WHAT ARE YOU DOING here? I thought this was your day off.”
Nancy Amerulo, one of the Seven-six detectives assigned to the Governors Island task force, glanced up as he strode into that precinct’s squad room armed with an extra-large coffee the next morning. Amerulo was a handsome blonde, big-boned, well-liked. She looked tired, though—this high-pressure, no-results investigation was wearing everybody down.
Jack shrugged. “Justice never rests.”
The detective stared at him, then shrugged back. She didn’t know him well enough to pry.
He moved away, and took a big slug of coffee. Time to buckle down. For the past few weeks he had been working at less than his true capacity, because—whether Michelle believed it or not—he had made an effort to get home for her. She had walked anyway. He made a sour face. It happened every day, to cops all over the world. The divorce rate for members of service was insane. So what? To hell with her. People were getting killed here. What was he supposed to do, not give a damn?
Over in a far corner, he dropped into a chair next to Anita Tam, a very tall, very skinny young black detective attached to the Medical Examiner’s office. Tam was a computer whiz; she brought her own high-tech laptop to the task force office, scorning the dinosaur desktops of the precinct house.
“Don’t those get in the way?” Jack asked, nodding down at her long fingernails poised over the keyboard.
“I like the clacking sound,” she replied.
“Really?”
She just grinned. Long stints of overtime research had given them a relaxed familiarity.
“Anything new?” Jack asked. While the rest of the task force was focused on the present whereabouts of Robert Dietrich Sperry, he was still determined to discover the identity of the boy in the box. He had a hunch that this was how the killer would be found.
Detective Tam nodded toward the computer screen: yet another list of missing persons. “You wouldn’t believe what a mess it is out there.”
Jack frowned—he would believe it all too well.
“What’s the plan for today?”
Jack shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m wondering if maybe we should look at Canadian missing persons. After all, that’s not so far from New Hampshire…”
Tam sighed and hunkered down.
After a couple of hours of staring at the computer screen, Jack grew bleary-eyed; he found himself imagining some strange alternate universe peopled by all the might-be-alives and the insufficiently remembereds, a twilight world of putty faces and eerie smiles.
Just before lunch, the other detective’s phone rang.
Tam picked up; her eyes widened. “DNA results,” she whispered to Jack.
At the Governors Island crime scene, the M.E.’s crew had taken hair samples from the bedding of Robert Sperry and the deceased boy. On TV, Crime Scene wizards would plug such samples into some high-tech gizmo and get instant results; in real life, it sometimes took weeks or months.
“Mm-hm,” the detective said. Her face fell. “That’s okay, we expected that.” Then her face brightened. “Really? Are you sure? It’s a definite match? All right, thanks a lot.”
Jack was sitting up now, leaning forward. “What? What did they say?”
Tarn frowned. “First of all, the boy’s DNA didn’t match anything from the missing person databases. No surprise there, but check this out: His DNA and Sperry’s are a definite match. They were related.”
Jack sat back, clasped his hands behind his head, and thought for a minute. “All right, let’s try to put this together…I doubt that Sperry was the kid’s father, because we would have seen that name pop among the New Hampshire school rolls. If the man was his grandfather, the kid might have had a different last name. But if that’s the case, why didn’t his parents report him missing?”
The two detectives sat in silence for a minute, thinking and thinking and not getting anywhere.
AT HOME THAT AFTERNOON, Jack made a beeline for the answering machine, but the goddamn red light didn’t blink once.
“Bitch,” he muttered, then felt guilty because he was talking about the woman he still loved. At least, he still loved her in the part of his heart that wasn’t hating her right now.
The thought of spending any more time in the apartment was oppressive, and he considered putting on his sweats and going for another run, but gravity and fatigue won out and he sank down into the couch in the front room. Michelle’s departure still had an air of unreality to it, as if she might still come home and point to a hidden camera and tell him that the whole thing had been a gag.
It wasn’t even five, but the room was already growing dark. He lay back and closed his eyes. After a few minutes, he rolled over, to make himself more comfortable for a nap, and felt something press into his side. He dug into his jacket pocket and winced.
The little ring box.
That made him too agitated to sleep. He went into the kitchen and fixed himself a bowl of cereal and then he returned to the couch and half-watched several hours of TV He didn’t care what was on, as long as the noise covered up the apartment’s silence, and helped drive bad thoughts from his head.
He had finally dozed off when—over the racket of a commercial—he barely heard his cell phone ring. Scrambling, heart pumping, he found the remote and killed the TV.
When he flipped his phone open, a woman’s voice came on the line and he was flooded with relief.
“Michelle?” he said. “Are you okay?”
But it wasn’t Michelle.
It was Maureen Duffy.