Mystic River

  According to Katie, he was usually a rational guy, her father, but she told Brendan one night, tears dropping to his chest, “He’s nuts when it comes to you. Nuts. He’s drunk one night, right? I mean, hammered, and he starts going on about my mom, how much she loved me and everything, and then he says, he says, ‘The fucking Harrises, Katie, they’re scum.’”

  Scum. The sound of the word caught in Brendan’s chest like a pile of phlegm.

  “‘You stay away from them. Only thing in life I demand of you, Katie. Please.’”

  “So how’d it happen?” Brendan said. “You ending up with me?”

  She’d rolled over in his arms and smiled sadly at him. “You don’t know?”

  Truth be told, Brendan didn’t have a clue. Katie was Everything. A Goddess. Brendan was just, well, Brendan.

  “No, I don’t know.”

  “You’re kind.”

  “I am?”

  She nodded. “I see you with Ray or your mother and even everyday people on the street, and you’re just so kind, Brendan.”

  “A lotta people are kind.”

  She shook her head. “A lot of people are nice. It’s not the same thing.”

  And Brendan, thinking about it, had to admit that his whole life he’d never met anyone who didn’t like him—not in a popularity contest type of way, but in a basic “That Harris kid’s all right” type of way. He’d never had enemies, hadn’t been in a fight since grade school, and couldn’t remember the last time he’d heard a harsh word directed his way. Maybe it was because he was kind. And maybe, like Katie said, that was rare. Or maybe he just wasn’t the type of guy who made people mad.

  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 lab
el 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.

  As he got closer, he saw his sergeant, Whitey Powers, standing a few feet away from a car with the driver’s door ajar. Souza and Connolly, who’d been bumped up to Homicide only last week, searched the weeds outside the park entrance, coffee cups in hand, and two patrol units and the Crime Scene Services van were parked along the gravel shoulder, the CSS crew going over the car and shooting dirty looks at Souza and Connolly for trampling possible evidence and leaving the lids off their Styrofoam cups.

  “Hey, bad boy.” Whitey Powers’s eyebrows rose in surprise. “Someone call you already?”

  “Yeah,” Sean said. “I don’t have a partner, though, Sarge. Adolph’s out.”

  Whitey Powers nodded. “You get your hand slapped and that useless kraut takes a sudden medical.” He put his arm around Sean. “You’re with me, kid. The duration of your probation.”

  So that was how it was going to work, Whitey keeping watch on Sean until the department brass decided if he met their gold standard or not.

  “Was looking like a quiet weekend, too,” Whitey said as he turned Sean toward the car with the open door. “Whole county last night, Sean? Quieter than a dead cat. Had a stabbing in Parker Hill, ’nother in Bromley Heath, and some college kid took a beating from a beer bottle over in Allston. None of them fatal, though, and all of them City’s. Hell, the Parker Hill vic, right? Walked into the ER at MGH on his own, big ol’ steak knife sticking out of his collarbone, asked the admitting nurse where they kept a Coke machine ’round this bitch.”

  “She tell him?” Sean said.

  Whitey smiled. He was one of State Homicide’s brightest boys and had been forever, so he smiled a lot. He must have taken the call heading into his shift, though, because he wore sweatpants and his son’s hockey jersey, a baseball hat riding backward on his head, iridescent blue flip-flops over bare feet, his gold badge hanging from a nylon cord over the jersey.

  “Like the shirt,” Sean said, and Whitey gave him another lazy grin as a bird broke overhead from the park and arced above them, letting loose a rattling caw that bit into Sean’s spine.

  “Man, half an hour ago? I was on my sofa.”

  “Watching cartoons?”

  “Wrestling.” Whitey pointed at the weeds and the park beyond. “I figure we’ll find her over there somewhere. But, you know, we just started looking and Friel says we call it a Missing Persons till we find a body.”

  The bird swung over them again, a little lower, that sharp rattle of a caw finding the base of Sean’s brain this time and nibbling.

  “It’s ours, though?” Sean said.

  Whitey nodded. “’Less the victim ran back out again, got snuffed somewhere down the block.”

  Sean glanced up. The bird had a big head and short legs tucked under a white chest that was striped gray in the center. Sean didn’t recognize the species, but then he didn’t hang out in nature all that much. “What is it?”

  “A belted kingfisher,” Whitey said.

  “Bullshit.”

  He held up a hand. “Swear to God, man.”

  “Watched a lot of Wild Kingdom as a kid, didn’t you?”

  The bird let loose that hard rattle again and Sean wanted to shoot it.

  Whitey said, “Want to look at the car?”

  “You said ‘her,’” Sean said as they ducked under yellow crime scene tape and headed for the car.

  “CSS found the reg in the glove box. Car’s owner is a Katherine Marcus.”

  “Shit,” Sean said.

  “Know her?”

  “Might be the daughter of a guy I know.”

  “You guys close?”

  Sean shook his head. “No, just to nod hello from around the neighborhood.”

  “Sure?” Whitey was asking if he wanted to pass on the case right here, right now.

  “Yeah,” Sean said. “Sure as shit.”

  They reached the car and Whitey pointed at the open driver’s door as a CSS tech stepped back from it and stretched, arching her back, hands entwined and thrust toward the sky. “Just don’t touch nothing, guys. Who’s the point on this?”

  Whitey said, “That’d be me. Park is State jurisdiction.”

  “But the car’s on city property.”

  Whitey pointed at the weeds. “That blood spatter fell on state land.”

  “I dunno,” the CSS tech said with a sigh.

  “We got an ADA en route,” Whitey said. “He can call it. Till then, it’s State.”

  Sean took one look at the weeds leading up to the park and knew if they found a body, they’d find it in there. “What do we have?”

  The tech yawned. “Door was ajar when we found it. Keys were in the ignition, headlights were on. Like on cue, the battery shit the bed about ten seconds after we got on the scene.”

  Sean noticed a bloodstain over the speaker on the driver’s door. Some of it had dripped, black and crusty, over the speaker itself. He dropped to a squat and pivoted, saw another spot of black on top of the steering wheel. A third stain, longer and wider than the other two, clung to the edges of a bullet hole punched through the vinyl of the driver’s seat back at shoulder level. Sean pivoted again so that he was looking past the door at the weeds to the left of the car, then he craned his head around to look at the outside of the driver’s door, saw the fresh dent there.

  He looked up at Whitey, and Whitey nodded. “Perp probably stood outside the car. The Marcus girl—if that’s who was driving—slams him with the door. Cocksucker gets a round off, hits her, ah, I dunno, in the shoulder, maybe the biceps? The girl makes a run for it anyway.” He pointed at some weeds freshly flattened by running feet. “They trample the weeds heading for the park. Her wound couldn’t have been too bad, because we’ve only found a few blood spatters in the weeds.”

  Sean said, “We got units over in the park?”

  “Two so far.”

  The CSS tech snorted. “They any smarter than those two?”

  Sean and Whitey followed her gaze, saw that Connolly had accidentally dropped his coffee in the weeds, was standing over it, bitching out the cup.

  “Hey,” Whitey said, “they’re new, cut ’em some slack.”

  “I gotta dust some more, guys.”

  Sean stepped back for the woman. “You find any ID besides the car reg?”

  “Yup. Wallet under the seat, driver’s license made out to Katherine Marcus. There was a backpack behind the passenger seat. Billy’s checking the contents now.”

  Sean looked over the hood at the guy she’d indicated with a toss of her head. He was on his knees in front of the car, a dark blue backpack in front of him.

  Whitey said, “How old did her license say she was?”

  “Nineteen, Sergeant.”

  “Nineteen,” Whitey said to Sean. “And you know the father? Fuck, man, he’s in for a world of hurt, poor bastard probably has no idea.”

  Sean turned his head, watched as the lone rattling bird headed back for the channel, screeching, and a hard shaft of sun cut through the clouds. Sean felt the screech drive through his ear canal and into his brain, and he was pierced for a moment by the memory of that wild aloneness he’d seen in eleven-year-old Jimmy Marcus’s face when they’d almost stolen that car. Sean could feel it now, standing by the weeds leading up to Penitentiary Park, as if the twenty-five years in between had passed as fast as a TV commercial, feel that beaten, pissed-off, begging aloneness that had lain in Jimmy Marcus like pulp hollowed from the core of a dying tree. To shake it, he thought of La
uren, the Lauren with long, sandy hair who’d marinated his dream this morning and smelled of the sea. He thought of that Lauren and wished he could just climb back into the tunnel of that dream and pull it over his head, disappear.

  7

  IN THE BLOOD

  NADINE MARCUS, Jimmy and Annabeth’s younger daughter, received the Blessed Sacrament of Holy Communion for the first time on Sunday morning at Saint Cecilia’s in the East Bucky Flats. Her hands pressed together from the base of her palms to the tips of her fingers, white veil and white dress making her look like a baby bride or snow angel, she walked up the aisle in procession with forty other children, gliding, where the other kids stutter-stepped.

  Or at least that’s how it seemed to Jimmy, and while he might have been the first to admit that, yeah, he was biased in favor of his kids, he was also pretty sure he was right. Other kids these days spoke or yelled whenever they felt like it, cussed in front of their parents, demanded this and demanded that, showed absolutely no respect for adults, and had the slightly dazed, slightly feverish eyes of addicts who spent too much time in front of a TV, a computer screen, or both. They reminded Jimmy of silver pinballs—sluggish one moment, banging off everything in sight the next, clanging bells and careening from side to side. They asked for something, they usually got it. If they didn’t, they asked louder. If the answer was still a tentative no, they screamed. And their parents—pussies one and all, as far as Jimmy was concerned—usually caved.

  Jimmy and Annabeth doted on their girls. They worked hard to keep them happy and entertained and aware that they were loved. But there was a fine line between that and taking shit from them, and Jimmy made sure the girls all knew exactly where the line was.