20

It was half past four on Sunday morning, and the sky was dark. A single cruiser, its light turned off, blocked the entrance to the Hill. Darby pulled alongside it as she rolled down her window, and when the cop rolled down his she gave him her name. He nodded and waved for her to continue on ahead, where a crowd of cops was gathered around the Snow Girls memorial.

Darby had never seen the sculpture up close and in person, but she had seen pictures of it online. It had been commissioned by Belham as a way of honouring Claire Flynn – to show the public that the town hadn’t forgotten her. The city set up a committee, and for several months it went over submissions from Massachusetts-based artists. The winning bid went to a Boston-based artist who had, according to a member of the committee, submitted a design for a sculpture that ‘reflected the city and its core values of community’.

The artist, however, decided to ditch her original design. She would later tell reporters that she’d needed to follow her creative muse and create a sculpture that reflected the hard truth about the Catholic Church, especially here in Boston. The city discovered the woman’s new design the day the sculpture was unveiled to the public.

The bronze sculpture affixed to a marble base showed a depiction of Jesus hanging on the cross. A priest stood behind him, covering Jesus’s eyes with a blindfold, while Claire Flynn, Elizabeth Levenson and Mary Hamilton knelt in the snow, bundled in jackets and scarfs, their gloved hands clasped together in prayer, their faces twisted in pain and fear.

The sculpture and the artist who created it made national headlines for weeks.

Diehard Catholics who never questioned the teachings of the Church or its moral failures, as well as leaders from the Church and the Boston Archdiocese, thought the sculpture was in poor taste. The Archdiocese and its well-stocked stable of lawyers and PR people mounted a crusade to get the sculpture removed. The public, however, thought the sculpture was an accurate portrayal of the Catholic Church and fought back, and when polls showed that negative perceptions of the Church were reaching epidemic levels, the Vatican stepped in and, not wanting to add any more oxygen to an out-of-control fire, pulled the plug on the fight.

Darby reached the top. The floodlight affixed to the telephone pole was on. To the far right of it was the memorial. It was hidden underneath a white crime-scene tent.

Darby parked in front of Dell’s. The store lights were on and through the windows she saw the owner Debbie Dallal, restocking shelves. Kennedy sat in a booth, his attention locked on the screen of a MacBook.

Debbie looked up from her work when Darby entered.

‘I’ve put on a fresh pot of coffee,’ she told Darby. ‘Go on behind the counter and help yourself. Doughnuts there too.’

Darby thanked her and walked over to Kennedy. In the harsh fluorescent light he looked like he had aged a good ten years since yesterday morning. He had thrown on jeans and a Red Sox baseball hat, and wore his badge on a lanyard over a grey Harvard sweatshirt, the cuffs worn thin.

‘Where’d you get the tent?’ she asked.

‘Trunk of my car. Always carried one during my homicide days, never took it out. Crime lab are on their way.’

‘Did you –’

‘No. Didn’t touch a single thing. Everything is safe and secured, I promise. Take a seat. You need to see this.’

Darby sat across from him. Kennedy turned his laptop around so she could see the screen.

In the picture, Richard Byrne, bundled up in a heavy winter coat and wearing boots that came up to his knees, stood by the monument. Given the light in the sky, it was early morning – just as dawn was breaking, or during twilight, she wasn’t sure which. One gloved hand gripped his cane while the other held a bouquet of cellophane-wrapped flowers. He held the flowers against his face, as though inhaling their scent.

Jesus, Darby thought. ‘Where’d you get this?’

‘On Insta-crap, or whatever it’s called.’

‘Instagram.’

‘All this social media stuff is, frankly, beyond me. Guy at the station is the one who brought this picture to my attention. I’m only on Facebook, and I joined to shut up my wife. Did you know only old people like you and me use Facebook?’

‘I’ve heard that.’ Darby stayed off all social media. She had no use for it, didn’t want to invite any more attention to her private life, which, thanks to the Internet, wasn’t so private. ‘Who posted this?’

‘Kid named Neal Sonnenberg,’ Kennedy replied. ‘He’s sixteen, a born-and-bred Belham boy. He and a few of his buddies apparently like to follow Byrne around town, take pictures of him with their phones. They call him the Belham Boogeyman. That has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?’

‘As a matter of fact, it does.’

‘Sonnenberg and his buddies make a game out of it.’

‘A game?’

‘Yeah. Who can get the most pictures of Byrne, that sort of shit. There’re about two dozen or so pictures posted on this private account they’ve set up, which only they can access. They’ve got pictures of Byrne out walking and more than a handful of ones taken through windows. Don’t ask me why they’re doing it, ’cause I don’t know – at least not yet. I’ll be talking to them later on this morning, see if they’ve glimpsed anything interesting, something that maybe they didn’t want to post.’

‘How long have they been doing this?’

‘Couple of months, from what I’m told,’ Kennedy said. ‘Neal took that picture this morning. There’s a place across the street where the bus picks him up for school.’ Kennedy removed his cap and ran a hand vigorously over his scalp and yawned. ‘Why the fuck has Byrne come back here – especially now, after that article that came out? Why isn’t he hiding away in that haunted-looking house of his?’

Darby shrugged, her attention locked on the picture. ‘Who left the flowers? Mickey?’

‘Yeah. Leaves them every year on the anniversary date. And what’s with the shrugging? You’re the one with a diploma in dipshits. You know how these guys think. Is it more than just wanting to relive the event in their minds?’

‘They have active fantasy lives. But, generally speaking, they typically engage in reliving the event at the place where they tortured and killed their victims. You tell Mickey about these pictures?’

Kennedy shook his head. ‘Don’t plan on telling him either. Mickey sees that one of Byrne smelling the flowers he left for his daughter, it’ll push him over the edge. He’ll go charging into that house.’

‘I agree.’

Kennedy turned his head to the right and glanced over his shoulder, at the cops gathered around the monument. Darby looked too. Thinking about what was in there made her stomach clench, feel like it was packed in ice.

When Kennedy turned back to her, she saw his face had changed. She knew he was thinking about what was in there too.

‘You ever encounter something like this?’ he asked.

‘No.’ She inhaled sharply. ‘Never.’

‘You speak with the other two mothers yet?’

Darby shook her head. “Neither Nancy Hamilton nor Judith Levenson has returned my calls.’

‘Can’t say I’m surprised. I had to chase them down too.’

‘I drove up to Nashua, hoping I could catch Hamilton. She wasn’t home, so I checked in with Nashua PD and went over the case, checked back at the house. Nothing. A neighbour thinks she and her husband are out of town.’

‘Picked a good time to get away. When the news about the jacket gets out, it’s going to be a media shitshow.’

‘I’m going to try Levenson today, head down to New Bedford.’

‘I told you, Levenson is a waste of time. She wouldn’t talk to me about her daughter. She’s not going to talk to you.’

‘I’ve got to try.’

‘The woman told me that she knew her daughter was dead, that she had grieved and moved on with her life.’

‘She said those exact words?’

‘More or less.’

A pair of headlights washed through the parking lot. ‘This must be Mickey,’ Kennedy said.

Darby saw Mickey’s truck come barging up the Hill. She closed the laptop.

Kennedy swallowed and his breath caught in his throat. He fitted the baseball cap back over his head so the visor hid his eyes, and, as he got to his feet, Darby saw an expression on his face that matched exactly how she was feeling – how Kennedy wanted to press a button and transport himself out of this room, this town and this state – this world – and go someplace where he’d never be tasked with having to deliver yet another piece of awful news to an already grieving victim in another ring of hell.