sentence, we agreed to meet Lionel and Beatrice McCready at Helene’s apartment in half an hour.
“You’ll take the case, then?” Beatrice said, as she and Lionel stood.
“That’s what we need to discuss between ourselves,” I said.
“But—”
“Mrs. McCready,” Angie said, “things are done a certain way in this business. We have to consult privately before we agree to anything.”
Beatrice didn’t like it, but she also realized there was very little she could do about it.
“We’ll drop by Helene’s in half an hour,” I said.
“Thank you,” Lionel said, and tugged his wife’s sleeve.
“Yes. Thanks,” Beatrice said, though she didn’t sound real sincere. I had a feeling that nothing less than a presidential deployment of the National Guard to search for her niece would satisfy her.
We listened to their footfalls descend the belfry stairs and then I watched from the window as they left the schoolyard beside the church and walked to a weather-beaten Dodge Aries. The sun had drifted west past my line of sight, and the early October sky was still a pale summer white, but wisps of rust had floated into the white. A child’s voice called, “Vinny, wait up! Vinny!” and from four stories above the ground there was something lonely about the sound, something unfinished. Beatrice and Lionel’s car U-turned on the avenue, and I watched the puff of its exhaust until it had pulled out of sight.
“I don’t know,” Angie said, and leaned back in her chair. She propped her sneakers up on the desk and pushed her long thick hair off her temples. “I just don’t know about this one.”
She wore black Lycra biking shorts and a loose black tank top over a tight white one. The black tank top bore the white letters NIN on the front and the words PRETTY HATE MACHINE on back. She’d owned it for about eight years and it still looked like she was wearing it for the first time. I’d lived with Angie for almost two years. As far as I could see, she didn’t take any better care of her apparel than I did mine, but I owned shirts that looked like they’d been run through a car engine half an hour after I removed the price tags, and she had socks from high school that were still as white as palace linen. Women and their clothes often astounded me this way, but I figured it was one of those mysteries I’d never solve—like what really happened to Amelia Earhart or the bell that used to occupy our office.
“Don’t know about this case?” I said. “In what way?”
“A missing child, a mother who apparently isn’t looking t
oo hard, a pushy aunt—”
“You thought Beatrice was pushy?”
“Not any more so than a Jehovah with one foot in the door.”
“She’s worried about that kid. Tear-her-hair-out worried.”
“And I feel for that.” She shrugged. “Still don’t enjoy being pushed, though.”
“It’s not one of your stronger qualities, true.”
She flipped a pencil at my head, caught my chin. I rubbed at the spot and looked for the pencil so I could throw it back.
“It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye,” I mumbled, as I felt under my chair for the pencil.
“We’re doing real well,” she said.
“We are.” The pencil wasn’t below my chair or the desk, as far as I could see.
“Made more this year than last.”
“And it’s only October.” No pencil by the floorboard or under the mini-fridge. Maybe it was with Amelia Earhart and Amanda McCready and the bell.
“Only October,” she agreed.
“You’re saying we don’t need this case.”
“Pretty much the size of it.”
I gave up on the pencil and looked out the window for a bit. The wisps of rust had deepened to blood red, and the white sky was gradually darkening into blue. The first yellow lightbulb of the evening clicked on in a third-story apartment across the street. The smell of the air coming through the screen made me think of early adolescence and stickball, long, easy days leaking into long, easy nights.
“You don’t agree?” Angie said after a few moments.
I shrugged.
“Speak now or forever hold your peace,” she said lightly.
I turned and looked at her. The gathering dusk was gold against her window, and it swam in her dark hair. Her honeycomb skin was darker than usual from the long dry summer that had somehow continued to extend well into autumn, and the muscles in her calves and biceps were pronounced after months of daily basketball games at the Ryan playground.
In my previous experience with women, once you’ve been intimate with someone for a while, her beauty is often the first thing you overlook. Intellectually, you know it’s there, but your emotional capacity to be overwhelmed or surprised by it, to the point where it can get you drunk, diminishes. But there are still moments every day when I glance at Angie and feel a gust cleave through my chest cavity from the sweet pain of looking at her.