“SHOULD WE go take a look at the body?” I asked.
Randy nodded, then shook himself all over like a diver about to plunge into icy water. But just as we started to duck under the tape, my phone rang. Somehow I knew before I checked: it was Vincent “Old School” Costello.
“Sorry,” I said. “I have to take this.”
If anything, Randy looked relieved: nobody wants a chaperone overseeing his first date. I walked back to the sedan, leaned up against the trunk, shoved my work phone into my front pocket, and pulled the burner from my back pocket.
“I’ve located her,” I said.
“Then why isn’t she sitting in front of me now?”
“I know where she is,” I said. “I mean, I know where she’s staying. I’m just waiting for the right moment to pick her up.”
“The right moment has passed, Detective. I understand why you didn’t bring Sarah to me. She’s your wife. There are demands even I can’t make. But the maid is different. I’ll give you until sundown, like in a western flick. If the girl isn’t in my possession by then, certain disquieting facts—facts that would put your fitness to serve in question—may become public knowledge.”
Reminding him that I’d collected certain disquieting facts of my own would have won me a one-way trip to the Everglades.
“I understand,” I said, but by then I was already talking to a dial tone.
I kept the phone pressed to my ear, sat on the trunk of the sedan with my feet on the bumper, pretending the conversation was still in full swing. I needed a moment to let the sweat dry. Sunset was a tight deadline, especially with a John Doe threatening forced overtime. And Vincent wasn’t the type to make idle promises. Whatever file he had on me would be in the hands of every local newscaster come morning. Vincent wouldn’t worry about my stink blowing back on him. He thought he was invincible. Maybe he was right: forty years is a long reign for a mob boss.
What I needed now was a reason to slip away, to leave Randy on his own for however long it took me to find Serena. But bringing Serena to Vincent wasn’t an option. As far as I knew, Sarah was Serena’s only friend in the US. I needed a Sarah ally in the box with Heidi, someone who’d swear up and down that Sarah and Anthony were on the best of terms. The only way I could square that with Vincent would be to hand him Anthony’s killer, or someone who could pass for Anthony’s killer—namely, Símon. Then Sarah would be off the hook all the way around, and I could go back to being a cop and nothing but a cop. There were a lot of moving parts, and all of them had to click into place before nightfall.
Impossible, I told myself. Ditch Randy now, and Heidi would sic Internal Affairs on me with an order to kill.
And then I finally caught a break. It came in the unlikely form of Marty the Mute, a vagabond I’d busted for drunken loitering almost weekly when I worked Vice. He was tugging on the hem of my blazer. I looked down at him. His beard had gone gray in the last decade, and his wino nose had turned a deeper shade of red, but the waiflike frame remained the same. Even wearing what must have been all the clothes he owned, he couldn’t have weighed more than a buck twenty. I mouthed a fake good-bye into the phone, then hopped down off the sedan.
“Marty,” I said. “It’s been a minute.”
He held out his wrists as if to say “Cuff me.” Marty was always the type who preferred prison to the street.
“Wish I could, buddy, but I’m working a murder.”
He nodded vigorously, pounded his chest with a tight fist.
“What, you?” I asked.
More nodding. Marty’s life hadn’t exactly panned out, but he’d always seemed harmless, even gentle. His rap sheet was a laundry list of petty offenses, and no way could I see him hoisting a cinder block high enough to cave in a man’s skull. I figured he viewed this as his chance to go inside for good.
“I tell you what,” I said. “Flip your hands over. Let me see your palms.”
He obliged. Sure enough, the skin was scraped to the bone. I decided to test him.
“We going to find your prints on that two-by-four?” I asked.
He looked confused, started drawing a rectangle in the air with his fingers, then mimed lifting something really heavy. There were tears in his eyes. They seemed legit.
Hot damn, I thought. You really never know.
“Do yourself a solid,” I told him. “Hold back on the remorse. You’ll get a longer sentence.”
I cuffed him, read him his rights, put him in the back of the nearest squad car, and signaled for one of the uniforms to go fetch Randy. A few minutes later, my junior colleague came stomping up to me, looking as if his little world was about to implode.
“I thought you were my partner for the day,” he said. “So far all you’ve done is take a phone call and drag me away from the scene.”
I got the feeling he was rehearsing his report to Heidi.
“Sorry, but I was busy solving your case for you,” I said.
“What?”
I jerked a thumb toward the squad car. Marty looked to be singing silently to himself in the back seat.
“He confessed?”
“Not in so many words.”
I laid it out for him, told him about my history with Marty, said he’d find corroborating fingerprints all over the cinder block. Then I asked for my reward.
“The collar’s all yours,” I said. “But I need a favor.”
Randy left me the sedan, drove back in the squad car with Marty and the uni who’d greeted us at the scene. I stuck a siren on the hood, made it crosstown in record time. I was sweating as though it was mid-August, and my head was spinning from the all-nighter, but at least I had the presence of mind to dial the animal hospital and make sure Símon’s hangover hadn’t turned into a sick day. It hadn’t. If Serena was at the apartment, then she didn’t have her big brother around to protect her.
An elderly woman pushing a grocery cart let me into the building without asking any questions. I hightailed it up two flights, rang Símon’s bell to the tune of “Pop Goes the Weasel,” hoping to sound playful and innocent. Serena didn’t answer, so for the second time in as many days I broke my way into Símon’s condo. The glasses from last night’s tryst were sitting in the sink alongside the morning’s breakfast dishes. Otherwise, the place looked just as tidy and unlived-in. I started for the back rooms.
“Serena,” I called. “Siesta’s over. Come out, come out, wherever you are.”
No response. No stirring that I could hear.
“Polícia,” I tried. “We need to talk.”
I counted to ten, then started opening doors. Spare room empty, bathroom empty, bedroom half ransacked but also empty. I made a beeline for the balcony. There was a newspaper and a half drunk cup of coffee on the table where I’d found English on Your Lunch Break the night before. The small, tan duffel bag brimming with Serena’s things was gone, too.
My gut started churning. I dropped onto one of the wrought iron chairs, held my breath until the nausea passed. I’d missed her. She’d been here, and I’d missed her, and the only place I knew she might be headed now was roughly a thousand miles away, a country where even the Costellos had no pull.