WHITEY SAT UP on the empty desk across from Sean’s own with the probation report open in his hand. “Raymond Matthew Harris—born September the sixth, 1955. Grew up on Twelve Mayhew Street in the East Bucky Flats. Mother, Delores, a housewife. Father, Seamus, a laborer who left the family in 1967. Predictable shit follows as the father is arrested on petty larceny in Bridgeport, Connecticut, 1973. Bunch of DUIs and D and D’s follow. Father dies of a coronary in Bridgeport, 1979. Same year, Raymond marries Esther Scannell—that lucky bastard—and takes a job working for the MBTA as a subway car operator. First child, Brendan Seamus, born 1981. Late the same year, Raymond indicted in a scam to embezzle twenty thousand dollars in subway tokens. Charges ultimately dismissed, but Raymond is fired for cause from the MBTA. Works odd jobs after that—day laborer on a home improvement crew, stock clerk at Looney Liquors, bartender, forklift operator. Lost the forklift operator job over the disappearance of some petty cash. Again, charges filed, then dropped, Raymond gets fired. Questioned in the 1982 robbery of Looney Liquors, released on lack of evidence. Questioned in the robbery, same year, of Blanchard Liquors in Middlesex County; once again, released on lack of evidence.”
“Beginning to become known, though,” Sean said.
“He’s getting popular,” Whitey agreed. “A known associate, one Edmund Reese, fingers Raymond in the 1983 heist of a rare comic book collection from a dealer in—”
“Fucking comic books?” Sean laughed. “You go, Raymond.”
“A hundred fifty thousand dollars’ worth of comic books,” Whitey said.
“Oh, excuse me.”
“Raymond returns said literature unharmed and is given four months, a year suspended, two months time served. Comes out of prison apparently with a wee bit of a chemical dependency problem.”
“My, my.”
“Cocaine, of course, this being the eighties, and that’s where the rap sheet grows. Somehow Raymond’s smart enough to keep whatever it is he’s doing to pay for the cocaine under the radar, but not so smart he doesn’t get picked up in his attempts to procure said narcotic. Violates his parole, does a year solid inside.”
“Where he learns the error of his ways.”
“Apparently not. Picked up by a joint Major Crime Unit/FBI sting for trafficking stolen goods across state lines. You’re going to love this. Guess what Raymond stole. Think 1984 now.”
“No hints?”
“Go with your first instinct.”
“Cameras.”
Whitey shot him a look. “Fucking cameras. Go get me some coffee, you’re not a cop anymore.”
“What then?”
“Trivial Pursuit,” Whitey said. “Never saw that one coming, did you?”
“Comic books and Trivial Pursuit. Our boy’s got style.”
“He’s got a shitload of grief, too. He stole the truck in Rhode Island, drove it into Massachusetts.”
“Hence the federal interstate rap.”
“Hence,” Whitey said, shooting Sean another look. “They’ve got his balls, basically, but he does no time.”
Sean sat up a bit, took his feet off his desk. “He rolled on someone?”
“Looks that way,” Whitey said. “After that, nothing else on the rap sheet. Raymond’s probie notes that Raymond is dutiful in appearing for his appointments until he’s released from probation in late eighty-six. His employment records?” Whitey looked over the file at Sean.
Sean said, “Oh, I can talk now?” He opened his own file. “Employment records, IRS records, social security payments—everything comes to a dead halt in August of 1987. Poof, he disappears.”
“You check nationally?”
“The request is being processed as we speak, good sir.”
“What are our possibilities?”
Sean propped the soles of his shoes up on his desk again and leaned back in his chair. “One, he’s dead. Two, he’s in Witness Protection. Three, he went deep, deep, deep underground and just popped back into the neighborhood to pick up his gun and shoot his son’s nineteen-year-old girlfriend.”
Whitey tossed his file down onto the empty desk. “We don’t even know if it’s his gun. We don’t know shit. What are we doing here, Devine?”
“We’re getting up for the dance, Sarge. Come on. Don’t gas out on me this early. We got a guy who was a prime suspect in a robbery eighteen years ago during which the murder weapon was used. Guy’s son dated the victim. Guy has a rap sheet. I want to look at him and I want to look at the son. You know, the one with no alibi.”
“Who passed a poly and who you and I agreed didn’t have the stuff necessary to do this.”
“Maybe we were wrong.”
Whitey rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. “Man, I’m sick of being wrong.”
“So you’re saying you were wrong about Boyle?”
Whitey’s hands remained over his eyes as he shook his head. “Ain’t saying that at all. I still think the guy’s a piece of shit, but whether I can tie him to Katherine Marcus’s death is another matter.” He lowered his hands, the puffy flesh under his eyes ringed red now. “But this Raymond Harris angle doesn’t look too promising, either. Okay, we take another run at the son. Fine. And we try to track down the father. But then what?”
“We tie somebody to that gun,” Sean said.
“Gun could be in the fucking ocean by now. I know that’s what I’d do with it.”
Sean tipped his head toward him. “You would’ve done that after you held up a liquor store eighteen years ago, though, too.”
“True.”
“Our guy didn’t. Which means…”
“He ain’t as bright as me,” Whitey said.
“Or me.”
“Jury’s still out there.”
Sean stretched in his chair, locking his fingers and raising his arms above his head, pushing toward the ceiling until he could feel the muscles stretch. He let loose a shudder of a yawn, and brought his head and hands back down. “Whitey,” he said, trying to hold back as long as possible on the question he’d known he’d have to ask all morning.
“What’s up?”
“Anything in your file on known associates?”
Whitey lifted the file off the desk and flipped it open, turned the first few pages over. “‘Known criminal associates,’” he read, “‘Reginald (aka Reggie Duke) Neil, Patrick Moraghan, Kevin “Whackjob” Sirracci, Nicholas Savage’—hmm—‘Anthony Waxman…’” He looked up at Sean, and Sean knew it was there. “‘James Marcus,’” Whitey said, “‘aka “Jimmy Flats,” reputed leader of a criminal crew sometimes called the Rester Street Boys.’” Whitey closed the file.
Sean said, “And the hits just keep on coming, don’t they?”
THE HEADSTONE Jimmy picked was simple and white. The salesman spoke in a low, respectful voice, as if he’d rather be anyplace but here, and yet he kept trying to nudge Jimmy toward more expensive stones, ones with angels and cherubs or roses engraved in the marble. “Maybe a Celtic cross,” the salesman said, “a choice that’s quite popular with…”
Jimmy waited for him to say “your people,” but the salesman caught himself and finished with “…an awful lot of people these days.”
Jimmy would have forked over the money for a mausoleum if he thought it would make Katie happy, but he knew his daughter had never been a fan of ostentation or overadornment. She’d worn simple clothes and simple jewelry, no gold, and she’d rarely used makeup unless it was a special occasion. Katie had liked things clean, with just a subtle hint of style, and that’s why Jimmy chose the white and ordered the engraving in the calligraphic script, the salesman warning him that the latter choice would double the engraver’s cost, and Jimmy turning his head to look down at the little vulture, backing him up a few feet as he said, “Cash or check?”
Jimmy had asked Val to drive him over, and when he left the office, he got back in the passenger seat of Val’s Mitsubishi 3000 GT, Jimmy wondering for probably the tenth time how a guy in his mid-thirties could drive a car like this and not think he looked anything but silly.
“Where to next, Jim?”
“Let’s get some coffee.”
Val usually had some sort of bullshit rap music blaring from his speakers, the bass throbbing behind tinted windows as some middle-class black kid or white-trash wannabe sang about bitches and hos and whipping out his gat and made what Jimmy assumed were topical references to all these MTV pussies Jimmy would never have known of if he hadn’t overheard Katie using their names on the phone with her girlfriends. Val kept his stereo off this morning, though, and Jimmy was grateful. Jimmy hated rap and not because it was black and from the ghetto—hell, that’s where P-Funk and soul and a lotta kick-ass blues had come from—but because he couldn’t for the life of him see any talent in it. You strung a bunch of limericks together of the “Man from Nantucket” variety, had a DJ scratch a few records back and forth, and threw out your chest as you spoke into a microphone. Oh, yeah, it was raw, it was street, it was the truth, motherfucker. So was pissing your name in the snow and vomiting. He’d heard some moron music critic on the radio say once that sampling was an “art form” and Jimmy, who didn’t know much about art, wanted to reach through the speaker and bitch-slap the obviously white, obviously overeducated, obviously dickless pinhead. If sampling was an art form, then most of the thieves Jimmy had known growing up were artists, too. Probably be news to them.
Maybe he was just getting old. He knew it was always a first sign that your generation had passed the torch of relevancy if it couldn’t understand the music of the younger one. Still, deep in his heart, he was pretty sure that wasn’t it. Rap just sucked, plain and simple, and Val listening to it was a lot like Val driving this car, trying to hold on to something that had never been all that worthwhile in the first place.
They stopped at a Dunkin’ Donuts and tossed their lids in the trash on the way out the door, sipped their coffee leaning against the spoiler attached to the trunk of the sports car.
Val said, “We went out last night, asked around like you said.”
Jimmy tapped his fist into Val’s. “Thanks, man.”
Val tapped back. “It ain’t just ’cause you did two years for me, Jim. Ain’t just ’cause I miss your brain running things, either. Katie was my niece, man.”
“I know.”
“Maybe not by birth or nothing, but I loved her.”
Jimmy nodded. “You guys were the best uncles any kid could have had.”
“No shit?”
“No shit.”
Val sipped some coffee and went silent for a bit. “Well, all right, here’s the deal: looks like the cops were right about O’Donnell and Farrow. O’Donnell was in county lockup. Farrow was at a party and we personally talked to, like, nine guys who vouched for him.”
“All solid?”
“Half, at least,” Val said. “We also sniffed around and there’s been no contracts floating along the street for a while. And, Jim, it’s been a year and a half since the last time I can even remember a hired hit, so we’d a heard. You know?”
Jimmy nodded and drank some coffee.
“Now the cops have been all over this,” Val said. “They’re smothering the bars, the street trade around the Last Drop, everything. Every hooker I’ve talked to has already been questioned. Every bartender. Every single soul who was in McGills or the Last Drop that night. I mean, the law descended, Jim. So it’s out there. Everyone’s trying to remember something.”
“You talk to anybody who did?”
Val held up two fingers as he took another drink. “One guy—you know Tommy Moldanado?”
Jimmy shook his head.
“Grew up in the Basin, paints houses. Anyway, he claims he saw someone staking out the parking lot of the Last Drop just before Katie left. He said the guy definitely wasn’t no cop. Drove a foreign car with a dented front quarter, passenger side.”
“Okay.”
“Other weird thing was, I talk to Sandy Greene. ’Member her from the Looey?”
Jimmy could see her sitting in the classroom, brown pigtails, crooked teeth, always chewed her pencils until they snapped in her mouth and she had to spit out the lead.
“Yeah. What’s she doing these days?”
“Hooking,” Val said. “And she looks rough, man. Our age, right? And my mother looked better in her coffin. Anyway, she’s like the oldest pro out there on that circuit near the Last Drop. She says she sort of adopted this kid. Runaway kid, works the trade.”
“Kid?”
“Like eleven-, twelve-year-old boy.”
“Ah, Jesus.”
“Hey, that’s life. Anyway, this kid, she thinks his real name is Vincent. Everyone called him ‘Little Vince’ except Sandy. She said he preferred ‘Vincent.’ And Vincent’s a lot older than twelve, you know? Vincent’s a pro. She says he’ll fuck you up you try anything with him, keeps a razor blade tucked under his Swatch band, that sorta thing. There six nights a week. Until this Saturday, that is.”
“What happened to him on Saturday?”
“No one knows. But he vanished. Sandy said he sometimes crashed at her place. She gets back there Sunday morning and his shit is gone. He blew town.”
“So, he blew town. Good for him. Maybe he got out of the life.”
“That’s what I said. Sandy said, No, this kid was into it. She said he was going to make one very scary adult, you know? But for now, he’s a kid, and he dug the work. She said if he blew town, only one thing could have caused it and that was fear. Sandy thinks he saw something, something that terrified him, and she said that something would have to be pretty bad, because little Vince don’t scare easy.”
“You got feelers out?”
“Yeah. It’s hard, though. The kiddie trade ain’t, like, organized. You know? They’re just living on the street, picking up a couple of bucks however they can, blowing town whenever they feel like it. But I got people looking. We find this Vincent kid, I figure maybe he knows something about the guy sitting in the parking lot of the Last Drop, maybe he saw the, you know, Katie’s death.”
“If it had anything to do with this guy in the car.”
“Moldanado said the guy gave off a bad vibe. Something about him, he said, even though it was dark, he couldn’t see the guy good, he just said a vibe came from that car.”
A vibe, Jimmy thought. Oh, yeah, that’s helpful.
“And this was just before Katie left?”
“Just before, yeah. The police, right, they sealed off the parking lot Monday morning, had a whole team down there, scraping the asphalt.”
Jimmy nodded. “So something went down in that parking lot.”
“Yeah. That’s what I don’t get. Katie was taken off on Sydney, man. That’s like ten blocks away.”
Jimmy drained his coffee cup. “What if she went back?”
“Huh?”
“To the Last Drop. I know what the prevailing theory is—she dropped Eve and Diane, drove up Sydney, and that’s when it happened. But what if she drove back to the Last Drop first? She drove back, she runs into the guy. He abducts her, forces her to drive back to Pen Park, and then it goes down like the cops think?”
Val tossed his empty coffee cup back and forth between his hands. “That’s possible. But what brought her back to the Last Drop?”
“I don’t know.” They walked to the trash barrel and dumped their cups, and Jimmy said, “What about Just Ray’s kid, you find anything out there?”
“Asked around in general about him. The kid’s a mouse by all accounts. No trouble to anyone. If he wasn’t so good-looking, I’m not sure anyone would even remember meeting him. Eve and Diane both said he loved her, Jim. Loved her like once-in-a-lifetime kinda love. I’ll take a run at him, you want.”
“Let’s hold off for the time being,” Jimmy said. “Watch and wait when it comes to him. Try to track down that Vincent kid.”
“Yeah, okay.”
Jimmy opened the passenger door, saw Val looking at him over the roof, Val holding something back, chewing it.
“What?”
Val blinked in the sunlight, smiled. “Huh?”
“You want to spit something. What is it?”
Val lowered his chin out of the sun, spread his arms on the roof. “I heard something this morning. Just before we left.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah,” Val said, and looked off into the doughnut shop for a moment. “I heard those two cops were by Dave Boyle’s again. You know, Sean from the Point and his partner, the fat one?”
Jimmy said, “Dave was in McGills that night, yeah. They probably just forgot to ask him something, had to come back.”
Val’s gaze left the doughnut shop and his eyes met Jimmy’s. “They took him with them when they left, Jim. You know what I mean? Put him in the backseat.”
MARSHALL BURDEN CAME into the Homicide Unit during lunch hour and called to Whitey as he pushed through the small gate attached to the reception desk. “You the guys looking for me?”
Whitey said, “That’s us. Come on over.”
Marshall Burden was a year short of his thirty and he looked it. He had the milky-wet eyes of a man who’d seen more of the world and more of himself than anyone wanted to, and he carried his tall, flabby frame like he’d rather move backward than forward, as if the limbs were at war with the brain and the brain just wanted out of the whole deal. He’d run the property room for the last seven years, but before that he’d been one of the aces of the whole State Police Department, groomed for a colonel’s slot, working his way up from Narcotics to Homicide to Major Crimes without a bump in the road until one day, the story went, he just woke up scared. It was a disease that usually afflicted the guys who worked undercover and sometimes the highway troopers who suddenly couldn’t pull over one more car, so sure were they that the driver had a gun in his hand and nothing left to lose. But Marshall Burden caught it somehow, too, started becoming the last guy through the door and dragging his ass to calls, freezing in stairwells as everyone else kept climbing.
He took a seat beside Sean’s desk, giving off an air of spoiled fruit, and thumbed through the Sporting News page-a-day calendar Sean kept there, the pages going back to March.
“Devine, right?” he said without looking up.
“Yeah,” Sean said. “Good to meet you. We studied some of your work in the Academy, man.”
Marshall shrugged as if the memory of his old self embarrassed him. He thumbed through a few more pages. “So what’s up, guys? I gotta get back in half an hour.”
Whitey wheeled his chair over by Marshall Burden. “You worked a task force with the Feebs in the early eighties, right?”
Burden nodded.
“You took down a small-timer named Raymond Harris, stole a truckload of Trivial Pursuit from a rest stop in Cranston, Rhode Island.”
Burden smiled at one of the Yogi Berra quotes in the calendar. “Yeah. Trucker went to take a piss, didn’t know he was staked out. The Harris guy jacked the truck and drove away, but the trucker called in, put it on the wire right away, we pulled the thing over in Needham.”
“But Harris walked,” Sean said.
Burden looked up at him for the first time, Sean seeing the fear and self-hatred in those milky eyes and hoping he never caught what Burden had.
“He didn’t walk,” Burden said. “He rolled. He rolled on the guy who’d hired him for the trucking job, guy name a Stillson, I think. Yeah, Meyer Stillson.”
Sean had heard about Burden’s memory—supposedly photographic—but to see the guy reach back eighteen years and pluck names out of the fog like he’d been talking about them yesterday was humbling and depressing at the same time. Guy could have run the whole show, for Christ’s sake.
“So he rolled and that was it?” Whitey said.
Burden frowned. “Harris had a record. He wasn’t walking just because he gave us his boss’s name. No, BPD’s Anti-Gang Unit stepped in to get info on another case, and he rolled again.”
“On who?”
“Guy ran the Rester Street Boys, Jimmy Marcus.”
Whitey looked over at Sean, one eyebrow cocked.
“This was after the counting room robbery, right?” Sean said.
“What counting room robbery?” Whitey asked.
“It’s what Jimmy did time for,” Sean said.
Burden nodded. “Him and another guy took off the MBTA counting room on a Friday night. In and out in two minutes. They knew what time the guards changed shifts. They knew exactly when they bagged up the cash. They had two guys out on the street who stalled the Brinks truck as it came to make the pickup. They were slick as hell and they knew too much not to have had a guy on the inside, or at least someone who’d worked for the T at some point in the previous year or two.”
“Ray Harris,” Whitey said.
“Yup. He gave us Stillson and he gave the BPD the Rester Street Boys.”
“All of ’em?”
Burden shook his head. “No, just Marcus, but he was the brains. Cut off the head, the body dies, you know? BPD picked him up coming out of a storage warehouse the morning of the Saint Pat’s parade. That was the day they planned to split up the take, so Marcus had a suitcase full of money in his hand.”
“But wait,” Sean said, “did Ray Harris testify in open court?”
“No. Marcus cut a deal long before it went to court. He dummied up on who he’d been working with and he took the fall. All the shit everyone knew he’d been behind they couldn’t prove. Kid was like nineteen or something. Twenty? He’d been running that crew since he was seventeen and he’d never even been arrested. DA cut the deal for two inside, three suspended, because he knew there was a good chance they wouldn’t even be able to convict in open court. Heard the Anti-Gang guys were pissed, but whatta you going to do?”
“So Jimmy Marcus never knew Ray Harris ratted him out?”
Burden looked up from the calendar again, fixed his swimming eyes on Sean with a vague contempt. “In a three-year span, Marcus pulled off something like sixteen major heists. Once, right, he hit twelve different jewelers in the Jeweler’s Exchange building on Washington Street. Even now, no one knows how the fuck he did it. He had to circumvent close to twenty different alarms—alarms running off phone lines, satellites, cellular, which was a completely new technology back then. He was eighteen. You believe that shit? Eighteen years old and he’s breaking alarm codes that pros in their forties couldn’t crack. The Keldar Technics job? He and his guys went in through the roof, jammed the fire department frequencies, and then they set off the sprinkler system. Best anyone could figure at the time, they were hanging suspended up at the ceiling until the sprinkler system shorted out the motion detectors. The guy was a fucking genius. If he went to work for NASA instead of himself? We’d be taking the wife and kids on vacation to Pluto. You think a guy this smart wouldn’t have figured out who fingered him? Ray Harris vanished from the face of the earth two months after Marcus rotated back into the free world. What does that tell you?”
Sean said, “It tells me you think Jimmy Marcus murdered Ray Harris.”
“Or he had that midget prick, Val Savage, do it. Look, call Ed Folan at the D-7. He’s a captain there now, but he used to work the Anti-Gang Unit. He can tell you all about Marcus and Ray Harris. Every cop who worked East Bucky in the eighties will tell you the same thing. If Jimmy Marcus didn’t kill Ray Harris, I’m the next Jewish pope.” He pushed the calendar away with his finger and stood up, hitched his pants. “I gotta go eat. You take her easy, fellas.”
He walked back through the squad room, his head swiveling as he took it all in, maybe the desk he used to sit at, the board where his cases used to be listed beside everyone else’s, the person he had been in this room before that person went AWOL, ended up in the property room praying for the day when he could punch that clock for the last time, go someplace where no one remembered who he could have been.
Whitey turned to Sean. “Pope Marshall the Lost?”
THE LONGER HE SAT in the rickety chair in that cold room, the more Dave realized that what he’d thought was a hangover this morning had merely been the continuation of last night’s drunk. The true hangover began to set in around noon, crawling through him like tight packs of termites, taking over his bloodstream and then his circulation, squeezing his heart and picking at his brain. His mouth dried up and sweat turned his hair damp, and he could smell himself suddenly as the alcohol began to leak through his pores. His legs and arms filled with mud. His chest ached. And a wash of the downs cascaded through his skull and settled behind his eyes.
He didn’t feel brave anymore. He didn’t feel strong. The clarity that just two hours ago had seemed as permanent as a scar left his body and took off out of the room and down the road, only to be replaced by a dread far worse than any he’d ever experienced. He felt certain he was going to die soon and die badly. Maybe he’d stroke out right here in this chair, slam the back of his head off the floor as his body shook with convulsions and his eyes leaked blood and he swallowed his tongue so deeply no one could pull it back out. Maybe a coronary, his heart already banging against the walls of his chest like a rat in a steel box. Maybe once they let him out of here, if they ever did, he’d step out on the street, hear a horn right beside him, and be flat on his back as the thick treads of a bus tire rolled up his cheekbone and kept rolling.
Where was Celeste? Did she even know he’d been picked up and taken down here? Did she even care? And what about Michael? Did he miss his father? The worst thing about being dead was that Celeste and Michael would move on. Oh, it might hurt them for a small amount of time, but they would endure and start new lives because that’s what people did every day. It was only in movies that people pined for the dead, their lives freezing up like broken clocks. In real life, your death was mundane, a forgettable event to everyone but you.
Dave sometimes wondered if the dead looked down on the ones they’d left behind and wept to see how easily their loved ones were getting along without them. Like Stanley the Giant’s kid, Eugene. Was he up there in the ether somewhere with his little bald head and white hospital johnny, looking down at his dad laughing in a bar, thinking, Hey, Dad, what about me? You remember me? I lived.
Michael would get a new dad, and maybe he’d be in college and he’d tell a girl about the father who’d taught him baseball, the one he barely remembered. It happened so long ago, he’d say. So long ago.
And Celeste was certainly attractive enough to get another man. She’d have to. Loneliness, she’d tell her friends. It just got to me. And he’s a nice guy. He’s good with Michael. And her friends would betray Dave’s memory in a flash. They’d say, Good for you, honey. It’s healthy. You have to get back on that bike and move ahead with your life.
And Dave would be up there with Eugene, the two of them looking down, calling out their love in voices none of the living could hear.
Jesus. Dave wanted to huddle in the corner and hug himself. He was falling apart. He knew if those cops came back in now, he’d crack. He’d tell them anything they wanted to know if they’d just show him a little warmth and get him another Sprite.
And then the door to the interrogation room opened up on Dave and his dread and his need for human warmth, and the trooper who entered in full uniform was young and looked strong and had those trooper eyes, the kind that managed to be impersonal and imperious at the same time.
“Mr. Boyle, if you could come with me now.”
Dave stood up and went to the door, his hands trembling slightly as the alcohol continued to fight its way out of him.
“Where?” he asked.
“You’ll be stepping into a lineup, Mr. Boyle. Someone wants to take a look at you.”
TOMMY MOLDANADO wore jeans and a green T-shirt speckled with paint. There were specks of paint in his curly brown hair and teardrops of it on his tan work boots and chips of it on the frames of his thick glasses.
It was the glasses that worried Sean. Any witness who walked into court wearing glasses might as well have put a target sign on his chest for the defense attorney. And the juries, forget about it. Experts all in regard to eyeglasses and the law thanks to Matlock and The Practice, they watched the bespectacled take the stand the same way they watched drug dealers, blacks without ties, and jailhouse rats who’d cut a deal with the DA.
Moldanado pressed his nose up against the viewing room glass and looked in at the five men in the lineup. “I can’t really tell with them looking head-on. Can they turn to the left?”
Whitey flicked the switch on the dais in front of him and spoke into the microphone. “All subjects turn to the left.”
The five men shifted left.
Moldanado put his palms against the glass and squinted. “Number Two. It could be Number Two. Could you get him to step closer?”
“Number Two?” Sean said.
Moldanado looked back over his shoulder at him and nodded.
The second guy in the lineup was a narc named Scott Paisner, who normally worked Norfolk County.
“Number Two,” Whitey said with a sigh. “Take two steps forward.”
Scott Paisner was short, bearded, and round with a rapidly receding hairline. He looked about as much like Dave Boyle as Whitey did. He turned face-front and stepped up to the glass, and Moldanado said, “Yeah, yeah. That’s the guy I saw.”
“You sure?”
“Ninety-five percent,” he said. “It was night, you know? There are no lights in that parking lot and, hey, I was buzzed. But otherwise I’m almost positive that’s the guy I saw.”
“You didn’t mention a beard in your statement,” Sean said.
“No, but I think now that, yeah, the guy had a beard maybe.”
Whitey said, “No one else in that lineup looks like the guy?”
“Shit, no,” he said. “They ain’t even close. What’re they—cops?”
Whitey lowered his head to the dais and whispered, “Why do I even do this fucking job?”
Moldanado looked at Sean. “What? What?”
Sean opened the door behind him. “Thanks for coming down, Mr. Moldanado. We’ll be in touch.”
“I did good, though, right? I mean, I helped.”
“Sure,” Whitey said. “We’ll FedEx that merit badge to you.”
Sean gave Moldanado a smile and a nod and shut the door on him as soon as he crossed the threshold.
“No witness,” Sean said.
“Uh, no shit.”
“The physical evidence from the car won’t hold up in court.”
“I’m aware of that.”
Sean watched Dave put a hand over his eyes and squint into the light. He looked like he hadn’t slept in a month.
“Sarge. Come on.”
Whitey turned from the microphone and looked at him. He was starting to look exhausted, too, the whites of his eyes gone pink.
“Fuck it,” he said. “Kick him loose.”