“I just want to find out where they are on catching this psycho.”
“Yeah, huh? You stick with your geometry or wherever it is you’re at in school. How damned old are you now?”
“Sixteen and calculus. Pete? Nicole Castro. She’s my friend.” Not having heard from Nicole, I wasn’t sure if I was telling the truth about that.
Pete sighed. “Jessica Barrone. Gold for ten years, at least. The best. If the Recluse is catchable, Barrone’s the one to do it.” He studied me with night-after-Heineken eyes. “You’re your mother through-and-through.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I used to hook her up with freelance work now and then. Did you know that?”
“I don’t think so.” My mother had been a journalist before she had me. She and my dad were in the same grad program at Columbia.
“This was back when you were in diapers,” Pete said. “A few dollars here and there to help with rent. You know, check out this guy’s story, stuff she could do over the phone from home. But now and then she would come into the office for an editorial meeting. She was so damned nice to everybody. That lopsided smile, that ridiculously loud laugh. People were suspicious. ‘What does she want from me?’ Like that. I had known her for a while by then. ‘Nothing,’ I’d say. ‘That’s just how she is.’ ‘Nah, she’s fake,’ they’d say, but after a while people got it, that she was the real deal.”
“And what was that?”
Pete shrugged. “She was just an other-centered person. C’mon, kid. Buy your old uncle Pete a cup of coffee.”
“Think she’ll tell us anything, Detective Barrone?”
“I’ll tell her you’re an aspiring reporter.”
“As in I’m your intern. Smart.”
“Son, you don’t get to be fifty-six-looking-sixty-six, twice divorced, forty pounds overweight, and alcoholic by being an idiot.”
“The truth is, the majority of cold cases go unsolved,” Detective Barrone said. “Most perps if they’re going to be caught are picked up in the first forty-eight hours. After that, the likelihood of an arrest is halved. After a week, you have a ten percent chance of closing the case.”
“Wow, I had no idea,” I said. “That sucks.”
Barrone nodded, sipped her coffee. She was ridiculously pretty. I imagined perps would come to her on their knees to confess if only to be eye level with what I dreamed was her very tanned, inny navel. “I know your dad,” she said.
“Wouldn’t imagine cops are into fluffy stuff like art.”
“You’d be surprised, but that’s not how I know him. My daughter is at Pratt.”
“The art college in Manhattan?”
“Brooklyn.”
“You don’t look old enough to have a daughter that old,” I said.
Barrone nodded to Uncle Pete. “How old’s this kid?”
“Sexteen.”
“Kid,” Barrone said, “never try to charm a cop.”
“My apologies.”
“And never apologize.”
“Sorry.”
“My daughter had to do a paper, some art history thing. She was using one of your father’s books. I recognized the name, told her I’d bump into your old man here at the diner every once in a while. She asked me to set up an interview. He was very helpful, she said. Very nice guy.”
“Oh, he’s the best all right. What if it’s a serial?”
“How’s that?”
“The Castro case. If it gets hot again. Say just for example the Recluse tried to attack Nicole a second time, the other side of her face. You know, finish what he started. Or if he decided to go after somebody else.”
“Like whom?” she said.
“I don’t know. Anybody. You, me-”
“Why would she go after you?”
“No, I’m just saying,” I said. “Why do you think he’s a she?”
“Who says I do?”
“You did.”
“I’m using ‘she’ as a global pronoun.”
“I suck at grammar.”
“Tough luck for you if you want to be a journalist, worse for Pete if you’re his intern.”
“A second attack,” I said. “Catching
“Yes and no. The new evidence is a warm lead, obviously, but serials are tricky. They live for the cat-and- mouse, and they think twenty steps ahead.”
“Do you think you’ll catch him, her,
“Not my case.”
“Whose is it?”
“Can’t say.” Her phone beeped. She checked it and put it back down on the table. “How
I shrugged. “Fine.”
She nodded as she stared at me just a hair too long. Suddenly the diner was way too hot. Barrone sipped her coffee. “Drop a hello on the old man for me.”
“Definitely.” I pretended my phone beeped, checked it, put it on the table. The lights flickered, except they didn’t. I was dizzy. “I have to pee,” I said.
She smiled. “You’re not under arrest. . yet.”
We all laughed. Yeah, so funny. I went to the bathroom and shut myself in. The zigzag lightning. The aura. Everything going fish-eye. I sat on the floor in case I seized. The aura didn’t always mean an attack was coming. Most times it just came on its own.
It passed.
I splashed my face with water I wished were colder and hung out in there for about as long I would have needed if I really had to pee bad. When I came out, Barrone was looking at my hair. I realized only then I’d run my wet hands over it. I wondered if this was some kind of tell, a show of my guilt. Was she onto my hacking?
Pete was standing now. “Thanks for your time, Detective,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Thank you very much.”
“Pete said if I give you twenty bucks you’ll get a haircut.”
“Might just blow it on meth too.”
“Trying to build a sheet, huh?”
“It’s tough, but I’ll get there.”
She winked. “What’d I tell you about not trying to charm a cop?” Then to Pete: “I like this kid.” Back to me: “Don’t forget your phone.”
“I’m an idiot.”
“And don’t forget to tell your old man Jessica Barrone said what’s up.”
I nodded and hoped my smile didn’t look as fake as it felt. She was really hammering this say hi to Pop thing.
When we were outside, Pete said, “Come on back to the office. I have those Velcro tennis paddles.”
“I gotta go.”
“Don’t be such a stranger. I mean it. You look good in a newsroom.”
“Threatening to make me your intern for real?”
“Make my coffee light and sweet, shine my shoes, pick up my dry cleaning, all for not a single penny: What
