“I used to see Michael and his friends at the baseball diamond at State Road Park. I’d see him all the time there, but never had the guts to talk to him. Remember how we used to just die of embarrassment at that age?”
“Oh yeah,” Paris says, thinking he hadn’t really progressed all that much in that department.
“So one day my friend Barb and I are tooling around in her old Ford Fairlane convertible, top down. We hit the Manners, the Dairy Queen, the McDonald’s, the Red Barn, then the baseball field on State Road. And suddenly I see him.
“‘There’s Michael!’ I yell. Barbara, of course, panics, swings into the parking lot, knocking her Dairy Queen cup on the floor, completely covering the brake pedal in chocolate milkshake. The car jumps the curb and heads right for the baseball game. Barbara is stamping and stomping and trying to hit the brake pedal, but it’s too slippery. We’re going, like, thirty miles an hour now, smacking into garbage cans, benches, lawn chairs. Finally, after making everyone scatter, she hits the brake pedal squarely and we fishtail around the middle of the diamond, coming to a stop right on the pitcher’s mound. And, because the top is down, there is now an inch of dust on everything-the car, the seats, the books, the burgers, me. Worse than that, ten boys our age are watching us in complete awe, knowing they had just seen what will probably be the story of the year at school.
“Well, it turns out that my history notebook had flown out of the backseat, landing God knows where. So, out of the cloud of dust, notebook in hand, comes Michael Patrick Ryan-black T-shirt, blue eyes, long eye-lashes, sweaty muscles. He says: ‘Hey, Dusty, this yours?’” Dolores looks at Paris with a half-smile that is somewhere adrift between inconceivable heartache and the joy of indelible memory. “Everybody laughed, but I didn’t really hear them, you know? All I saw were those Irish eyes. I was a goner.”
Paris watches as Dolores absently fingers the ribbed cuff of the sweat-shirt, wandering through her reverie, and realizes it is Michael’s. She is still wearing his clothes.
Dolores returns to the moment. She checks the grandfather clock in the hallway, pours more coffee, allows the levity of her story to come to a full rest. After a minute of silence, she says, “He was scared, you know.”
“Michael?”
“Yeah.”
“Scared of what?”
Dolores looks out the bay window, at the rain turning to snow, at the ice crystals starring the tips of the hedges in front of the house. “Everything.” She waves the back of her hand at the long-ago widened doorway leading to the first-floor bathroom; the gesture, a full explanation of life with a family member in a wheelchair. “He was scared all the time after we came back.”
A decade or so earlier, Michael Ryan had pulled up stakes, moved west, taken a job with the San Diego PD. But after his daughter was injured by a hit-and-run driver, a driver never caught, as Paris understood it, he moved the family back to Cleveland to be near Dolores’s mother, a police widow herself.
“He was a great cop, Dusty. An even better man.”
Dolores considers Paris for a moment, then leans forward, as if to share a secret. With one carefully measured exhale, she concedes the real reason for Paris’s visit in the first place, saying: “I knew.”
These are words that Paris does not want to hear. Michael Ryan is dead. As is his killer. Paris would just as soon hang on to the notion that Michael was on the job when he was murdered, was following up a lead, got ambushed. But, against his will, his mouth opens and forms the words. “What do you mean?”
Dolores reaches for a tissue, dabs at her eyes. “That’s why I don’t look in the storage, in the boxes. I just can’t.”
“You don’t have to tell me this.”
“Michael and I had… had a deal, you see. We made it the day of Carrie’s accident. Michael told me that she would never, ever, want for anything, as long as he was alive.”
Paris considers just standing, hugging her, leaving, letting all this go. Instead, he asks:
“What was your end?”
“My end?” She looks up at him, her eyes leaden with pain. “My end was never to ask where the money came from.”
The tiny lock opens with a satisfying click. Paris is proud of himself. He hadn’t picked a desk lock in years but, for some reason, the touch seemed to be back. Maybe he’d start carrying his pick-set again. He is in bay number 202 at the My-Self Storage on Triskett Road. Dolores had given him the key, but asked if he would drop it back off as soon as possible. Dolores and Carrie Ryan are moving to Tampa, Florida, soon.
The bay is large, perhaps ten by fifteen feet, and stacked ceiling to floor with the detritus a man acquires in forty-some years of life: a rusting band saw, mismatched golf clubs, a delaminated poker table. Along the back wall are Dolores’s things. Hatboxes, white-handled shopping bags stuffed with clothes, along with a few big boxes from a ladies’ retailer whose name Paris hadn’t heard in years.
The space smells of mildew, mice; the damp ennui of shelved memory.
Within ten minutes or so, by the light of the single forty-watt bulb in the ceiling, Paris had sifted through all the musty books and folders and papers on the desk. Nothing pertinent to any investigation Michael had been working on. Nothing that leapt out at him. He had tried, unsuccessfully, to pull open the small floor safe serving as a stand for Michael’s old Remington manual typewriter. The safe did not open, but, after a few long-unpracticed turns of a bent paper clip, the bottom right-hand drawer on the desk did.
In the drawer is a solitary item: a nine-by-twelve envelope.
Paris removes the envelope, opens it. Inside is a black-and-white photograph of a corpse, the mutilated, naked body of a man lying in a gravel parking lot. There is a white brick wall to the right, the wheels of a big Dumpster behind the man’s right shoulder. The man is horribly disfigured, slicked with blood nearly head to toe. With disgust, Paris can see that pieces-large pieces-of the man’s midsection are missing; chunks that appear to have been torn away, eaten, as if animals had been at the body.
But it is the appearance of the man’s head that runs a cold finger up Paris’s spine.
The man’s head is completely wrapped in barbed wire.
The photograph looks like a standard police crime-scene photo but is not marked in any official way. The yellowing edges and slightly sienna whites tell him the picture is old. Fifteen, twenty years maybe. In the upper- right-hand corner is an address, handwritten in faded blue ink. An address on East Twenty-third Street.
Paris flips the picture over and what he sees on the back tricks his eyes for a moment, then comes swimming back into focus.
It is a sentence. A simple, handwritten, five-word sentence that should not be written on the back of a picture in a dead man’s desk, a man who had not drawn breath in two years.
Scrawled in red, from the coldness of his grave, Michael Ryan says:
Evil is a breed, Fingers.
Two
14
BELMONT CORNERS,OHIO
THIRTY YEARS EARLIER
The woman waits in the emergency room at Our Lady of Mercy Hospital on Greenville Road, her face a mass of swollen tissue, her womb a capacious medicine ball beneath her dress. It is New Year’s Eve and the woman’s ex-husband had stopped by the trailer at around five-thirty that evening, supposedly to drop off a late Christmas present for his daughter, but what he really wanted was what he always wanted. Drug money. The scene had escalated so quickly that the woman had not even had time to lock her daughter in the bedroom for her own protection, although the man had never once laid a finger on the little girl.
