‘You got family, Frank?’
They were still waiting in a queue for coffee. Travis looked out of the window, wondering where Amy Houser had got to, and then he turned his attention back to Katherine McKenzie. He smiled at her, thought again how attractive she was when she did the same, and said, ‘Yeah. I’ve got two kids. A son and a daughter. Mark, he lives out in LA and does something I don’t fully understand with video games. Gaby’s in her final year at Midwestern.’
‘Chicago?’
‘Correct.’
‘That’s nice,’ McKenzie said. ‘You see them much?’
He shrugged. ‘Not as much as I’d like.’
‘Doesn’t help that you’re working your ass off at the NYPD, even when you’re supposed to be retired. How’s all that Rebekah Murphy stuff going?’
‘Getting there, I think. It’s pretty complicated.’
McKenzie nodded.
The queue still didn’t move.
‘What about you?’ Travis said. ‘Have you got kids?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I missed the boat on that.’ Travis didn’t know how to respond. ‘Would have been nice,’ she added, as if she thought she’d made him uncomfortable. ‘I just never found the right man …’
Her eyes stayed on him, flashing briefly in the light from the window, and Travis felt a momentary buzz. It had been so long since he’d found any woman attractive, and they’d appeared to find him attractive in return, that he didn’t know what to do. And then, for some reason, he thought about Naomi, all the things she’d said to him over the years, and that was when gravity started to pull at him: McKenzie was chief of detectives; she was probably ten years younger than he was; she was good-looking and industrious. He was old and directionless.
Why would she ever be interested in someone like him?
McKenzie started talking about being married to the job, and maybe sometimes regretting it, and then Travis mentioned Naomi and how it was hard to strike a balance. Eventually, at the front of the queue, Travis offered to pay for McKenzie’s drink, but she refused and said his black coffee was the least the NYPD owed him after all he’d done.
When they were waiting at the end of the counter, she smiled at him again, and said, ‘You’re easy to talk to, Frank, you know that?’
‘Are you serious?’
She seemed surprised by the comeback. ‘Of course I’m serious. Haven’t you heard the rumours? “The Dyke” is physically incapable of opening up.’
Travis grimaced.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘The name doesn’t bother me.’
‘At all?’
‘There are other things to worry about.’ The traces of something drifted across her expression. Before Travis could work out what it was, she said, ‘Anyway, I meant it. You’re easy to talk to.’
‘My ex-wife would’ve disagreed.’
‘Well, she’s wrong.’
She seemed to mean what she was saying, to enjoy his company, and as he thought of Amy Houser again, for the first time in days his initial thought wasn’t about the call he’d picked up at Amy’s desk, or his doubts about his friend. Instead it was about what Amy had said to him when they’d come out of the meeting with McKenzie: McKenzie liked Travis.
‘Family can be hard sometimes.’
Travis tuned back in. ‘I’m sorry?’
‘I was just thinking,’ McKenzie said. Her eyes were on the windows of the coffee shop, but she wasn’t looking at the sidewalk, at the street, at the crosswalks and traffic lights, she was caught somewhere else. It was almost as if she’d let her guard down without knowing it. ‘You talking about your ex, about being so far away from your children. Family is hard sometimes.’
Travis studied her. ‘Do you have family close by?’
She rocked her head from side to side, like the answer wasn’t an easy one. ‘Sort of. I grew up in a shitty house in Staten Island. I loved my mom, I truly did, but she had her own problems – mental-health issues, I guess you’d call it these days – and my father was a waste of oxygen.’ She blinked a couple of times, and it seemed to break the spell. ‘Way to bring the mood down, Katherine. This is what I mean, Frank. You reel people in just by being so damn nice. You must have been a hell of an interviewer.’
‘I had my moments,’ he said.
‘I had a half-brother,’ she said finally, her face different this time, Travis unable to quite decipher it. ‘That’s where I was going with that. He was the product of one of my dad’s many affairs – and when his mother died, he came to live with us. My dad refused to adopt him, we never fostered him. In terms of the system, he just kind of fell through the cracks. That wouldn’t happen these days – maybe shouldn’t have happened back in the seventies, but it did.’
‘Are you two close?’
‘We were,’ she said. ‘Very. He was two years older than me, and I’d always wanted a brother. But, I don’t know, there was … something in him.’
Travis frowned. ‘In him?’
‘He could be weird. He got into some trouble at school. My dad was a major-league asshole and the two of them went off like fireworks at home. When your father tells you he never wanted you, over and over, that tends to screw you up. So my brother, he started acting out. It began in his teens. He did some stupid things: vandalism, petty theft …’ She was eyeing Travis as if unsure whether to form into words whatever picture was in her head. ‘He used to hurt things sometimes. People. Animals. I remember my father lost his shit one night when he found out next door’s cat had crapped in our yard and, the next day, the cat’s got a broken leg.’
They just stared at each other.
‘He was just trying to please my father,’ she said softly, but Travis saw an echo in her face, a hint of doubt perhaps, and he wondered if that was just an excuse. Maybe her brother hadn’t hurt that cat to please a father who didn’t want him.
Maybe he just liked to hurt things.
Just then, their coffees were put at the end of the counter, and – like a light being switched on – McKenzie broke into a smile. ‘Shit, I don’t know why I’m saying this.’
Except, for some reason, Travis wasn’t sure that was true.
It was like she’d been holding her breath: she’d never been able to tell anyone about her brother, yet had always wanted to; to her, he was a ghost that needed exorcizing. But now Travis was wondering why she’d chosen this moment to let the breath go. Why, of all people, did she tell him? Why would she let her guard down in front of a guy she barely knew? She’d built an entire career out of never giving an inch. Even if, as she’d said, Travis was easy to talk to, it still felt like something was amiss.
She looked at the third cup of coffee waiting for them on the bar, the side marked with the name ‘Amy’, and said, ‘You waiting here for Houser?’
‘I’m supposed to be.’
McKenzie nodded. ‘That’s a shame. I wanted to show you something.’
He was thrown by the statement.
‘It’s in my car,’ she said, and looked at her watch.
‘Your car?’
‘It might be pertinent to what you’re working on.’
Travis frowned. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I’d rather not discuss it here,’ she said, looking around.
Did she mean the cold cases that Houser had given him?
Or did she mean Louise Mason?
Or Rebekah, Travis thought, glancing out of the window.
Still no sign of Houser.
‘It’ll make sense when we get there,’ McKenzie assured him.
Intrigued, Travis said, ‘Sure, okay. Let’s go take a look.’