CHAPTER 26

It seemed like miles back to the cab. Valerie didn’t exactly fight me, but she wasn’t all that helpful either. For somebody who could move so fast, she walked slowly. Once she tried to wriggle away and I had to grab her by the hair.

The cab was where I’d left it. In Boston, the stolen-car capital of the western world, that is not always the case.

Cops carry handcuffs. Private investigators don’t. Nor do they have the option of tossing prisoners into a caged backseat bereft of door handles.

I kept Valerie with me in the front seat, in the middle straddling the hump, not on the passenger side. That way she’d need to scoot over, avoid banging into the fare meter, unlock the door, and heave it open before escaping. And by that time I’d stop her.

She didn’t try anything. She was still breathing hard from the chase, and after that last wriggle she seemed to lose heart. Maybe she didn’t like having her hair pulled.

I watched her more closely than I watched the road. There wasn’t much traffic.

She’d stuck some kind of gunk on the front of her hair to make it stand on end, and she’d overdone her makeup in bold colored triangles. The effect was punk, bizarre, and cheap. She wore a low-cut Spandex bodysuit in metallic silver paired with a thigh-high black mini and killer heels. Red plastic beads, matching dangle earrings, and a fistful of rings completed the ensemble. I wondered if she’d worn the bodysuit in Geoff Reardon’s class.

It wasn’t her attire that separated her from the young girl in the school photo. It was her eyes. This version of Valerie had defiant, alert eyes, alive and glowing, eyes that wouldn’t look demurely away from the camera.

“You on drugs?” I asked. I learned the technique when I was a cop. Often the blunt unexpected inquiry will net more response than measured logic.

“Nah,” she said. “I do some coke, but so does everybody. I don’t need it.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Well, you run pretty fast.”

“Not as fast as you.”

“Next time you’re going to race me, dump the shoes,” I said.

She looked down at her feet and stifled a giggle. “I never thought of that.”

“You’re lucky you didn’t break a leg,” I said.

“Lucky,” she repeated sarcastically. “Well, at least I’d have been in a hospital. Look, can’t we just forget you saw me?”

“Sorry,” I said.

“You a cop?”

“Private,” I said.

“I could pay you,” she said.

“With what you turn in tricks?” I asked.

She ignored that for a while, but I could hear her ragged breathing. Then she said, “You mind if I turn on some noise?” Her voice was a blast of arctic air.

“Go ahead,” I said. “There’s a tape in the player.”

The music picked up in the middle of Rory Block’s “Lovin’ Whiskey,” so I reached over and punched rewind.

It’s a sad wailing song about loving a guy who drinks, and Block sings it with feeling and grace and a fine guitar backup. I don’t know much about coping with alcoholics, but I know a lot about living with a coke-fiend, and believe me, she’s got it right.

I stole a glance at Valerie. A tear had worked its way down her cheek, leaving a glistening trail edged in black mascara.

“Hey,” I said.

She turned her face to the window.

“Sorry,” I said.

“Look, I mean it when I say I won’t go home.”

“I believe you,” I said.

“So where are we going?” she asked.

“It’s late,” I said. “We’ll go to my place.”

“Where’s that?”

“Cambridge.”

“Will you call my father?”

“We’ll talk about it,” I said.

We stopped by Green & White to swap for my Toyota, and she didn’t try anything there. Sam’s car wasn’t parked in the lot, and Gloria was swamped with the phones, so I didn’t pick up the message about the license plate. I figured I’d call once I got home.

But sitting on my front porch was a man I’d never expected to see there again.

Sam Gianelli.