TONY CALLED AS I was walking home from the mall. I thought about ignoring him, but knew that would only delay the inevitable. I knew from experience that he did not like being ignored.
He asked if Callie had told me anything he hadn’t told her. I said she had not.
“She talk any shit on me?” he said.
“She did not,” I said. “The only one doing that was me.”
“You lying to me, Sunny Randall?” he said.
“I am not,” I said.
“I want to know what you know as soon as you know it,” he said.
I said, “It actually doesn’t go that way, Tony.”
“And how does it go?”
“I work this the way I work it and if you don’t like it, you can call me off right now and go find her yourself.”
I heard a low whistle on his end.
“Balls on you,” he said.
“Ground already covered,” I said, and ended the call.
The winter sun was high in the sky, but there was a big wind out of the east today, so even though the temperature was supposed to be in the thirties I felt colder than Admiral Byrd as I walked up Boylston and across Arlington and up Beacon. I passed the Bull and Finch, the pub whose exterior had been used for the old television show Cheers. The bar in that one, I remembered from my teenage years, was where everybody knew your name, and was always glad you came.
Where, I wondered, did Callie Harden go to feel that way, now that she was living a life that wasn’t much, but was at least her own?
I had set the house alarm before walking over to meet her at the mall. I heard the reassuring beep when I came through the door, then punched in the code to deactivate as Rosie came running this time.
She was always glad when I came.
I put on some tea to take some of the chill out of me and called Sergeant Lee Farrell.
Even Lee admitted he wasn’t yet the homicide cop that Frank Belson was. Lee hadn’t worked the job as long or as well as Frank had. But he was damn good. He had told me last week that Belson and his wife were on a long-discussed vacation in Ireland, and while he wasn’t rooting for someone to get clipped while Frank was away, there was a part of him hoping to give the higher-ups a chance to see what he could do when he was the one in the barrel.
He had been worried about being gay when joining the cops. But he was so clearly good at what he did, and obsessed with outworking everybody around him, that it had never really been an issue, except among a handful of idiots.
He was smart and funny and loyal and brave and handsome. More than once I had mentioned to him that maybe he and Spike would make kind of a cute couple.
“Of course,” he said. “Because all single and attractive gay men are automatically attracted to every other single gay man they meet.”
“You are two of my favorite people on the planet,” I said. “You can’t blame a girl for trying.”
“You need to know something, Sunny,” he said. “Only my mother tries to fix me up more than you do.”
On the phone now I told him I needed help finding a missing employee of Tony Marcus’s.
“You mean a hooker,” Lee said.
“I believe they’re now called sex workers,” I said.
“Have it your way.”
“Ex-hooker, not to make too fine a point of it,” I said.
“No such thing,” he said. “And why are you helping Tony Marcus, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“He’s sort of a client,” I said.
“How is someone sort of a client?”
“It’s complicated,” I said. “And I promise to explain later. But for now I’m looking for a woman named Lisa Morneau who has essentially been acting as Tony’s chief operating officer, in addition to being his main squeeze.”
“I’m guessing it’s not in Tony’s best interest to file a Missing Persons report,” he said.
“Nope,” I said.
“You think she might be dead?”
“Please don’t sound so hopeful,” I said. “But hoping not.”
“So why are you calling me?”
“Because you’re the smartest cop I know, at least when Belson is on the other side of the Atlantic,” I said.
“You know you’re not as funny as you think you are, right?”
“Am too,” I said.
“What’s in it for me, if I do decide to help a girl out?”
“My undying gratitude,” I said.
“Yeah, right,” he said, and then asked me what I had on her, and I gave him the credit card numbers and cell phone numbers and bank cards and everything else Tony had given me. He said he’d get back to me.
I thought about calling my father, a trained detective himself. But for the time being, I didn’t want to have the same conversation with him about Tony Marcus that I was having with everybody except Anderson Cooper, who’d probably disapprove of my working for Tony, too. I thought about going back to Lisa Morneau’s apartment, to see if I had possibly missed something. But I didn’t think I had, and I could always circle back there later. For now I needed to get the address of the upscale house of ill repute nearby and talk to some of the women working there, if they’d been on the payroll when Lisa was in charge.
I was aware from my own police training that there was a protocol to be followed with missing persons on whom reports were actually filed. But there was nothing remotely normal about any of this.
I decided to bundle up as well as I could and still look like a sleek running machine, and make a couple laps around the Public Garden and the Common to clear my mind, not just about the case, but about my life.
Before Richie had left the house in the morning, he’d suggested a tentative plan, around my work schedule, for the four of us to spend some time together tomorrow.
“Four of us?” I’d said. “Kathryn, too?”
“You, me, Richard, Rosie,” he said.
So I ran in Lululemon Toasty Tech Tights and a cold-weather mock turtleneck and a North Face vest and gloves and a Bruins knit cap that Richie had bought for me. Most days I loved running along the Charles. Just not today, and not in this wind.
Usually when I ran around the park, I was good for three laps. Today I ran two. When I got home I checked my phone for messages. There were none. Lee Farrell had not called, nor Darcy Gaines, nor Tony. Richie hadn’t called, either. He had said something about apartment-hunting with Kathryn. Maybe they were doing that today. Or she was doing that with their son. Who was back in Richie’s life, and thus very much in mine.
I showered and made more tea and fed Rosie an early dinner. Tired of waiting for someone to call me and without a plan for tonight, I went upstairs to paint. It was a piece on which I had recently resumed work after putting it aside for nearly a year, one of the buildings in which the original Rosie and I had once lived in Fort Point. A photograph I had taken of the building from behind and to the side, with just some of the ocean showing in the distance, served as the inspiration.
I had loved living at Fort Point. So had the original Rosie. I had loved being that close to the water, even though I was almost as close to the Charles now. But there had been far too many memories after I’d had to put the original Rosie down. Now the new Rosie and I were living on the perimeter of Beacon Hill for a ridiculously low rent that Melanie Joan Hall steadfastly refused to raise because I had saved her life once.
I painted until all of the late-afternoon winter light was gone and into the night, surprised when I finally stopped that it was past eight o’clock. I left my board on the table, cleaned my brushes, and put them away.
I was back downstairs, preparing to pour myself a well-earned glass of pinot grigio, when my phone did chirp.
It was Farrell.
“I caught a case after all,” he said.
“Please tell me it’s not Lisa Morneau,” I said.
“It’s not,” he said.
But he was Homicide. He was calling me. Suddenly it was as if all the bitter cold of the day had found its way to where I stood in the kitchen.
“We found a woman,” he said. “Near Joe Moakley Park in Southie. Looks like she got beaten up before somebody put two in her chest and dumped her there.”
Joe Moakley Park wasn’t far from Old Colony. Where she’d said she lived.
Farrell continued, “The vic’s name—”
“Callie,” I said. “Callie Harden. I was with her this morning. Talking to her about Lisa Morneau.”
“She had your card in her purse,” he said.
“I gave it to her,” I said.
Then neither one of us said anything until Lee said, “You still there?”
“Yeah.”
“You okay?”
“No,” I said.
“Can you meet me at the station?” Lee said.
I told him I was on my way. Then I put my phone down on the island counter in the middle of the kitchen and closed my eyes and thought about Callie Harden, who now had no goddamn life at all.