Well, except for Katie's father. That was a mystery. And there was no denying it for what it was: hate.
Just half an hour ago, Brendan had felt it in Mr. Marcus's corner store? that quiet, coiled hatred emanating from the man like a viral infection. He'd wilted under it. He'd stammered because of it. He couldn't look at Ray the whole way home because of how that hatred had made him feel? unwashed, his hair filled with nits, teeth covered in grime. And the fact that it made no sense? Brendan had never done anything to Mr. Marcus, hell, barely knew the man? didn't make it any easier. Brendan looked at Jimmy Marcus and saw a man looking back who wouldn't stop to piss on him if he was on fire.
Brendan couldn't call Katie at one of her two numbers and risk somebody on the other end having caller ID or star-69ing him, wondering what the hated Brendan Harris was doing calling their Katie. He'd almost done it a million times, but just the thought of Mr. Marcus or Bobby O'Donnell or one of those psycho Savage brothers answering the other end was enough to make him drop the phone from a sweaty hand back into the cradle.
Brendan didn't know who to fear more. Mr. Marcus was just a regular guy, owner of the corner store Brendan had been going to for half his life, but there was something about the guy? more than just his obvious hatred for Brendan? that could unsettle people, a capacity for something, Brendan didn't know what, but something, that made you lower your voice around the guy and try not to meet his eyes. Bobby O'Donnell was one of those guys nobody knew exactly what he did for a living but you'd cross a street to avoid him in either case, and as for the Savage brothers, they were a whole planetary system away from most people in terms of normal, acceptable behavior. The maddest, craziest, most dyed-in-the-wool, lunatic motherfuckers to ever come out of the Flats, the Savage brothers had thousand-yard stares and tempers so hair-trigger you could fill a notebook the size of the Old Testament with all the things that could set them off. Their father, a sick chucklehead in his own right, had, along with their thin, sainted mother, popped the brothers out one after another, eleven months apart, like they were running a midnight assembly line for loose cannons. The brothers grew up crammed and mangy and irate in a bedroom the size of a Japanese radio beside the el tracks that used to hover over the Flats, blotting out the sun, before they got torn down when Brendan was a kid. The floors in the apartment sloped hard to the east, and the trains hammered past the brothers' window twenty-one out of twenty-four hours each and every goddamned day, shaking the piece-of-shit three-decker so hard that most times the brothers fell out of bed and woke in the morning piled on top of one another, greeted the morning as irritable as waterfront rats, and pummeled the piss out of one another to clear the pile and start the day.
When they were kids, they had no individuality to the outside world. They were just the Savages, a brood, a pack, a collection of limbs and armpits and knees and tangled hair that seemed to move in a cloud of dust like the Tasmanian Devil. You saw the cloud coming your way, you stepped aside, hoped they'd find someone else to fuck up before they reached you, or simply whirl on by, lost in the obsession of their own grimy psychoses.
Hell, until Brendan had started dating Katie on the sly, he wasn't positive just how many of them there actually were, and he'd grown up in the Flats. Katie laid it out for him, though: Nick was the oldest, gone from the neighborhood six years to serve ten minimum at Walpole; Val was the next and, according to Katie, the sweetest; then came Chuck, Kevin, Al (who usually got confused with Val), Gerard, just fresh from Walpole himself, and finally, Scott, the baby boy and mother's favorite when she'd been alive, who was also the only one with a college degree, and the only one who didn't live at home in the first- and third-floor apartments the brothers had commandeered after they'd successfully scared the previous tenants to another state.
"I know they have this rep," Katie said to Brendan, "but they're really nice guys. Well, except for Scott. He's kinda hard to warm up to."
Scott. The "normal" one.
Brendan looked at his watch again, then over at the clock by his bed. He looked at the phone.
He looked at his bed where just the other night he'd fallen asleep with his eyes on the back of Katie's neck, counting the fine blond hairs there, his arm draped over her hip so that his palm rested on her warm abdomen, the smell of her hair and perfume and a light sweat filling his nostrils.
He looked at the phone again.
Call, goddamnit. Call.
* * *
A COUPLE of kids found her car. They called it into 911 and the one who spoke into the phone sounded breathless, caught up in something beyond himself as the words spilled out:
"There's like this car with blood in it and, ah, the door's open, and, ah? "
The 911 operator broke in and said, "What's the location of the car?"
"In the Flats," the kid said. "By Pen Park. Me and my friend found it."
"Is there a street address?"
"Sydney Street," the kid expelled into the phone. "There's blood in there and the door's open."
"What's your name, son?"
"He wants to know her name," the kid said to his friend. "Called me 'son.'"
"Son?" the operator said. "I said your name. What's your name?"
"We're so fucking outta here, man," the kid said. "Good luck."
The kid hung up and the operator noted from his computer screen that the call had come in from a pay phone on the corner of Kilmer and Nauset in the East Bucky Flats, about half a mile from the Sydney Street entrance to Penitentiary Park. He relayed the information to Dispatch and Dispatch sent a unit out to Sydney Street.
One of the patrolmen called back and requested more units, a Crime Scene tech or two, and, oh yeah, maybe you want to send a couple Homicides down or somebody like that. Just an idea.
"Have you found a body, Thirty-three? Over."
"Ah, negative, Dispatch."
"Thirty-three, why the request for Homicide if there's no body? Over."
"Looks of this car, Dispatch? I kinda feel like we're going to find one around here sooner or later."
* * *
SEAN STARTED HIS first day back to work by parking on Crescent and walking around the blue sawhorses at the intersection with Sydney. The sawhorses were stamped with the label of the Boston Police Department, because they were first on-scene, but Sean guessed by what he'd heard on the scanners driving over here that this case would belong to State Police Homicide, his squad.
The car, as he understood it, had been found on Sydney Street, which was city jurisdiction, but the blood trail led into Penitentiary Park, which as part of reservation land fell under State jurisdiction. Sean walked down Crescent along the edge of the park, and the first thing he noticed was a Crime Scene Services van parked halfway down the block.