a benefit for Max Ebersole, six. A Fraternal Order of Police benefit that raised more than twenty-nine hundred dollars.
She looks into Paris’s eyes, at his smile, the way his presence just fits so perfectly in this setting, a benefit for someone else. She looks at his big hands, recalling them on her body and how protected she had felt, how good.
And knows, without question, that it is over.
57
The cauldron is full. I can watch the recording again. I put my coat on, cross the living room, hit Play.
“This was a cold-blooded killing of a police officer in the line of duty,” the man in the old video begins. “I think the evidence will show that the defendant, Sarah Weiss, pulled the trigger… Mike Ryan was a good cop… Mike Ryan was a family man… a man who woke up every day and chose-chose-to strap on a gun and jump into the fray… Mike Ryan died in the line of duty protecting the people of this city… So the next time you find yourself picking through a pile of garbage, or hiding in the bushes like some pervert, or running down the street with a forty-pound video camera just so you can invade the privacy of a heartbroken ten-year-old girl in a wheelchair, I want you to stop, take a deep breath, and ask yourself what the hell it is you do for a living… Mike Ryan took a bullet for the people of this city… Mike Ryan was a hero.”
This is where the woman reporter asks a question I cannot hear.
But I hear the man’s response. Loud and clear and full of arrogance. I have heard it every ten minutes, like maddening clockwork, for a very long time. As I listen, my silence momentarily gives way to the sound of a beast, stirring in its nap.
“Sometimes, the monster is real, people,” the man says. “Sometimes, the monster has a pretty face and a perfectly ordinary name. This time, the monster is called Sarah Weiss.”
58
Ronnie’s Famous is fully lighted, empty. Paris had called Ronnie earlier in the day and asked him to put together two dozen doughnuts and coffee for the stakeout team. And damned if there aren’t a pair of bulging white bags on the counter, right next to the register, right next to a tray of large white foam cups and one of Paris’s Thermoses. Even on New Year’s Eve. Paris had said he would be by at nine-thirty, and he is right on time.
Paris makes a U-turn, parks in front of the shop, grabs his empty Thermos, steps inside, his mind afloat on the increasingly bizarre facts of a case that is starting to look like it began twenty-six years ago when a woman named Lydia del Blanco got beaten nearly to death by her ex-husband, a man who once lived at Fortieth and Central.
Is this why Fayette Martin was lured to the Reginald Building?
Is this why Michael Ryan was murdered?
If God is doling out luck this New Year’s Eve, he will begin to get some of these answers in the next few hours. One way or another.
Paris looks around Ronnie’s. No customers at the short counter. No one behind the glass. Paris can hear the whine of a vacuum cleaner in the back, the sound of a television.
“Ronnie?” Paris yells.
Nothing.
“Ronnie?”
Just the mewl of a motor and some kind of sitcom. Paris grabs everything on the counter, drops a twenty, then turns to leave before Ronnie Boudreaux can come out of the back room and object.
“Happy New Year, Ronnie!” Paris yells, but he is certain the drone of the vacuum has drowned him out.
As Paris approaches his apartment building he sees two men standing by the front door. Two familiar shapes. Bobby Dietricht and Greg Ebersole. At his apartment.
A first.
Something must be going down. Why hadn’t they called?
Paris parks on East Eighty-fifth Street, grabs his Thermos. “Hey guys,” he says, climbing the steps, letting the surprise register on his face. “What’s up? We have a name?”
“Hey,” Bobby Dietricht says, reading the surprise, ignoring the question.
The three men step inside the lobby of Paris’s building as an icy gust wraps around the building. “What’s goin’ on?” Paris asks, checking his watch. He is due at the Westwood stakeout in thirty-five minutes. “We starting a doo-wop group?”
Greg laughs a little too hard. Although he is on the task force, he is not part of the raid team. Early that evening, amid Greg’s violent protests, Captain Elliott had taken one look at him and ordered him off duty.
Bobby Dietricht reaches into his overcoat and pulls out a manila envelope. “Full lab reports are in.”
“What?” Paris says. “Why the hell didn’t someone call me?”
“This is it, Jack,” Bobby says. “This is the call. I just got the report ten minutes ago.”
“What’s Elliott’s take?” Paris asks.
“He hasn’t seen them yet.”
Wrong answer, Paris thinks. Wrong, wrong answer. Why not? “Talk to me, Bobby.”
“We’ve got matches. All over the fuckin’ map. Blood, prints.”
“No shit.”
“None. Most of the blood is Fayette Martin’s. But there was also trace evidence of Willis Walker’s blood, too.”
“What about the prints?”
A look passes between Greg and Bobby. “Yeah. We’ve got a match. And we’ve got it a half-dozen times.”
“Do we like someone? Please tell me we like someone.”
“Yes and no,” Bobby says. “Mostly no.”
“What the hell are you saying? We have a hit on the prints or not?”
Bobby nods.
“Great,” Paris says, his stomach starting to centrifuge with tiny needles that soon work their way down to his groin, where the real fear lives. And he knows why. “We’ve got the connection.”
“Not so great,” Greg says, a look of distilled heartbreak on his face.
“The prints,” Bobby says, cop-stare locked in place, cold and unnerving. Paris had never been on this side of it.
“What about them?” Paris asks.
Bobby: “They’re yours.”
59
The fifth time she texts Jesse Ray she stops, halfway, defeated, her tears no longer an enemy. No one is going to save her. No one is going to wave a magic wand and keep her out of prison. This had gotten so bad, so fast, that everything she had worked for in the past two years seemed to be slipping away. If she had just been able to get the money into a trust for Bella, to show her father that the little girl’s future was secured, she might have had a life.
Jean Luc had told her to call no one, to stay inside her apartment until he came for her.
But she knows that if she can just get to her car, she will find the courage to drive down to the Justice
