Mystic River

  That’s what you carried back home and into the bars and locker rooms of the precincts or barracks—an annoyed acceptance that people sucked, people were dumb and petty-bad, often murderously so, and when they opened their mouths they lied, always, and when they went missing for no discernibly good reason, they’d usually be found dead or way the hell worse off.

  And often the worst thing wasn’t the victims—they were dead, after all, and beyond any more pain. The worst thing was those who’d loved them and survived them. Often the walking dead from now on, shell-shocked, hearts ruptured, stumbling through the remainder of their lives without anything left inside of them but blood and organs, impervious to pain, having learned nothing except that the worst things did, in fact, sometimes happen.

  Like Jimmy Marcus. Sean didn’t know how the fuck he was going to look that guy in the eye and say, Yeah, she’s dead. Your daughter’s dead, Jimmy. Someone took her away for good. Jimmy, who’d already lost a wife. Shit. Hey, guess what, Jim—God said you owed another marker. He’s come to collect. Hope that puts it in perspective, pal. Be seeing you.

  Sean crossed the short plank bridge over the ravine and followed the path down into the circular grove of trees that stood facing the drive-in screen like a pagan audience. Everyone was down by the steps that led up to a door on the side of the screen. Sean could see Karen Hughes snapping away with her camera, Whitey Powers leaning against the doorjamb, looking in, taking notes, the assistant ME on his knees beside Karen Hughes, a goddamn platoon of uniformed troopers and BPD blues milling behind those three, Connolly and Souza studying something on the steps, and the big brass—Frank Krauser from BPD and Martin Friel from State, Sean’s commanding officer—standing off a bit along the stage that stretched under the screen, talking to each other, heads close and tilted downward.

  If the assistant ME said she’d died here in the park, it fell within State jurisdiction and made it Sean and Whitey’s case. Sean’s job to tell Jimmy. Sean’s job to become intimate and obsessed with the victim’s life. Sean’s job to put the case down and give everyone an illusion, at least, of closure.

  BPD, however, could ask for the case. It was within Friel’s power to give it to them since the park was surrounded on all sides by City turf, and because the first attempt made on the victim’s life had occurred within City jurisdiction. This would attract attention, Sean was sure. Homicide in a city park, the victim found near or in what was fast becoming a local and pop culture landmark. No motive readily apparent. No killer, either, unless he’d offed himself down there by Katie Marcus, which seemed doubtful or Sean would have heard. Huge media case, when you really thought about it, the whole city having been pretty much devoid of those the last couple of years. Shit, the press would fill the Pen with their drool.

  Sean didn’t want it, which, if prior experience was any kind of barometer, pretty much guaranteed he’d get it. He worked his way down a slope toward the base of the drive-in screen, his eyes on Krauser and Friel, trying to read the verdict in the smallest motions of their heads. If that was Katie Marcus in there—and Sean didn’t have much doubt—the Flats would explode. Forget Jimmy—he’d probably be catatonic anyway. But the Savage brothers? Back at the Major Crimes Unit, they had files the size of doorstops on almost every one of those crazy fuckers. And that was just the State shit they’d pulled. Sean knew guys in the BPD said a Saturday night without at least one Savage in lockup was like a solar eclipse—other cops came down to have a look for themselves because they couldn’t believe it.

  On the stage below the screen, Krauser nodded once and Friel’s head swiveled, looked around until he met Sean’s eyes, and Sean knew this was his and Whitey’s now. Sean saw a small amount of blood splattered on some leaves leading up to the base of the screen, saw some more on the steps leading up to the door.

  Connolly and Souza looked up from the blood on the stairs, gave Sean grim nods, and went back to peering at the crevices where the steps met the risers. Karen Hughes came up off her haunches and Sean could hear the whir of her camera as she flicked a knob with her thumb and the film spooled to the end. She reached into her bag for a fresh roll and flicked open the back of the camera, Sean noticing that her ash blond hair had darkened at the temples and bangs. She glanced at him without expression and dropped the spent film in her bag, then reloaded.

  Whitey was on his knees alongside the assistant ME, and Sean heard him say “What?” in a sharp whisper.

  “Just what I said.”

  “You’re sure now, yeah?”

  “Not a hundred percent, but I’m leaning.”

  “Shit.” Whitey looked back over his shoulder as Sean approached, and shook his head, jerked his thumb at the assistant ME.

  Sean’s view widened as he climbed up behind them and their shoulders dropped away and he was looking down into the doorway, down at the body scrunched in there, the space between the walls no more than three feet wide and the corpse sitting with her back against the wall on his left, her feet pushed up hard against the wall on his right, so that Sean’s first impression was of a fetus seen through a sonogram screen. Her left foot was bare and muddy. What was left of the sock hung around her ankle, shriveled and torn. She wore a simple black shoe with a flat sole on her right foot, and it was caked in dried mud. Even after she’d lost the one shoe in the garden, she’d left the other one on. Her killer must have been breathing down her neck the whole way. And yet she’d come in here to hide. So for a moment she must have given him the slip, which meant something had slowed him down.

  “Souza,” he called.

  “Yeah?”

  “Get some uniforms to check the trail leading up here. Look in the bushes and shit for torn clothes, scraped-off skin, anything like that.”

  “We already got a guy doing casts on footprints.”

  “Yeah, but we need more. You on it?”

  “I’m on it.”

  Sean looked down at the body again. She wore soft, dark pants and a navy blue blouse with a wide neck. Her jacket was red and torn and Sean figured it for a weekend outfit, too nice for everyday for a girl from the Flats. She’d been out somewhere, somewhere nice, maybe on a date.

  And somehow she’d ended up stuffed in this narrow corridor, its mildewed walls the last thing she saw, probably the last thing she’d smelled.

  It was as if she’d gone in here to escape a red rain, and the downpour remained in her hair and cheeks, stained her clothing in wet strings. Her knees were pressed close to her chest, and her right elbow was propped on her right knee, a clenched fist up by her ear so that again Sean was reminded of a child more than a woman, curled up and trying to keep some awful sound at bay. Stop it, just stop it, the body said. Stop it, please.

  Whitey moved out of the way, and Sean squatted just outside the doorway. Even with all the blood on the body and pooled beneath it and the mildew clinging to the concrete around it, Sean could smell her perfume, just a hint of it, slightly sweet, slightly sensual, the lightest scent, which made him think of high school dates and dark cars, the panicky fumbling through fabric and the electric grazing of flesh. Underneath the red rain, Sean could see several dark bruises on her wrist and forearm and ankles, and he knew these were the places where she’d been hit with something.

  “He beat her?” Sean said.

  “Looks that way. The blood from the top of her head? That’s from a split on the crown. Guy probably broke whatever he was hitting her with, he brought it down so hard.”

  Piled on the other side of her, filling this narrow corridor behind the screen, were wooden pallets and what looked like stage props—wooden schooners and cathedral tops, the bow of what looked like a Venetian gondola. She wouldn’t have been able to move. Once she got in there, she was stuck. If whoever had been chasing her found her, then she’d die. And he’d found her.

  He’d opened the door on her, and she’d curled tight into herself, trying to protect her body with nothing more substantial than her own limbs. Sean craned his head and pee
red around her clenched fist, looked into her face. It, too, was streaked with red, and her eyes were clenched as tight as her fist, trying to wish it all away, the eyelids locked by fear at first and now by rigor.

  “That her?” Whitey Powers said.

  “Huh?”

  “Katherine Marcus,” Whitey said. “That her?”

  “Yeah,” Sean said. She had a small scar curving underneath the right side of her chin, barely noticeable and faded with time, but you’d notice it on Katie when you’d see her around the neighborhood because the rest of her was so unblemished, her face a flawless record of her mother’s dark, angular beauty combined with her father’s more tousled good looks, his pale eyes and hair.

  “Hundred percent positive?” the assistant ME asked.

  “Ninety-nine,” Sean said. “We’ll have the father do a positive at the morgue. But, yeah, it’s her.”

  “You see the back of her head?” Whitey leaned in and lifted the hair off her shoulders with a pen.

  Sean peered back there, saw that a small piece of the lower skull was missing, the back of the neck gone dark with the blood.

  “You telling me she was shot?” He looked at the ME.

  The guy nodded. “That looks like a bullet wound to me.”

  Sean leaned back out of the smell of perfume and blood and mildewed concrete and sodden wood. He wished, for just a moment, that he could pull Katie Marcus’s clenched fist down from her ear, as if by doing so those bruises he could see and the ones they were sure to find under her clothes would evaporate, and the red rain would ascend from her hair and body, and she would step back out of this tomb blinking sleep from her eyes, a bit groggy.

  Off to his right, he heard the sounds of a commotion, several people yelling at once, the rustle of mad scrambling, and the K-9 dogs snarling and barking in a mad fury. When he looked over, he saw Jimmy Marcus and Chuck Savage burst through the trees at the far side of the grove, where the land turned green and manicured and sloped gracefully down toward the screen, the place where summer crowds spread their blankets and sat in the grass to watch a play.

  At least eight uniforms and two plainclothes converged on Jimmy and Chuck, and Chuck went down right away, but Jimmy was fast and Jimmy was slippery. He slid straight through the line with a series of quick, seemingly illogical pivots that left his pursuers grasping air, and if he hadn’t stumbled coming down the slope, he would have made the screen with no one to stop him but Krauser and Friel.

  But he did stumble, his foot slipping out from under him on the damp grass, and his eyes locked with Sean’s as he belly-flopped on the grass, his chin punching through the soil. A young trooper, all square head and high-school-tight-end body, landed on top of Jimmy like he was a sled, and the two of them slid another few feet down the slope. The cop pulled Jimmy’s right arm behind his back and went for his cuffs.

  Sean stepped out onto the stage and called: “Hey! Hey! It’s the father. Just pull him back.”

  The young cop looked over, pissed and muddy.

  “Just pull him back,” Sean said. “The both of them.”

  He turned back toward the screen and that’s when Jimmy called his name, his voice hoarse, as if the screams in his head had found his vocal cords and stripped them: “Sean!”

  Sean stopped, caught Friel looking at him.

  “Look at me, Sean!”

  Sean turned back, saw Jimmy arching up under the young cop’s weight, a dark smudge of soil on his chin, whiskers of grass hanging off it.

  “You find her? Is it her?” Jimmy yelled. “Is it?”

  Sean stayed motionless, holding Jimmy’s eyes with his own, locking them until Jimmy’s surging stare saw what Sean had just seen, saw that it was over now, the worst fear had been realized.

  Jimmy began to scream and ropes of spit shot from his mouth. Another cop came down the slope to help the one on top of Jimmy, and Sean turned away. Jimmy’s scream blew out into the air as a low, guttural thing, nothing sharp or high-pitched to it, an animal’s first stage of reckoning with grief. Sean had heard the screams of a lot of victims’ parents over the years. Always there was a plaintive character to them, a beseechment for God or reason to return, tell them it was all a dream. But Jimmy’s scream had none of that, only love and rage, in equal quantity, shredding the birds from the trees and echoing into the Pen Channel.

  Sean went back over and looked down at Katie Marcus. Connolly, the newest member of the unit, came up beside him, and they looked down for a while without saying anything, and Jimmy Marcus’s scream grew more hoarse and ragged, as if he’d sucked in kernels of glass every time he took a breath.

  Sean looked down at Katie with her fist clenched to the side of her head in the drench of the red rain, then over her body at the wooden props that had kept her from reaching the other side.

  Off to their right, Jimmy continued to scream as they dragged him back up the slope, and a helicopter chopped the air over the grove as it made a hard pass, the engine droning as it turned to bank and come back, Sean figuring it was from one of the TV stations. It had a lighter sound than the police choppers.

  Connolly, out of the side of his mouth, said, “You ever seen anything like this?”

  Sean shrugged. It wouldn’t matter much if he had. You got to the point where you stopped comparing.

  “I mean, this is…” Connolly sputtered, trying to find the words, “this is some kind of…” He looked away from the body, off into the trees, with an air of wide-eyed uselessness, and seemed on the verge of trying to speak again.

  Then his mouth closed, and after a while he quit trying to give it a name.

  12

  THE COLORS OF YOU

  SEAN LEANED AGAINST the stage below the drive-in screen with his boss, Detective Lieutenant Martin Friel, and they watched Whitey Powers give direction to the coroner’s van as it backed down the slope that led to the doorway where Katie Marcus’s body had been found. Whitey walked backward, his hands raised and occasionally cutting left or right, his voice sniping the air with crisp whistles that shot through his lower teeth like puppy yelps. His eyes darted from the crime scene tape on either side of him to the van tires to the driver’s nervous eyes in the side-view like he was auditioning for a job with a moving company, making sure those fat tires never strayed an inch or more from where he wanted them to go.

  “A little more. Keep it straight. Little more, little more. That’s it.” When he had the van where he wanted it, he stepped aside and slapped the rear doors. “You’re good.”

  Whitey opened the rear doors and pulled them wide so they blocked anyone’s view of the space behind the screen, Sean thinking it never would have occurred to him to form protective wings around the doorway where Katie Marcus had died, and then reminding himself that Whitey had a lot more time put in on crime scenes than he had, Whitey an old warhorse going back to a time when Sean was still trying to cop feels at high school dances and not pick at his acne.

  The two coroner’s assistants were both halfway out of their seats when Whitey called to them. “Ain’t going to work that way, guys. You’re gonna have to come out through the back.”

  They shut their doors and disappeared through the back of the van to retrieve the corpse, and Sean could feel a finality in their disappearance, a certainty that this was his to deal with now. The other cops and teams of techs and the reporters hovering in their copters overhead or on the other side of the crime scene barriers that surrounded the park would move on to something else, and he and Whitey would bear the lion’s share of Katie Marcus’s death alone, filing the reports, preparing the affidavits, working her death long after most of the people here had moved on to something else—traffic accidents, larcenies, suicides in rooms gone stale with recirculated air and overflowing ashtrays.

  Martin Friel hoisted himself up onto the stage and sat there with his small legs dangling over the earth. He’d come here from the back nine at the George Wright and smelled of sunblock under his blue polo and khakis. He drummed
his heels off the side of the stage, and Sean could feel a hint of moral annoyance in him.

  “You’ve worked with Sergeant Powers before, right?”

  “Yeah,” Sean said.

  “Any problems?”

  “No.” Sean watched Whitey take a uniformed trooper aside, point off to the stand of trees behind the drive-in screen. “I worked the Elizabeth Pitek homicide with him last year.”

  “Woman with the restraining order?” Friel said. “Ex-husband said something about paper?”

  “Said, ‘Paper rules her life, don’t mean it rules mine.’”

  “He got twenty, right?”

  “Twenty solid, yeah.” Sean wishing someone had gotten her a stronger piece of paper. Her kid growing up in a foster home, wondering what happened, who the fuck he belonged to now.

  The trooper walked away from Whitey, grabbed a few more uniforms, and they headed off for the trees.

  “Heard he drinks,” Friel said, and pulled one leg up onto the stage with him, held the knee up against his chest.

  “I’ve never seen it on the clock, sir,” Sean said, wondering who was really on probation in Friel’s eyes, him or Whitey. He watched Whitey bend and peer at a clump of grass near the van’s rear tire, pull up the cuff of his sweatpants as if he were wearing a Brooks Brothers suit.