Darkness, Take My Hand (8 page)

My father, even
before he entered the arena himself, had been active in local politics. He was a sign holder and a door knocker, and the bumpers of the various Chevys we’d owned throughout my childhood and adolescence had always borne stickers attesting to my father’s partisan loyalty. Politics had nothing to do with social change to my father, and he didn’t give a shit what most politicians promised in public; it was the private bonds that drew him. Politics was the last great tree house, and if you got in with the best kids on the block, you could roll the ladder up on the fools below.

He’d supported Stan Timpson when Timpson, fresh out of law school and new to the DA’s office, had run for alderman. Timpson was from the neighborhood, after all, a comer, and if things went right, soon he’d be the guy to call when you needed your street plowed or your noisy neighbors rousted or your cousin put on the union dole.

I vaguely remembered Timpson from my childhood, but couldn’t completely separate where my own recollection of Timpson differed from the one I’d seen on TV. So when his voice filtered through my phone receiver, it seemed strangely disembodied, as if it were prerecorded.

“Pat Kenzie?” he said heartily.

“Patrick, Mr. Timpson.”

“How are you, Patrick?”

“Just fine, sir. How about yourself?”

“Great, great. Couldn’t be better.” He laughed warmly
as if we’d shared a joke I somehow missed. “Diandra tells me you have some questions for me.”

“I do, yes.”

“Well, fire away, son.”

Timpson was only ten or twelve years older than I was. I wasn’t sure how that made me
son
.

“Diandra told you about the photo of Jason she received?”

“She sure did, Patrick. And I got to tell you, it seems a bit strange.”

“Yes, well—”

“Personally I think someone’s playing a trick on her.”

“Pretty elaborate trick.”

“She told me you dismissed the Mafia connection?”

“At the moment, yes.”

“Well, I don’t know what to tell you, Pat.”

“Is there anything your office is working on, sir, which could have caused someone to threaten your ex-wife and son?”

“That’s the movies talking, Pat.”

“Patrick.”

“I mean, maybe in Bogotá they go after their district attorneys on personal vendettas. Not in Boston. Come on, son—that’s the best you can do?” Another hearty laugh.

“Sir, your son’s life may be in danger and—”

“Protect him, Pat.”

“I’m trying to, sir. But I can’t do that if—”

“You know what I think this is? I’ll tell you the truth, it’s one of Diandra’s crazies. Forgot to take his Prozac and decided to make her nervous. You look over her patient list, son. That’s my suggestion.”

“Sir, if you’d just—”

“Pat, listen to me. I haven’t been married to Diandra in almost two decades. When she called last night, that’s the first time I’d heard her voice in six years. No one knows we were ever married. No one knows about Jason. The last campaign, believe me, we were waiting for the issue to be raised—how I left my first wife and baby boy and have maintained very little contact. Guess what, though, Pat? It never came up. A dirty political race in a dirty
political town, and it never came up. No one knows about Jason or Diandra in relation to me.”

“What about—?”

“It’s been a pleasure talking to you, Pat. Tell your father Stan Timpson said hi. I miss that old guy. Where’s he hiding these days?”

“Cedar Grove Cemetery.”

“Got himself a groundskeeper job, did he? Well, got to run. Take care, Pat.”

“This kid,” Angie said, “is an even bigger slut than you used to be, Patrick.”

“Hey,” I said.

Our fourth day of following Jason Warren and it was beginning to feel like tailing a young Valentino. Diandra had stressed that we not let Jason know we were tailing him, citing a male’s reluctance to let anyone else control or alter his destiny and Jason’s own “formidable” sense of privacy, as she called it.

I’d be private too, I guess, if I averaged three women in three days.

“A hat trick,” I said.

“What?” Angie said.

“The kid scored a hat trick on Wednesday. That officially puts him in the hound hall of fame.”

“Men,” she said, “are pigs.”

“This is true.”

“Wipe that smirk off your face.”

If Jason were being stalked, the most likely suspect was a jilted lover, some young woman who didn’t much appreciate being a notch on a belt, the number two of three. But we’d been watching him almost nonstop for over eighty hours and we’d seen no one following him but us. He wasn’t hard to find either. Jason spent his days in class, usually arranged a nooner in his dorm room (an arrangement he seemed to have worked out with his roommate, a stoner from Oregon who held bong parties every night at seven when Jason was out of the room), studied on the lawn until sunset, ate in the cafeteria with a tableful of
women and no men, then hit the bars around Bryce at night.

The women he slept with—at least the three we’d seen—all seemed to know of one another without jealousy. All were somewhat of a type, too. They wore fashionable clothing, usually black, with even more fashionable rips in them somewhere. They wore tacky costume jewelry which—given the cars they drove and the soft imported leather of their boots, jackets, and knapsacks—they presumably knew was tacky. So un-hip as to be hip, I guess—their ironic postmodern wink at a hopelessly out of touch world. Or something. None of them had boyfriends.

They were all enrolled in the School of Arts and Sciences. Gabrielle majored in literature. Lauren majored in art history, but spent most of her time playing lead guitar in an all-female ska/punk/speed metal band which seemed to have spent far too much time taking Courtney Love and Kim Deal seriously. And Jade—small and lean and self-consciously foul-mouthed—was a painter.

None of them appeared to bathe much. This would have been a problem for me, but it didn’t seem to bother Jason. He didn’t bathe much, either. I’ve never been particularly conservative when it comes to my taste in women, but I do have one rule about bathing and one rule about clitoral rings and I’m pretty unyielding about both of them. Makes me a killjoy with the grunge set, I guess.

Jason made up for the slack, though. Jason, from what we’d seen, was the male campus pump. Wednesday, he climbed out of Jade’s bed and they both went to a bar called Harper’s Ferry, where they met Gabrielle. Jade stayed in the bar, but Jason and Gabrielle retired to Gabrielle’s BMW. There they had oral-genital contact, which I had the misfortune to observe. When they returned, Gabrielle and Jade went into the ladies’ room where, according to Angie, they gleefully compared notes.

“Thick as a python allegedly,” Angie said.

“It’s not the size of the wand—”

“Keep telling yourself that, Patrick—maybe one day you’ll believe it.”

The two women and their boy-toy then moved on to TT
the Bear’s Place in Central Square, where Lauren and her band played like tone-deaf Hole wannabes. After the show, Jason took a ride home with Lauren. They went into her room, lit incense, and fucked like sea otters to old Patty Smith CDs until shortly before dawn.

On the second night, in a bar on North Harvard, I bumped into him as I was coming out of the bathroom. I had my eyes on the crowd, trying to spot Angie, and I didn’t even notice Jason until my chest hit his shoulder.

“Looking for someone?”

“What?” I said.

His eyes were full of mischief, but without malice, and shone a bright green in the light shafting from the stage.

“I said, ‘Are you looking for someone?’” He lit a cigarette, drew it from his mouth with the same fingers that held his scotch glass.

“My girlfriend,” I said. “Sorry I bumped you.”

“No problem,” he said, shouting a bit over the band’s tepid guitar riffs. “You looked a little lost is all. Good luck.”

“What’s that?”

“Good luck,” he shouted into my ear. “Finding your girl or whatever.”

“Thanks.”

I cut into the crowd as he turned back to Jade, said something in her ear that made her laugh.

“At first it was fun,” Angie said on our fourth day.

“Which?”

“The voyeurism.”

“Don’t knock voyeurism. American culture wouldn’t exist without it.”

“I’m not,” she said. “But it’s getting kind of, well, sodden watching this kid fuck everything that isn’t nailed down. You know?”

I nodded.

“They seem lonely.”

“Who?” I said.

“All of them. Jason, Gabrielle, Jade, Lauren.”

“Lonely. Hmm. Well, they seem to be doing a good job hiding it from the rest of the world.”

“So did you for a long time, Patrick. So did you.”

“Ouch,” I said.

The end of the fourth day, we split the duties. For a kid who packed so many women and so many bars into his day, Jason was very structured. You could predict, almost to the minute, where he’d be at any given moment. That night, I went home, and Angie watched his dorm room.

She called while I was cooking dinner to tell me that Jason seemed to have settled in for the night with Gabrielle in his own room. Angie was going to grab a cat-nap and walk him to class in the morning.

After dinner, I sat on my porch and looked out the avenue as night deepened and chilled. It wasn’t minor lessening in warmth, either. It was a total plummet. The moon burned like a slice of dry ice and the air smelled the way it does after an evening high-school football game. A stiff breeze swept the avenue, bit its way through the trees, nibbled at the dry edges of leaves.

I came off the porch when Devin telephoned.

“What’s up?” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“You don’t call to chat, Dev. It’s not your style.”

“Maybe this is the new me.”

“Nope.”

He grumbled. “Fine. We have to talk.”

“¿
Porque
?”

“Because someone just smoked a girl on Meeting House Hill and she has no ID and I’d like to know who she is.”

“Which has what, exactly, to do with me?”

“Maybe nothing. But she did have your card in her hand when she died.”

“My card?”

“Yours,” he said. “Meeting House Hill. See you in ten minutes.”

He hung up and I sat with the phone in my ear, listening
until the dial tone returned. I sat there longer still, hearing the tone, waiting for it to tell me that the dead girl on Meeting House Hill wasn’t Kara Rider, waiting for it to tell me something. Anything.

By the time
I reached Meeting House Hill, the temperature had dropped into the low thirties. It was a barren cold, one without wind or spirit, the kind that sinks into your bone marrow and fills your blood with shards of ice.

Meeting House Hill is the dividing line where my neighborhood ends and Field’s Corner begins. The hill starts below the pavement, sloping the streets into a steep upgrade that turns a car’s third gear into reverse on icy nights. Where several streets converge at an apex, the tip of Meeting House Hill rises through the grid of cement and tar to form a pauper’s field in the middle of a neighborhood so blighted you could fire a missile through its center and no one would notice unless you hit a bar or a food stamp office.

The bell of St. Peter’s tolled once as Devin met me at my car and we trudged up the hill. The sound of the bell was hollow, ringing blithely on a cold night in an area some god had clearly forgotten. The ground was beginning to harden and patches of dead grass crunched under our feet.

I could see only a few figures silhouetted under the streetlight atop the hill, and I turned to Devin. “You bring the entire force out tonight, Dev?”

He looked at me, his head shrunk low in his jacket. “You’d prefer we made a media event out of it? Have a bunch of reporters and townies and rookies trampling evidence?” He glanced at the rows of three-deckers overlooking the hill. “Great thing about homicides in shitty
neighborhoods, nobody gives a fuck, so nobody gets in the way.”

“Nobody gives a fuck, Devin, then nobody’s going to tell you anything.”

“That’s the downside, sure.”

His partner, Oscar Lee, was the first cop I recognized. Oscar is the largest guy I’ve ever met. He’d make Refrigerator Perry look anorexic and Michael Jordan look like a midget, and even Bubba looks puny beside Oscar. He wore a leather watch cap over a black head the size of a circus balloon and smoked a cigar that smelled like beachfront after an oil slick.

He turned as we approached. “The hell’s Kenzie doing here, Devin?”

Oscar. My friend in need, my friend indeed.

Devin said, “The card. Remember?”

“So you might be able to ID this girl, Kenzie.”

“If I could see her, Oscar. Maybe.”

Oscar shrugged. “She’s probably looked better.”

He stepped aside so that I had a clear view of the body lying under the streetlight.

She was naked except for a pair of light blue satin underpants. Her body was swollen from the cold or rigor or something else. Her bangs were swept back off her forehead and her mouth and eyes were open. Her lips were blue from the cold and she seemed to look at something just over my shoulder. Her thin arms and legs were spread wide, and dark blood—chilled to slush—puddled out from the base of her throat, the heels of her upturned palms, and the soles of her feet. Small, flat circles of metal glinted from the center of each palm and each upturned ankle.

It was Kara Rider.

She’d been crucified.

“Three-penny nails,” Devin said later as we sat in The Black Emerald Tavern. “Very basic. Only two thirds of the homes in this city have them. Preferred by carpenters everywhere.”

“Carpenters,” Oscar said.

“That’s it,” Devin said. “The perp’s a carpenter. Pissed
off about that Christ thing. Taking it upon himself to avenge the hero of his trade.”

“You writing this down?” Oscar asked me.

We’d come to the bar looking for Micky Doog, the last person I’d seen Kara with, but he hadn’t been seen since the early afternoon. Devin got his address from Gerry Glynn, the owner, and sent a few patrolmen by, but Micky’s mother hadn’t seen him since yesterday.

“There was a few of them in here this morning,” Gerry told us. “Kara, Micky, John Buccierri, Michelle Rourke, part of that crew used to run around together a few years back.”

“They leave together?”

Gerry nodded. “I was just coming in as they were going out. They were pretty hammered and it wasn’t even one in the afternoon. She’s a good kid, though, that Kara.”

“Was,” Oscar said. “Was a good kid.”

It was close to two in the morning and we were drunk.

Gerry’s dog, Patton, a massive German shepherd with a coat of black and dusky amber, lay on the bar top ten feet away, watching us as if deciding whether he’d be taking our car keys or not. Eventually he yawned, and a great bacon strip of a tongue lolled from his mouth as he looked away from us with what seemed a studied disinterest.

After the medical examiner had shown up, I’d stood in the cold for another two hours while Kara’s body was carted into an ambulance and shipped off to the morgue and then while the forensics team swept the area for the evidence and Devin and Oscar canvassed the homes fronting the park for anyone who might have heard anything. It wasn’t so much that no one heard anything, just that women screamed in this neighborhood every night and it was sort of like a car alarm—once you heard it enough times, you stopped noticing.

From the cloth fibers Oscar noticed stuck to Kara’s teeth, and the lack of blood Devin found in the nail holes that bored through the frozen dirt under her hands and feet, they assumed the following: She’d been killed at another location after the killer had shoved a handkerchief or piece of shirt in her mouth, then made an incision in the base of
her throat with either a stiletto or a very sharp ice pick to demobilize her larynx. He’d then been free to watch her die from either severe shock trauma, a heart attack, or slow suffocation due to drowning in her own blood. For whatever reason, the killer had then transported the body to Meeting House Hill and crucified Kara to the frozen dirt.

“He’s a sweetheart, this guy,” Devin said.

“Probably just needs a good hug,” Oscar said. “Straighten him right out.”

“No such thing as a bad boy,” Devin said.

“You’re damn skippy,” Oscar said.

I hadn’t said much since I’d seen her body. Unlike Oscar and Devin, I’m no pro when it comes to violent death. I’ve seen my share, but not on a level even remotely comparable with either of these guys.

I said, “I can’t handle this.”

“Yes,” Devin said, “you can.”

“Drink more,” Oscar said. He nodded in the direction of Gerry Glynn. Gerry’d owned the Black Emerald since the days when he was a cop, and even though he usually shuts down at one, he never closes his doors to people on the Job. He had our drinks in front of us before Oscar finished his nod, and he was back at the other end of the bar before we even realized he’d been by. The definition of a good bartender.

“Crucified,” I said for the twentieth time that night as Devin placed a fresh beer in my hand.

“I think we’re all agreed on that point, Patrick.”

“Devin,” I said, trying to focus on him, pissed off that he wouldn’t remain still, “the girl was barely twenty-two years old. I’ve known her since she was two.”

Devin’s eyes remained still and blank. I looked at Oscar. He chewed a half-smoked, unlit cigar and looked back at me like I was a piece of furniture he hadn’t decided where to place.

“Fuck,” I said.

“Patrick,” Devin said. “Patrick. You listening?”

I turned in his direction. For a brief moment, his head stopped moving. “What?”

“She was twenty-two. Yes. A baby. And if she’d been
fifteen or forty, it wouldn’t be any better. Death is death and murder’s murder. Don’t make it worse by getting sentimental about her age, Patrick. She was murdered. Atrociously. No argument. But…” He leaned haphazardly on the bar, closed one eye. “Partner? What was my
but
?”

“But,” Oscar said, “don’t matter if she was male or female, rich or poor, young or old—”

“Black or white,” Devin said.

“—black or white,” Oscar said, scowling at Devin, “she was still murdered, Kenzie. Murdered bad.”

I looked at him. “You ever seen anything that bad?”

He chuckled. “Seen a whole lot worse, Kenzie.”

I turned to Devin. “You?”

“Hell, yes.” He sipped his drink. “Violent world, Patrick. People enjoy killing. It—”

“Empowers them,” Oscar said.

“Exactly,” Devin said. “Some part of it makes you feel pretty goddammed good. All that power.” He shrugged. “But why’re we telling you? You’d know all about that.”

“Excuse me?”

Oscar put a hand the size of a catcher’s mitt on my shoulder. “Kenzie, everyone knows you did Marion Socia last year. We got you pegged for a couple punks in the projects off the Melnea Cass too.”

“What,” I said, “and you haven’t had me arraigned?”

“Patrick, Patrick, Patrick,” Devin said, slurring just a bit, “it was up to us, you’d get a medal for Socia. Fuck him. Fuck him twice, far as I’m concerned. But,” he said, closing one eye again, “you can’t tell me some part of you didn’t feel real good watching the light go out of his eyes when you popped one through his head.”

I said, “No comment.”

“Kenzie,” Oscar said, “you know he’s right. He’s drunk, but he’s right. You drew on that pile of shit Socia, looked in his eyes, and put his ass down.” He made a pistol with his index finger and thumb, shoved it against my temple. “Bang. Bang. Bang.” He removed the finger. “No more Marion Socia. Kind of feels like being God for a day, don’t it?”

How I felt when I killed Marion Socia under an ex
pressway as trucks hammered the metal extensions overhead was one of the more conflicted set of emotions I’d ever had in my life, and I sure as hell didn’t feel like reminiscing about it in a bar with two homicide detectives when I was half in the bag. Maybe I’m paranoid.

Devin smiled. “Killing someone feels very good, Patrick. Don’t kid yourself.”

Gerry Glynn came down the bar. “Another round, boys?”

Devin nodded. “Hey, Ger.”

Gerry stopped halfway down the bar.

“You ever kill anyone on the Job?”

Gerry looked a bit embarrassed, as if he’d heard the question too many times. “Never even pulled my gun.”

“No,” Oscar said.

Gerry shrugged, his kind eyes completely at odds with the job he’d done for twenty years. He scratched Patton’s abdomen absently. “Those were different days, then. You remember, Dev.”

Devin nodded. “Different days.”

Gerry pulled the tap to fill my beer mug. “Different world, really.”

“Different world,” Devin said.

He brought our fresh drinks down to us. “Wish I could help you out, guys.”

I looked at Devin. “Someone notify Kara’s mother?”

He nodded. “She was passed out in her kitchen, but they woke her up and told her. Someone’s sitting with her now.”

“Kenzie,” Oscar said, “we’re going to get this Micky Doog. It was someone else, a gang, whatever, we’ll get ’em all. In a few hours, we know everyone’s awake, we’re going to recanvass every house and someone probably will have seen something. And we’ll pick the punk motherfucker up and sweat him and mess with his head till he breaks. Won’t bring her back, but maybe we speak for her a bit.”

I said, “Yeah, but…”

Devin leaned toward me. “The prick who did this is going down, Patrick. Believe it.”

I wanted to. I really did.

Just before we left, while Devin and Oscar were in the bathroom, I looked up from the blurred bar top and found both Gerry and Patton staring at me. In the four years Gerry’d had him, I’d never known Patton to so much as bark, but one look in the dog’s still, flat eyes and you’d never consider messing with it. That dog’s eyes had probably forty different casts for Gerry—ranging from love to sympathy—but it had only one for everyone else—bare warning.

Gerry scratched behind Patton’s ears. “Crucifixion.”

I nodded.

“How many times you think that’s happened in this city, Patrick?”

I shrugged, not trusting my tongue to enunciate properly anymore.

“Probably not many,” Gerry said, then looked down as Patton licked his hand and Devin came back into the room.

That night, I dreamed of Kara Rider.

I was walking through a cabbage field filled with Black Angus cows and human heads whose faces I didn’t recognize. In the distance, the city burned, and I could see my father’s silhouette standing atop an engine ladder, hosing the flames with gasoline.

The fire was rolling steadily out from the city, kissing the edges of the cabbage field. Around me, the human heads were beginning to speak, an incoherent babble at first, but soon I could distinguish a stray voice or two.

“Smells like smoke,” one said.

“You always say that,” one of the cows said and spit cud onto a cabbage leaf as a stillborn calf fell from between its legs and puddled by its hoofs.

I could hear Kara screaming from somewhere in the field as the air grew black and oily and the smoke bit my eyes, and Kara kept screaming my name, but I couldn’t tell the human heads from the cabbage heads and the cows
were moaning and tipping in the breeze and the smoke was all around me, and pretty soon Kara’s screams stopped and I felt grateful as the flames began to lick at my legs. So I sat down in the middle of the field to get my wind back and watch the world burn around me as the cows chewed the grass and swayed back and forth and refused to run.

When I woke up in bed, I was gasping for air and the smell of burning flesh clung to my nostrils. I watched the sheet shake over my racing heart and swore I’d never go drinking with Oscar and Devin again.