“I FEEL PRETTY CONSPICUOUS HERE,” HUNTER SAID FROM the passenger seat. Theirs was the only car parked on the street, facing a sand berm running horizontal across the far end of the block, obscuring the beach and Atlantic surf that lay beyond. Two-story homes—mostly with light-colored siding, but occasionally red brick—lined the block behind empty, narrow sidewalks and short, bare trees. Brennan thought she could make out in the rearview mirror a lapis strip—Jamaica Bay—underneath an unblemished robin’s-egg sky. The house they watched, a narrow box with a brick first story and shingle second story, lay midway between the ocean and the bay on Rockaway.
“Not much we can do about it,” Brennan said.
“I know. I just hope McCann’s not in Florida for the winter.”
They’d both agreed that trying to catch people in person was best.
“We’ll give it another hour. If he doesn’t turn up, we can try to track him down by phone.”
A black SUV turned the corner behind them. Brennan perked up. She caught a flash of the driver, a man with short white hair, when he drove past them without stopping before disappearing around the next corner a moment later.
“What if McCann’s the one who’s been making the threats?” Hunter asked.
“Then this is probably a bad idea.”
They didn’t speak again until an old blue Ford Taurus turned onto the street from the far avenue.
“God, let this be him,” Brennan whispered. To her relief, the driver turned into McCann’s driveway. The trunk popped open the moment the car stopped.
Brennan and Hunter crossed the street against a cold wind blowing in from the Atlantic, just as an old man with thinning white hair and a woman in a knit wool hat climbed out of the Taurus. The woman rooted through her purse as she shuffled toward the door of the house, while the man walked to the trunk. He looked up as the siblings approached, a cop’s glare lashing at them from a broad face. Brennan had seen more than a few of them in her career. They were a landscape feature she barely noticed anymore.
“Detective McCann?” Brennan asked.
“Retired. Who’s asking?”
“My name is Brennan. This is my brother,Hunter.”
McCann cocked his head and narrowed his eyes like he was trying to read some confusing text.
“I feel like I should know what this is about,” he said.
“It’s about an old case of yours. A murder.”
“I had a lot of those.” She watched him riffle through old cases in his head. The woman stopped halfway to the door to watch, and the bags of groceries in his trunk waited to be collected.
“It’s—” Brennan started, but McCann held up his hand. Another second passed. He said, “John Lo. You’re his kids.”
They nodded.
“We’d like to talk to you about the case,” Brennan said.
“You should have called.”
“We thought you might not speak to us if we called.”
“You were right. But you would have saved yourself the trip.” McCann reached into his trunk and pulled out two paper bags of groceries to cradle one in each arm. He turned to the woman. “Bonnie, stop standing there and get the door.”
“Sir,” Hunter said, as McCann walked to his door while Bonnie sifted through God knows what in her purse, “we’re sorry for dropping in on you like this, and we don’t need to discuss it today. But we wanted you to see our faces, so that you’d know that we…that we’re not trying to make trouble. We’re only looking for answers. Personally. For us.”
McCann reached his front door where Bonnie stood, the keys finally in her hand. She spoke to him words neither sibling heard over the wind, then turned to unlock the door. McCann disappeared into the house, but Bonnie turned back to them.
“Do you mind grabbing the last bag in the trunk?” she said, then shuffled through the door, leaving it open behind her.
Brennan retrieved the bag and closed the trunk. Bonnie was waiting for them inside a narrow foyer with a white tile floor. She hung her coat on a row of hooks lining one wall. Hunter closed the door behind them, casting most of the foyer into shadow. A beam of cold light blasted through a small smoked-glass window in the door, illuminating Bonnie like a spotlight.
“Thank you,” Brennan said.
“He likes to complain,” Bonnie said, “but he’s always in a better mood if he gets a chance to chat with people. You can hang your coats next to mine. The groceries go to the kitchen, just through there.”
Hunter managed the coats while Brennan followed Bonnie’s directions to the kitchen.
“Let me get these unpacked, then we can talk.” McCann placed oranges and grapefruit into a bowl on the counter. “You can leave that with me.”
Brennan placed the grocery bag on the counter, then joined Hunter and Bonnie in the small dining room off the kitchen. The siblings sat at an oval polished-wood table set beneath a low-hanging chandelier while Bonnie went to boil a kettle of water. McCann entered, draped his coat on the back of one of the chairs, and settled his bulk into another across from Brennan. Bonnie shuttled the accoutrements for tea into the room: teacups, spoons, a creamer, and a sugar bowl.
“I don’t want to be a bad host,” he said, “but I hope you recognize this is an imposition.”
“We do,” Brennan said, “and we’re grateful for any time you can give us.”
McCann grunted, leaned back, and said, “So tell me exactly what you’re doing here.”
“We wanted to get some color on the investigation,” Brennan said. “Things we wouldn’t know from reading the news stories or the trial transcript.”
“But why? What’s the point? The guy—your dad, he’s dead, right? I remember seeing that. You want me to tell you he didn’t do it?”
“Actually,” Hunter said, “I think he did it. But my sister doesn’t. You can imagine that it makes family dinners pretty strained.”
“What do you do?” “I’m a reporter.”
McCann glanced at Brennan. “You?”
“A lawyer. I was a prosecutor.”
McCann’s eyes flickered between the two of them. “So the two of you think you can do my job better than me thirty years after the fact?”
Brennan patted at the air as if to calm an angry animal. “It’s not about that. There’s just so much we don’t know. You know how young we were. Our mom never spoke to us about what happened. Dad definitely didn’t. Everything we know came from kids taunting us or tidbits people mentioned over the years or references in old files and news stories. We probably won’t learn anything more than you knew at the time, but it will be more than we know now.”
Bonnie entered with a steaming kettle and poured water into their cups before returning to the kitchen. The siblings let the cups sit to cool a bit. McCann spooned sugar into his with a fist like a toddler.
“And what’s the goal here? You going to write a story about this? Or a book?”
“Like we said,” Hunter said, “this is for us.”
“I imagine if we were to find something new,” Brennan said, “we’d turn it over to the authorities. But thirty years later?” She gave an abbreviated shrug to let McCann know that she wasn’t optimistic about the prospect.
“If I talk to you, I don’t want what I say coming up in some news story or a book,” McCann said. “So strictly off-the-record, Mr. Reporter, you got that?”
“Understood,” Hunter said.
“And you, counselor. You know how it is. We don’t bring cases unless we think it’s our guy. So I don’t want to sit here and fight you on why you think your daddy didn’t do it.”
“I only want whatever facts and thoughts you have.”
McCann nodded. “Ask away.”
“How well do you remember the case?” Brennan asked, taking the lead.
“I remember it pretty good. It was one of my first homicides. I got partnered up with Bobby Bauman so he could break me in. He ended up making chief of detectives down the line. Anyway, he caught the case because he was the best we had at the time. And it was a unique case. Got a lot of media attention. Fancy victim. Your dad’s race. At the time, that stood out. He was the only murderer I caught that didn’t plead guilty or get convicted of something.”
“Why do you think that was?” Hunter asked.
“Jury had reasonable doubt.”
“But why?”
McCann grunted. “The whole thing was circumstantial. The defense attorney did a great job. Still, I thought at worst, we’d get a hung jury. The acquittal surprised me. I spent a lot of time after thinking what I could have done better to nail him.”
“Let’s come back to that in a bit,” Brennan said. “Can you tell us how you settled on our dad as the suspect?”
“We ruled out a robbery or home invasion pretty quick. Nothing was stolen. No forced entry to the apartment. When her friend, Cathy, I think it was, told us why Jessica was at her place, Bauman thought it was either the husband or the boyfriend. It’s almost always one of those two. The husband…what was his name?”
“Mark,” Hunter said.
“Yeah. He showed up to the scene. Cathy told us she called him right after she called the cops. We interviewed him. I thought his alibi was weak. Said he left work, walked for a while before getting home, and stayed there until he got the call from Cathy. Parts of that story didn’t match exactly with other witnesses, but we couldn’t disprove it.”
“Did Cathy tell you that they used to fight? Jessica and Mark?”
McCann thought for a moment. “What do you mean ‘fight’?”
“They apparently hit each other.”
McCann’s brow creased. “I’d remember if she told us that.”
“If you knew about that, would you have pushed harder on his alibi?” Brennan asked.
“What do you think?”
“So how did you get to my dad?”
“We figured that her boyfriend was probably someone from work. So we interviewed the lawyers there. One of the partners, I forget his name, he gave us a list of people she was friendly with. We interviewed them. One of them was your dad.”
McCann finished his tea before resuming. “Your dad told us that they were friends. Honestly, that first conversation, once we saw him, we didn’t give much thought to him. Neither of us—me or Bauman—could picture a girl like Jessica having an affair with someone like him. No offense.”
Hunter tensed beside her but didn’t say anything.
“The next day, we interviewed a bunch of Jessica’s friends. They told us that Jessica mentioned that her boss was into her.”
“They said she had told them that like, what, nine or ten months before she was murdered?” Brennan asked. She remembered the reference in the scans of the detectives’ notes.
“Yeah. That sounds right. I’d have to see my notes to be sure. So we went back to the firm. Talked to all the partners again, including your dad. Same stories. Then we talked to the one partner, the guy from the first day. He explained the way these law firms worked to us.”
“Let me guess. He basically said that she may have called any of the partners her boss?” Brennan asked.
“Yep. Something like that. But he also mentioned that your dad and Jessica had been getting coffee a lot the past six months or something.”
“Just out of the blue? He explain why he didn’t tell you guys that the first day?” Maybe Brennan missed it, but she hadn’t seen anything like what McCann was describing in the detectives’ notes, only pages recording various partners saying the same thing: Jess was smart, hardworking, and reserved. Had lots of friends in the office.
McCann smiled. “Bauman got it out of him. Made this whole show of closing his notebook and putting it away. Said to him, ‘Look sir’”—McCann’s voice changed into what Brennan assumed was an imitation of Bauman—“‘we know you don’t want to get anyone in trouble or embarrass anybody, so this is just between us, okay, but do you got any gossip, anything that might help?’”
“So this partner, he told you then?” Brennan asked.
“Yeah. He also suggested that we check the car-service voucher books.” McCann told them that he and Bauman collected the voucher books going back at least a year. “We noticed that your dad had vouchers showing repeated trips to various intersections about a block from Cathy’s apartment. In a few instances, he and Jessica took separate cars to the same location within fifteen minutes of each other. The pattern started in January, six months before Jessica’s murder.”
“That was clever,” Brennan said. “The vouchers got you both the affair and our dad in the area the night of the murder.”
“If he’d taken a cab,” McCann said, “it would have been untraceable. Cash only back then.”
“Why did you guys interview this partner first?”
“When we showed up at the firm, we asked who Jessica worked most with. It was that guy, what was his name, Walter something.”
“Walter Roberts.”
McCann nodded.
“Did you look at him?” Brennan asked. “He’d have been her ‘boss,’ too, right?”
“We did. Everyone in that firm had an alibi that checked out except your dad.”
“Okay, then,” Hunter said. “What bothered you about the case, though?”
“What do you mean?” McCann asked.
“I mean, your theory fits, but there were things that didn’t fit it, right? Like the handprint.”
McCann nodded. “That fucking—”
“Language!” Bonnie called from the kitchen.
“Sorry. The goddamned handprint. Yeah, it was a problem. But didn’t match anything else in the place. Nothing to indicate that it was left the night of the murder.”
“Except that it was on the overturned chair,” Brennan said.
“Yeah. Honestly, it bothered me. My first homicide. I wanted it perfect. But Bauman? Not so much. Between us, he suggested that we lose it. I told him, ‘No way.’ I mean, Bauman had a great reputation, so I didn’t think he was serious. And McCarthy, the ADA, he was a cocky bastard, he wasn’t troubled by it.”
“He’s running for DA now,” Brennan said. If McCann was the one making the threatening calls, maybe he would slip.
“Yeah. He’s an asshole. Lucky for him I don’t vote in Manhattan.”
“What did he say about the handprint?”
McCann squinted as he tried to remember. “Told us the jury would never buy that a random guy happened to be in the room and leave only one handprint on a chair but not the door or anything else. I mean, he was right, right? Defense didn’t even use it at trial.”
“The defense didn’t know,” Brennan said.
“Wait. What do you mean?”
“I talked to the attorney. It wasn’t in the defense files. He didn’t know.”
McCann shook his head. “I don’t believe it. Bauman wouldn’t actually do that.”
“Did you see them turn it over?”
Another head shake. His shoulders dropped an inch as he considered the information.
“You ever try running those prints again?” Hunter asked.
“Not after the trial.”
“It’s a big problem,” Brennan said, as if she were commiserating. “Risky to go to trial with that hanging out there. You didn’t know?”
“I told you I didn’t. Bauman took the lead on the trial stuff. I moved on to other cases.” McCann watched the steam rise from his tea before speaking again. “There was a lot of evidence that pointed toward your dad. And a lot of pressure on us to bring a charge. You know how it is with the press.” He shot a look at Hunter. “I don’t know what kind of shit McCarthy was getting, but me and Bauman were drowning in it. Frankly, McCarthy thought that your dad would fold once he indicted him. He didn’t expect him to take the risk of trial.”
They waited for McCann to speak further, but instead he asked, “You talk to anyone else?”
“The partner, Walter. Cathy Cooke,” Brennan said. “Do you know where Bauman is?”
“He died about ten years ago. Right after he retired. His son’s a cop. Ran across him a couple of times before I retired. Kinda got fast-tracked because of his dad, know what I mean?” he asked, then looked between the two of them. “No. I guess you don’t know what that’s like.”
He stood up. “Looks like we’ve finished the tea. Can I get you anything before you go?”
Brennan’s cup was still half full.
Hunter extended a hand. “We appreciate you sitting down with us.”
McCann shook their hands and walked them back to the front hall.
“One last thing,” Brennan said, as she grabbed her coat from the hook. “Cathy mentioned that she was having an affair with someone.
The guy paid for her to stay in a hotel until she could move out of the apartment. She say anything about that to you?”
McCann held her gaze for a moment. “She didn’t mention anything like that to us.”
“Guess you couldn’t picture a girl like her doing something like that either.” Brennan shrugged, then said, “Thank you for your time.”
He opened the door, blasting them all with cold air, even before the siblings had pulled their coats on.