“Maybe. I don’t know, Andy. I mean, I see where you’re going, but to me he sounds like more of a wanker than a killer. Anyway, the sex angle-the Rifkin kid had no signs of sexual assault.”
I shrugged. “Maybe he never got that far. He could have been interrupted. Maybe he propositions the kid or tries to force him into the forest at knifepoint, and the kid resists. Or maybe the kid laughs at him, ridicules him, and Patz flies into a rage.”
“That’s a lot of maybes.”
“Well, let’s see what he has to say. Go bring him in.”
“Can’t bring him in. We’ve got nothing to hold him on. There’s nothing tying him to this case.”
“So tell him you want him to come look through the mug books and see if he can identify anyone he might have seen in Cold Spring Park.”
“He’s already got a Committee lawyer for the pending case. He’s not going to come in voluntarily.”
“Then tell him you’ll violate him for not registering his new address with the sex offender registry. You’ve already got him jammed up on that. Tell him the kiddy porn on his computer is a federal offense. Tell him anything, it doesn’t matter. Just get him in and give a little squeeze.”
Duffy smirked and raised his eyebrows. Ball-grabbing jokes never get old.
“Just go pick him up.”
Duffy hesitated. “I don’t know. It feels like we’re jumping the gun. Why not just show Patz’s picture around, see if anyone can put him in the park that morning? Talk to his neighbors. Maybe knock on his door, low-key it, don’t spook him, get him talking that way.” Duffy formed his fingers into a beak and flapped it open and shut: talk, talk. “You never know. If you pick him up, he’ll just call his lawyer. You might lose your only chance to talk to him.”
“No, it’s better we pick him up. After that, you can sweet-talk him, Duff. That’s what you’re good at.”
“You sure?”
“We can’t have people saying we didn’t push hard enough on this guy.”
The comment was off key, and a doubtful expression crossed Duffy’s face. We had always made it a rule not to give a shit how things looked or what people thought. A prosecutor’s judgment is supposed to be insulated from politics.
“You know what I mean, Paul. This is the first credible suspect we’ve found. I don’t want to lose him because we didn’t do enough.”
“Okay,” he said with a sour little frown. “I’ll bring him in.”
“Good.”
Duffy leaned back in his chair, the work conversation over, eager now to smooth the slight friction between us.
“How’d it go with Jacob at school this morning?”
“Oh, he’s okay. Nothing bothers Jake. Now, Laurie, on the other hand…”
“She a little shook up?”
“A little? You remember in Jaws when Roy Scheider has to send his kids into the ocean to show everyone it’s safe to swim?”
“Your wife looked like Roy Scheider? That’s what you’re saying?”
“The expression on her face.”
“You weren’t worried? Come on, I’ll bet you looked like Roy Scheider too.”
“Listen, pal, I was all Robert Shaw, I promise you.”
“Things didn’t end well for Robert Shaw, as I recall.”
“For the shark either. That’s all that matters, Duff. Now go get Patz.”
“Andy, I’m a little uncomfortable with this,” Lynn Canavan said.
For a moment I did not know what she was talking about. It actually crossed my mind she might be kidding. When we were younger, she used to like putting people on. More than once I got sucked in, taking seriously a comment that, a moment later, was revealed as a joke. But I saw, in the next moment, that she was quite serious. Or seemed to be. She had become a little hard to read lately.
There were three of us that morning in Canavan’s big corner office, District Attorney Canavan, Neal Logiudice, and me. We were seated at a round conference table, at the center of which was an empty box from Dunkin’ Donuts, left over from a meeting earlier that morning. The room had a dressy finish, with wood paneling and windows overlooking East Cambridge. But it still had the same chill as the rest of the courthouse. Same thin plum-purple industrial carpet over a concrete slab floor. Same dingy flecked acoustic tiles overhead. Same stale, twice-breathed air. As power offices go, it was not much.
Canavan fiddled with a pen, tapping the tip on a yellow pad, head tilted as if she was thinking it over. “I don’t know. You handling this case, I don’t know as I like it. Your son goes to that school. It’s a close thing. I’m a little uncomfortable.”
“ You’re uncomfortable, Lynn, or Rasputin here is?” I gestured toward Logiudice.
“Oh, that’s funny, Andy-”
“I am,” Canavan asserted.
“Let me guess: Neal wants the case.”
“Neal thinks there might be an issue. I do too, frankly. There’s an appearance of a conflict. That does matter, Andy.”
Indeed, appearances did matter. Lynn Canavan was a rising political star. From the moment she was elected district attorney, two years earlier, there were rumors about which office she would run for next: governor, Massachusetts attorney general, even U.S. senator. She was in her forties, attractive, smart, serious, ambitious. I had known and worked alongside her for fifteen years, since we were both young lawyers. We were allies. She appointed me First Assistant the day she was elected DA, but I knew from the start it was a short-term gig. A courtroom mucker like me is of no value out in the political world. Wherever Canavan was headed, I would not be going along. But that was all still in the future. In the meantime, she was biding her time, polishing her public persona, her “brand”: the no-nonsense law-and-order professional. On camera she rarely smiled, rarely joked. She wore little makeup or jewelry and kept her hair short and sensible. The older people in the office remembered a different Lynn Canavan-fun, charismatic, one of the boys, who could swear like a sailor and drink like she had a hollow leg. But the voters never saw any of that, and at this point maybe the old, more natural Lynn did not exist anymore. I suppose she had no choice but to transform herself. Her life was now an endless candidacy; you could hardly blame her for becoming what she pretended to be for so long. Anyway, we all do have to grow up, put childish things aside and all that. But something was lost too. In the course of Lynn’s transformation from butterfly to moth, our long friendship had suffered. Neither of us felt the old intimacy, the sense of trust and connection we’d once had. Maybe she would make me a judge someday, for old times’ sake, to pay the whole thing off. But we both knew, I think, that our friendship had run its course. We both felt vaguely awkward and mournful around each other because of it, like lovers on the downside of an unwinding affair.
In any event, Lynn Canavan’s likely ascent created a vacuum behind her, and politics abhors a vacuum. That Neal Logiudice might actually fill it would have seemed absurd, once upon a time. Now, who knew? Clearly Logiudice did not see me as an obstacle. I had said over and over that I had no interest in the job, and I meant it. The last thing I wanted was to live an exposed, public life. Still, he would need more than bureaucratic infighting to get there. If Neal wanted to be DA, he would need a real accomplishment to show the voters. A splashy signature win in the courtroom. He needed a skin. Whose skin, I was just beginning to understand.
“Are you pulling me off the case, Lynn?”
“Right now I’m just asking what you think.”
“We’ve been through this. I’m keeping the case. There’s no issue.”
“It hits pretty close to home, Andy. Your son might be in danger. If he’d been unlucky enough to be walking through that park at the wrong time…”
Logiudice said, “Maybe your judgment is clouded, just a little. I mean, if you’re being fair, if you stop and think about it objectively.”
“Clouded how?”
“Does it make you emotional?”
“No.”
“Are you angry, Andy?”
“Do I look angry?” I counted out the words one by one.
