29

It was after six by the time I stuck my car in the lot behind the station. A fiery disk of sun crouched on the horizon, burning the western sky. The fading light brought an unexpected pang of regret. September and October are precious in New England, clear and crisp, painfully short. Between this Manuela business and the volleyball tournament I hadn’t taken Paolina apple picking, or up to the White Mountains to view the sweep of changing foliage. The early sundown warned of coming winter.

I was relieved to find Mooney’s Buick in the lot. He was in his office. As a bonus, he was alone.

I closed the door behind me.

He gazed up from a pile of papers. Tobacco smoke scented the air, and he held an unlit cigarette between the index and middle fingers of his right hand. He stared at it, placed it carefully in the top drawer of his desk, and closed the drawer.

“Can’t make dinner tonight, Carlotta,” he said with a forced grin. “All hell’s breaking loose. Mayor wants task forces, I give him task forces. I got twenty extra bodies on this case all of a sudden. Nothing like a headline killing, especially in an election year.”

“Yeah,” I said.

He tapped his finger on a pile of yellowed folders. “Foley’s pulling jackets on all known sex offenders. We’re checking parolees from Bridgewater. There’s been a string of violent robberies in the Fens and we’re squeezing snitches to see if these killings could be related. Your friend Triola’s doing traffic tickets for the areas where the corpses were found. That turned the trick for the Son of Sam guys.”

“Busy,” I said.

“You bet. Some of it’s out of headquarters. Some at D. Some state. District attorney’s giving us full cooperation.” He blew out a deep breath and flexed his shoulders. “All ticking away, going like clockwork—and I start smoking again.”

I sat in the chair across from him. “Mooney, who owns the place on Westland? Run that by me again.”

“A whole month with no butts, and today I had to light up.”

“It’s tough,” I said. I quit three years ago. I could probably give you month, day, and time.

He emptied his ashtray into the wastebasket under his desk, as if hiding the evidence could revoke the act. “Makes me feel like a jerk. Glad I don’t work narcotics. How can you run around busting people for drugs while you’re sucking on a butt?”

“A lot of cops do, Mooney, and they don’t even think about it. About Westland Avenue, there was a guy named Canfield involved, right?”

“Three guys fronting for a real-estate trust. Canfield, Oates, and Heffernan. Canfield’s the landlord, the only up-front one. There could be a whole slew of secret partners we don’t know shit about. Why?”

“If your Canfield’s connected to my Canfield, I may have something.”

“Two Canfields, Carlotta? It’s a fairly common name.”

“Just nine in the phone book, Mooney. Humor me.”

“Humor’s something I’m low on. Set me straight. Are you trying to make a neat little package out of a string of random deaths? I got fifteen guys trying to get some connection between the victims, and a fat lot of good it did ’em down in New Bedford. They know most of those women hung around the same bars, used drugs—”

“Mooney—” I tried to interrupt but he had more to say.

“Serial killings make sense, Carlotta. But it’s a kind of sense only lunatics understand. They act out some fantasy or relive some dream sequence or some memory from a screwy childhood. I make this guy as Hispanic, because his fantasy revolves around Hispanic women. Maybe his mother, maybe his wife, maybe somebody he dated or wanted to date—”

“Mooney, I’ve got something that connects the name Manuela Estefan to a place where a lot of illegals work. And there could be a connection to Westland Avenue, if your Canfield knows my Canfield.”

He pushed aside his folders, took the cigarette out of his desk drawer, and lit it with an air halfway between defeat and defiance. “My Canfield is Harold. Harold J.”

“Mine is a woman. Lydia. She’s part owner of the place.”

“Married to Harold?”

“Won’t work. Mine’s married to a James Hunneman.” I waited to see if the name Hunneman registered.

“How’d you make this connection?”

“Tip,” I said.

“Go on. I don’t want to have to pry this out of you.”

“You might already know about it from INS,” I said cautiously.

Mooney inhaled tobacco as if he were drawing energy from it. “Jamieson hasn’t been sharing.”

“They’re planning a raid at the Hunneman Pillow Factory. In Brighton. They’ve got somebody undercover.”

“Wait a fucking minute. You saying they know there’s a connection to a homicide and they’re sitting on it?”

“I’m not sure what they know.”

“Who’s they?”

“I heard it from a colleague of Jamieson’s, guy named Clinton.”

“I haven’t even been able to reach that Jamieson jerk today. Some secretary keeps telling me he’s unavailable. Want to know why? Because he hasn’t given me a scrap of backup on that Manuela Estefan green card.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“Bingo. He left me a long, detailed bullshit message about some bureaucratic screwup, but I’m not sure I buy it.”

I yanked at a strand of my hair and wondered when I’d stop wanting a smoke. “It’s not a counterfeit card, right?” I said slowly. “But it’s not a documented card either.”

Mooney’s mouth spread into a smug grin, and I knew we were thinking along similar lines. “Sound familiar?” he asked. “Ring any bells?”

“The fake drivers’ licenses,” I murmured, referring to a local scandal that had been brewing for the past three months.

“And those were issued by a regular clerk at the Registry of Motor Vehicles,” Mooney agreed. “Legit licenses, no forgery involved. So maybe I can’t get hold of Jamieson because somebody at INS is peddling ‘genuine’ green cards for a fee. Maybe he doesn’t want to air dirty INS linen in front of the Boston cops.” Mooney lit another cigarette from the butt of the one he’d just smoked. “The thing I can’t figure is whether this has anything to do with the killings or if it’s just a sidebar.”

I started unburdening my soul, telling him everything I knew about the pillow factory with the emphasis slightly bent so it wouldn’t look like I’d been keeping secrets. I’d barely begun when somebody knocked on the door and flung it open at the same moment.

“Dave,” Mooney said to a narrow-faced man in a leather jacket, “I’m busy here. Can it keep?”

“Guess so,” the cop answered, shrugging his shoulders. “We picked her up in front of the Westland place. Kind of loitering. I questioned her, sort of, and I don’t think she knows much. Says she’s looking for a place to live and somebody gave her that address, or she read it in the paper, or she saw it on a sign on a tree. She doesn’t remember. Or she doesn’t understand English. Cooperative. I don’t really know what we can hold her on, but I thought—”

By that time I’d swiveled in my chair. The cop was holding her above the elbow, not gently, but not so tight as to cause any bruises.

“Jesus Christ, Mooney,” I said. “Jackpot. Bring her in.”

Green Blouse stared at me. She muttered something under her breath in Spanish and made the sign of the cross on her chest. Then she started to cry.