I MET LIEUTENANT DARCY Gaines, who’d been a rookie on the cops when I was, at a Dunkin’ in Brighton that was a few miles away from her office at the Family Justice Center on Commonwealth Ave.
She was taller than I was, just as blond, happily married with two children, now making a name for herself as the head of the BPD’s Human Trafficking Unit. A few weeks ago there had been a feature about her in The Boston Globe, one in which she’d floated the idea of publicly shaming johns by sending them to what she called John School, where they could learn about the collateral damage associated with the world’s oldest profession, especially when it involved underage girls.
She’d told me that when she first told the commissioner her idea about John School, he’d asked if it had a hockey team and what league it played in.
We were sitting at a corner table at midmorning. We both had hot coffee in front of us. Darcy had also ordered an old-fashioned plain donut, which I said reinforced negative stereotypes about the eating habits of cops.
“I still don’t get the Dunkin’ thing,” she said, referring to the rebranding of Dunkin’ Donuts.
“They do more than just sell donuts!” I said, like I was doing a television commercial.
“Next somebody will try to rebrand the Common,” she said.
I had called her after Richie left, telling her I could use some of her wisdom on a case I’d just started working, about an ex-prostitute who’d gone missing. She was living in Watertown and said she’d meet me there on her way to her office, which was up near Boston University.
Now she sat across from me in uniform, Boston Police patch high on her right sleeve, name tag on the right front of her shirt, BPD pin on her collar. I studied the dark blue uniform, not a bad color for her, same as it once was for me, and wondered where I’d be in the department if I’d stayed on the job.
“So what’s up?” she said.
I told her I was sort of working for Tony.
“You’re shitting me,” she said.
“It’s complicated,” I said. “But no, I am not shitting you.”
“You are working for Tony Freaking Marcus?” she said, in a voice loud enough for the kids working the drive-thru window to hear, even wearing their headsets.
“Would it help if I told you that in my mind I’m working on behalf of the woman who’s gone missing and not for him?” I said.
“No,” she said. “Wait. Let me amend that. Fuck no. And quit calling her missing. Maybe she just finally came to her goddamn senses.”
“Can I explain further?”
“About lying down with dogs?”
She wasn’t my old friend Darcy in that moment. She was a career cop giving me the cop stare. I’d never been able to carry it off, but Darcy always could. And once you had it, you never lost it.
“Go ahead,” she said. “This ought to be good.”
I took her through it as quickly as I could, all the way back to why I’d needed Tony to find Desmond Burke when he’d been taken by the guy who’d shot Richie, and how I’d turned over the gun shipment to the Feds when Tony thought they were his.
“Blah, blah, blah,” she said.
I couldn’t resist any longer, and broke off a piece of her donut and ate it. She gave me a disappointed look. I shrugged.
“There’s more,” I said, and then told her about somebody breaking into my house while I was talking to Gabriel Jabari at Suite.
“Another beauty,” she said.
“So that’s where I am,” I said.
“Working for somebody who represents everything I hate,” she said. “And by the way? While you’re going to work for this clown, we’re seeing an uptick in the number of underage girls being turned out, on the street, in those cheesy massage parlors, even doing hotel work for some of these perverts. Another one died last week. OD’d after somebody beat her to an inch of what was left of her life.”
“I heard,” I said.
“It didn’t even make the papers,” she said. “That’s how little these kids seem to matter. How’d you hear, by the way?”
“Tony.”
“One of his girls?”
“Evidently.”
Darcy spread her arms wide and put a fake smile on her face. “I wonder if he even knows her goddamn name,” she said.
She wasn’t done. We both knew it. It was like watching steam come out of her.
“Does your father know you’re working for him?” she said.
“Richie knows,” I said. “Spike knows. Jabari knows.”
“Now you expect me to help you find her,” she said.
I smiled now.
“Not expecting,” I said. “Just asking.”
She was staring at me again.
“For the good old days?” I said.
“You know what I remember best about the good old days?” she said. “How many times you got me to do things that I knew I shouldn’t be doing.”
“Come on,” I said. “We had fun. Remember that weekend at the Cape with the two surfers? You ever tell your husband about that one?”
“They weren’t surfers,” she said. “They were lifeguards. You want to blackmail somebody, at least do it with the right information.”
I heard a phone buzz, realized it was hers. She pulled it out of the pocket of her pants, looked at it, nodded.
“I have to get to work,” she said. “Just had a meeting with the boss moved up and I can’t be late. He’s been busting my chops since the story about me in The Globe, asking me when I get my own TV series.”
“Help me find her,” I said.
“So you can get the two lovebirds back together?” she said.
“I think there could be more going on here,” I said.
“You know what a big ask this is,” she said.
I said, “I’d do the same for you.”
She nodded. “Yes,” she said. “As a matter of fact, you would.”
Then she said, “I am making no promises, but I will ask around about Lisa Morneau. I’ll talk to my friends at this new task force they’ve got going.”
“Vice?” I said.
“No such thing anymore at the BPD,” she said. “This one throws an umbrella over sex and drugs.”
“And rock ’n’ roll?”
“Oh, and gangs,” she said.
“Don’t they get in your way?” I said.
She smiled. “Not for long,” she said, and then wanted to know if I’d asked Lee Farrell to help me out with Lisa Morneau. Darcy knew that even though Lee worked Homicide, he really was my best friend in the department now that my father had retired, even though Phil Randall said you never retired, you were a cop until they closed the box on you.
“Nobody’s died,” I said. “At least not that I know of.”
“Let’s try to keep it that way,” Darcy said. “You have any actual leads?”
“Tony gave me a name, a friend of Lisa’s who used to be in the life and is out now,” I said. “I’m going to try to see her today.”
Darcy stood up and told me I didn’t have to.
“We share information, right?” she said. “Just in case you come across something that would help me penetrate the force field around Marcus that somehow seems to keep getting stronger and lock his ass up once and for all.”
“Well,” I said, “I’ll share up to a point.”
“And what point might that be?”
“Like the old Supreme Court justice said that time about obscenity,” I said. “I’ll know it when I see it.”
“You gotta be careful here, Sunny,” Darcy said. “I know you think you’re bad. These guys are worse.”
“I’m always careful,” I said.
“Not with the lifeguards,” she said, and left.