"How much?"
Whitey held his thumb and index finger a hair's width apart. "A bit. Found some more in the trunk."
"In the trunk," Sean said.
"A lot more actually."
"So?"
"So, it's at the lab."
"No," Sean said. "I meant so what if you found blood in the trunk? Katie Marcus never got in anyone's trunk."
"That's a fly in the ointment, sure."
"Sarge, your search of the car's going to be tossed out."
"No."
"No?"
"The car was stolen and abandoned in State jurisdiction. Purely for insurance purposes and, I might add, in the best interest of the owner? "
"You did a physical search and filed a report."
"Ah, you're quick, boy."
They pulled up in front of Dave Boyle's house and Whitey raised the gearshift on the driver's column into park. He killed the engine. "I got enough to bring him in for a chat. That's all I want right now."
Sean nodded, knowing there was no point in arguing with the man. Whitey got to be a sergeant in the Homicide Unit by the dog-to-a-bone tenacity he had regarding his hunches. You didn't talk him out of his hunches, you rode them out.
"What about the ballistics?" Sean said.
"That's a weird one, too," Whitey said as they sat looking at Dave's house, Whitey making no move to leave just yet. "The gun was a thirty-eight Smith like we figured. Part of a lot stolen from a gun dealer in New Hampshire in 'eighty-one. The same gun that killed Katherine Marcus was involved in a liquor store holdup in 'eighty-two. Right here in Buckingham."
"The Flats?"
Whitey shook his head. "Up in Rome Basin, place called Looney Liquors. It was a two-man job, both guys wearing rubber masks. They came in through the back after the owner had shut the front doors, and the first guy into the store fired a warning shot that went through a bottle of rye and embedded in the wall. Rest of the robbery went smooth-'n'-styling, but the bullet was recovered. Ballistics matched it to the same gun as the one killed the Marcus girl."
"So that would tend to point in another direction, don't you think?" Sean said. "Nineteen-eighty-two, Dave was, like, seventeen and starting out at Raytheon. I don't think he was pulling any liquor store jobs."
"Don't mean the gun didn't eventually end up in his hands. Shit, kid, you know the way they get passed around." Whitey didn't sound as sure of himself as he had last night, but he said, "Let's go get him," and pushed open his door.
Sean got out of the passenger side and they walked up to Dave's place, Whitey thumbing the cuffs on his hip like he was hoping he'd get an excuse to use them.
* * *
JIMMY PARKED his car and carried a cardboard tray of coffee cups and a bag of doughnuts across the cracked tar parking lot toward the Mystic River. The cars slammed across the metal extension spans of the Tobin Bridge above him, and Katie knelt by the water's edge with Just Ray Harris, both of them peering into the river. Dave Boyle was there, too, his bruised hand ballooned to the size of a boxing glove. Dave sat in a sagging lawn chair beside Celeste and Annabeth. Celeste had some kind of zipper contraption covering her mouth and Annabeth smoked two cigarettes at once. All three of them wore black sunglasses and didn't look at Jimmy. They stared up at the underside of the bridge, and gave off an air that said they'd prefer to be left alone in their lawn chairs, thank you very much.
Jimmy put the coffee and doughnuts down beside Katie and knelt between her and Just Ray. He looked down at the water and saw his reflection, saw Katie's and Just Ray's, too, as they turned toward him, Ray with a big red fish clamped between his teeth, the fish still flopping.
Katie said, "I dropped my dress in the river."
Jimmy said, "I can't see it."
The fish plopped out of Just Ray's mouth and landed in the water, lay there on top of the surface flopping away.
Katie said, "He'll get it. He's hunting fish."
"Tasted just like chicken," Ray said.
Jimmy felt Katie's warm hand on his back, and then he felt Ray's on the back of his neck, and Katie said, "Why don't you go get it, Dad?"
And they pushed him over the edge and Jimmy saw the black water and the flopping fish rise up to meet him and he knew he was going to drown. He opened his mouth to scream and the fish jumped up inside there, cutting off his oxygen, and the water felt like black paint when his face plunged into it.
He opened his eyes and turned his head, saw the clock reading seven-sixteen, and he couldn't remember coming to bed. He must have, though, because here he was, Annabeth sleeping beside him, Jimmy waking up to a brand-new day with an appointment to pick out a headstone in a little over an hour, and Just Ray Harris and the Mystic River knocking at his door.
* * *
THE KEY to any successful interrogation was to get as much time as possible before the suspect demanded a lawyer. The hard cases? the dealers and gangbangers and bikers and mobbed-up guys? usually asked for a "mouth" right off the bat. You could fuck with them a little bit, try to rattle them before the lawyer showed up, but for the most part, you were going to have to rely on physical evidence to make your case. Rarely had Sean taken a hard guy into the box and come out with much of use.
When you were dealing with regular citizens or first-time felons, on the other hand, most of your cases were dunked during Q & A's. The "road rage" case, Sean's career topper so far, had been made like that. Out in Middlesex, guy's driving home one night, the right front tire of his SUV came off at eighty miles an hour. Just came off, rolled across the highway. The SUV flipped over nine or ten times, and the guy, Edwin Hurka, was dead on-scene.
Turned out the lug nuts on both his front tires were loose. So they were looking at involuntary manslaughter at best because prevailing opinion was that it was probably just some hungover mechanic's error, and Sean and his partner, Adolph, found out that the victim did have his tires replaced just a few weeks before. But Sean had also found a piece of paper in the victim's glove compartment that bothered him. It was a license plate, hastily scrawled, and when Sean ran it through the RMV computer, he'd come up with the name Alan Barnes. He'd dropped by Barnes's house and asked the guy who answered the door if he was Alan Barnes. The guy, nervous as hell, said, Yeah, why? And Sean, feeling it through his whole body, said, "I'd like to talk to you about some lug nuts."
Barnes broke right there in his doorway, told Sean he'd just meant to fuck the guy's car up a little, give him a scare, the two of them having gotten into it a week before in the merge lane heading into the airport tunnel, Barnes so pissed by the end of it that he hung back, skipped his appointment, and followed Edwin Hurka home, waited till the guy had shut off all the lights in his house before he went to work with his tire iron.