Mystic River (14 page)

Signs of foul play. That was it.

Blood, she was sure. It had to be blood. Evidence. And she looked down at the bag still twisted in her hand and thought:

Dave.

J
IMMY STOOD
on the civilian side of the yellow tape, facing a ragged line of cops, as Sean walked away through the weeds and into the park, not looking back once.

“Mr. Marcus,” this one cop, Jefferts, said, “get you some coffee or something?” The cop looked at Jimmy’s forehead, Jimmy feeling a mild contempt and pity in the loose gaze and the way the cop used the side of his thumb to scratch his belly. Sean had introduced them, telling Jimmy this was Trooper Jefferts, a good man, and telling Jefferts that Jimmy was the father of the woman who, uh, owned the abandoned car. Get him anything he needs and hook him up with Talbot when she arrives, Jimmy figuring Talbot was either a shrink with a badge or some disheveled social worker with a mountain of student loans and a car that smelled of Burger King.

He ignored Jefferts’s offer and walked back across the street to Chuck Savage.

“What’s going on, Jim?”

Jimmy shook his head, pretty sure he’d puke all over himself and Chuck, too, if he tried to put what he was feeling into words.

“You got a cell phone?”

“Yeah, sure.” Chuck scrambled his hands through his windbreaker. He put the phone in Jimmy’s open hand, and Jimmy dialed 411, got a recorded voice asking him what
city and state, and he hesitated a second before throwing his voice out into the phone line, had an image of his words traveling through miles and miles of copper cable before dropping down a vortex into the soul of some gargantuan computer with red lights for eyes.

“What listing?” the computer asked.

“Chuck E. Cheese’s.” Jimmy felt a sudden wave of bitter terror at saying such a ridiculous name on the open street near his daughter’s empty car. He wanted to put the whole phone between his teeth and bite down, hear it crack.

Once he’d gotten the number and dialed, he had to wait as they paged Annabeth. Whoever had answered the phone hadn’t put him on hold but merely placed the receiver down on a countertop, and Jimmy could hear the tinny echoes of his wife’s name: “Will an Annabeth Marcus please contact the hostess stand? Annabeth Marcus.” Jimmy could hear the peal of bells and eighty or ninety kids running around like maniacs and pulling one another’s hair, shrieking, mingled with desperate adult voices trying to climb above the din, and then his wife’s name was called again, echoing. Jimmy pictured her looking up at the sound, confused and frazzled, the whole Saint Cecilia’s First Communion squad fighting for pizza slices around her.

Then he heard her voice, muffled and curious: “You called my name?”

For a moment, Jimmy wanted to hang up. What would he tell her? What was the point of calling her with no hard facts, only the fears of his own crazed imagination? Wouldn’t it be better to leave her and the girls in the peace of ignorance for a little while longer?

But he knew there was already too much wounding going on today as it was, and Annabeth would be wounded if he left her unaware while he pulled out his hair on Sydney Street by Katie’s car. She’d remember her bliss with the girls as unearned and, worse, as an assault, a false promise. And she’d hate Jimmy for it.

He heard her muffled voice again: “This one?” and then the scrape of her lifting the phone off the counter. “Hello?”

“Baby,” Jimmy managed before he had to clear his throat.

“Jimmy?” A slight edge to her voice. “Where are you?”

“I’m…Look…I’m on Sydney Street.”

“What’s wrong?”

“They found her car, Annabeth.”

“Whose car?”

“Katie’s.”

“They? The police?
They?
”

“Yeah. She’s…missing. In Pen Park somewhere.”

“Oh, Jesus God. No, right? No. No, Jimmy.”

Jimmy felt it fill him now—that dread, that awful certainty, the horror of thoughts he’d kept clenched behind a shelf in his brain.

“We don’t know anything yet. But her car’s been here all night and the cops—”

“Jesus
Christ
, Jimmy.”

“—are searching the park for her. Tons of them. So…”

“Where are you?”

“I’m on Sydney. Look—”

“On the fucking street? Why aren’t you in there?”

“They won’t let me in.”

“They? Who the fuck are they? Is she their daughter?”

“No. Look, I—”

You
get
in there. Jesus. She could be hurt. Lying in there somewhere, all cold and hurt.”

“I know, but they—”

“I’m on my way.”

“Okay.”

“Get in there, Jimmy. I mean, God, what’s wrong with you?”

She hung up.

Jimmy handed the phone back to Chuck, knowing that Annabeth was right. She was so completely right that it killed Jimmy to realize that he would regret his impotence of
the last forty-five minutes for the rest of his life, never be able to think about it without cringing, trying to crawl away from it in his head. When had he become this thing—this man who’d say yes, sir, no, sir, right you are, sir, to fucking cops when his firstborn daughter was missing? When had that happened? When had he stood at a counter and handed his dick over in exchange for feeling like, what, an upright citizen?

He turned to Chuck. “You still keep those bolt cutters under the spare in your trunk?”

Chuck got a look on his face like he’d been caught doing something. “Guy’s gotta make a living, Jim.”

“Where’s your car?”

“Up the street, corner of Dawes.”

Jimmy started walking and Chuck trotted up beside him. “We’re going to cut our way in?”

Jimmy nodded and walked a little faster.

W
HEN
S
EAN REACHED
the part of the jogging path that circled around the fence of the co-op garden, he nodded at some of the cops working the flowers and soil for clues, could see a tight anticipation in most of their faces that told him they’d already heard by now. There was an air saturating the entire park that he’d felt at a few other crime scenes over the years, one that carried an edge of fatalism, a dank acceptance of someone else’s doom.

They’d known coming into the park that she was dead, yet some infinitesimal piece of all of them, Sean knew, had held out for otherwise. It was what you did—you came on-scene knowing the truth, and then spent as much time as you could hoping you were wrong. Sean had worked one case last year where a couple had reported their baby missing. A ton of media showed up because the couple was white and respectable, but Sean and every other cop knew the couple’s story was bullshit, knew the kid was dead even as they consoled the two assholes, cooed assurances to them that their
baby was probably fine, ran down dumb-ass leads on suspicious ethnics seen in the area that morning, only to find the baby at dusk, stuffed in a vacuum cleaner bag and crammed in a crevice under the cellar stairs. Sean saw a rookie cry that day, the kid shaking as he leaned against his cruiser, but the rest of the cops looked irate yet unsurprised, as if they’d all spent the night dreaming the same shitty dream.

That’s what you carried back home and into the bars and locker rooms of the precincts or barracks—an annoyed acceptance that people sucked, people were dumb and petty-bad, often murderously so, and when they opened their mouths they lied, always, and when they went missing for no discernibly good reason, they’d usually be found dead or way the hell worse off.

And often the worst thing wasn’t the victims—they were dead, after all, and beyond any more pain. The worst thing was those who’d loved them and survived them. Often the walking dead from now on, shell-shocked, hearts ruptured, stumbling through the remainder of their lives without anything left inside of them but blood and organs, impervious to pain, having learned nothing except that the worst things did, in fact, sometimes happen.

Like Jimmy Marcus. Sean didn’t know how the fuck he was going to look that guy in the eye and say, Yeah, she’s dead. Your daughter’s dead, Jimmy. Someone took her away for good. Jimmy, who’d already lost a wife. Shit. Hey, guess what, Jim—God said you owed another marker. He’s come to collect. Hope that puts it in perspective, pal. Be seeing you.

Sean crossed the short plank bridge over the ravine and followed the path down into the circular grove of trees that stood facing the drive-in screen like a pagan audience. Everyone was down by the steps that led up to a door on the side of the screen. Sean could see Karen Hughes snapping away with her camera, Whitey Powers leaning against the doorjamb, looking in, taking notes, the assistant ME on his knees beside Karen Hughes, a goddamn platoon of uni
formed troopers and BPD blues milling behind those three, Connolly and Souza studying something on the steps, and the big brass—Frank Krauser from BPD and Martin Friel from State, Sean’s commanding officer—standing off a bit along the stage that stretched under the screen, talking to each other, heads close and tilted downward.

If the assistant ME said she’d died here in the park, it fell within State jurisdiction and made it Sean and Whitey’s case. Sean’s job to tell Jimmy. Sean’s job to become intimate and obsessed with the victim’s life. Sean’s job to put the case down and give everyone an illusion, at least, of closure.

BPD, however, could ask for the case. It was within Friel’s power to give it to them since the park was surrounded on all sides by City turf, and because the first attempt made on the victim’s life had occurred within City jurisdiction. This would attract attention, Sean was sure. Homicide in a city park, the victim found near or in what was fast becoming a local and pop culture landmark. No motive readily apparent. No killer, either, unless he’d offed himself down there by Katie Marcus, which seemed doubtful or Sean would have heard. Huge media case, when you really thought about it, the whole city having been pretty much devoid of those the last couple of years. Shit, the press would fill the Pen with their drool.

Sean didn’t want it, which, if prior experience was any kind of barometer, pretty much guaranteed he’d get it. He worked his way down a slope toward the base of the drive-in screen, his eyes on Krauser and Friel, trying to read the verdict in the smallest motions of their heads. If that was Katie Marcus in there—and Sean didn’t have much doubt—the Flats would explode. Forget Jimmy—he’d probably be catatonic anyway. But the Savage brothers? Back at the Major Crimes Unit, they had files the size of doorstops on almost every one of those crazy fuckers. And that was just the State shit they’d pulled. Sean knew guys in the BPD said a Saturday night without at least one Savage in lockup was like a
solar eclipse—other cops came down to have a look for themselves because they couldn’t believe it.

On the stage below the screen, Krauser nodded once and Friel’s head swiveled, looked around until he met Sean’s eyes, and Sean knew this was his and Whitey’s now. Sean saw a small amount of blood splattered on some leaves leading up to the base of the screen, saw some more on the steps leading up to the door.

Connolly and Souza looked up from the blood on the stairs, gave Sean grim nods, and went back to peering at the crevices where the steps met the risers. Karen Hughes came up off her haunches and Sean could hear the whir of her camera as she flicked a knob with her thumb and the film spooled to the end. She reached into her bag for a fresh roll and flicked open the back of the camera, Sean noticing that her ash blond hair had darkened at the temples and bangs. She glanced at him without expression and dropped the spent film in her bag, then reloaded.

Whitey was on his knees alongside the assistant ME, and Sean heard him say “What?” in a sharp whisper.

“Just what I said.”

“You’re sure now, yeah?”

“Not a hundred percent, but I’m leaning.”

“Shit.” Whitey looked back over his shoulder as Sean approached, and shook his head, jerked his thumb at the assistant ME.

Sean’s view widened as he climbed up behind them and their shoulders dropped away and he was looking down into the doorway, down at the body scrunched in there, the space between the walls no more than three feet wide and the corpse sitting with her back against the wall on his left, her feet pushed up hard against the wall on his right, so that Sean’s first impression was of a fetus seen through a sonogram screen. Her left foot was bare and muddy. What was left of the sock hung around her ankle, shriveled and torn. She wore a simple black shoe with a flat sole on her right
foot, and it was caked in dried mud. Even after she’d lost the one shoe in the garden, she’d left the other one on. Her killer must have been breathing down her neck the whole way. And yet she’d come in here to hide. So for a moment she must have given him the slip, which meant something had slowed him down.

“Souza,” he called.

“Yeah?”

“Get some uniforms to check the trail leading up here. Look in the bushes and shit for torn clothes, scraped-off skin, anything like that.”

“We already got a guy doing casts on footprints.”

“Yeah, but we need more. You on it?”

“I’m on it.”

Sean looked down at the body again. She wore soft, dark pants and a navy blue blouse with a wide neck. Her jacket was red and torn and Sean figured it for a weekend outfit, too nice for everyday for a girl from the Flats. She’d been out somewhere, somewhere nice, maybe on a date.

And somehow she’d ended up stuffed in this narrow corridor, its mildewed walls the last thing she saw, probably the last thing she’d smelled.

It was as if she’d gone in here to escape a red rain, and the downpour remained in her hair and cheeks, stained her clothing in wet strings. Her knees were pressed close to her chest, and her right elbow was propped on her right knee, a clenched fist up by her ear so that again Sean was reminded of a child more than a woman, curled up and trying to keep some awful sound at bay. Stop it, just stop it, the body said. Stop it, please.

Whitey moved out of the way, and Sean squatted just outside the doorway. Even with all the blood on the body and pooled beneath it and the mildew clinging to the concrete around it, Sean could smell her perfume, just a hint of it, slightly sweet, slightly sensual, the lightest scent, which made him think of high school dates and dark cars, the panicky fumbling through fabric and the electric grazing of
flesh. Underneath the red rain, Sean could see several dark bruises on her wrist and forearm and ankles, and he knew these were the places where she’d been hit with something.