“Anna’s a cleaner, too,” Walker said. “Boss is on me that it’s somehow my fault she hasn’t showed. So basically, I’m picking up her work, putting in a double.” He hesitated. “She wouldn’t leave me hanging like this-not without calling or something. This body … it looks like her?”
“Unfortunately, the body doesn’t look like much, Mr. Walker. Too long in the water. Now, you asked this Lanny Neal about her, and his reaction was what exactly? And I urge you to recollect what was said, not what you felt about what was said.” She interrupted herself again. “I take it your sister is living with this individual, or involved in a way that suggests he might have knowledge of her whereabouts?”
“He’s jumping her, if that’s what you’re asking. And, yeah, she’s pretty much shacked up, since we don’t have the boat no more. Which is on account of Neal anyway. ’Cause once they started hanging out, she bailed on me- thirty years of our family fishing these waters, down the drain-and that pretty much finished me off with the fucking bankers, thank you very much.”
“Mr. Neal’s reaction to your call?”
“Lame,” Walker answered. Dead fish were piling up, awaiting him. “You mind?” he asked, indicating the table.
She did mind, but she told him she didn’t, and so they stepped up to the cleaning table where Walker, gloved once again, worked the curved blade of that knife in such an automatic and efficient way that it bordered on graceful. He tore loose the entrails and tossed them into a white plastic pail.
“Take me through the call, please. You asked to speak with Mary-Ann.”
“Listen, lady … lieutenant … whatever … Neal’s a scum-sucking piece of shit. I know it, and he knows I know it. He beats her up, and she goes back to him, and I just don’t fucking get that, you know? And me? I’m looking out for her, and she blows me off like I’m the pond scum, not that dirtbag she’s hanging with, so what I’m saying is, we didn’t exactly get into it, Neal and me. He essentially blew me off.”
“His exact words were?”
“Just tell me it isn’t her.” His fingers moved, the blade sliced and another fish was processed.
She waited for his attention. He was sad-eyed by nature, a dog starved for affection. Her job biased her into such snap appraisals, and though loath to admit it, she went with first impressions. “I sincerely hope the Jane Doe is not your sister. The fact remains, your cooperation is essential if we’re to clear Mary-Ann’s name from our list, and that means answering my questions as they’re asked. Do you understand?”
Walker’s gaze lifted off the fish he was cutting, the look he gave her so penetrating that she averted her eyes.
“We haven’t identified the body.” She now wondered whether she had handled this correctly. She observed grief on a regular basis and tried to avoid labeling it. Some screamed, some cried, some went silent, some became violently sick. Some became violent, period.
“Neal said she wasn’t there, that he hadn’t seen her, and that at this point if he did it would be for the last time.”
Matthews scribbled down notes. “Okay …,” she said automatically.
“It’s not okay,” he said. “The guy beats her, lady. He’s awful with her, and if he’s done anything to her …” He lifted the fillet knife. “I’ll turn him into chum and feed him to the crabs.” His eyes reminded her of killers she’d interviewed. Grief could do that-make us do things we never intended.
“It’s important we all keep cool heads, Mr. Walker. We’re still just collecting the facts, the evidence. There has been no positive ID-identification-of the body we found. It would be a mistake to make assumptions about Mr. Neal’s involvement at this point.”
“I’m not making an assumption,” he said. “I’m just telling you how it is.”
“It isn’t anything until we know who, and what, we’ve got.”
He was more kid than adult, she thought. A lovesick brother with a fishing knife sharp enough to split hairs- she reminded herself to thank LaMoia for this one.
Rain fell, wetting her pad.
“Did she take prescription drugs? Recreational drugs?”
“If she was drinking and drugging, Lanny got her into it.”
She wrote that down as affirmative. Booze, drugs, abuse-the father, son, and holy ghost of domestic disturbances.
As the rain increased, she debated pulling up the hood on the jacket but decided she wanted him to know she could take the weather.
“Do you have an address, a phone number for Mr. Neal?”
Walker recited a Wallingford address and Matthews wrote it down. He went back to the fish. This time, he hacked the head off with a single blow, then the tail. Then he minced the body, entrails and all, into pieces and swept it down the drain and the seagulls attacked the surface of the water with a frenzy.
“Remember, Mr. Walker, we have not connected Mr. Neal to any suspicious act. This is the first I’ve heard of Mr. Neal.
Are we clear on this?” Matthews worried where a younger brother might take this. He’d lost the family boat, the family business. What had she been thinking, implicating Neal? She hoped she might steer her way back out. “Women disappear, Mr. Walker. Tens of thousands every year. Some just up and walk away, from their families, their husbands, their boyfriends-their brothers. That’s right. Most show back up, a few days, a few weeks later. I’d like to think we can pretty much put Mary-Ann in that last category.”
He dragged a salmon in front of him with the knife’s sharpened tip. “If it is Mary-Ann,” he said matter-of- factly, “then all the more reason you’d better talk to Neal. Anna’s afraid of heights.”
“Acrophobic?”
“Whatever.”
She made note of the phobia on the page of her notepad.
As it rained harder, she again almost pulled up the jacket’s hood but decided against it once more. Rain drizzled down both their faces. His eyes hardened, making him seem much older than his twenty years.
“So what do we do next?” he asked.
“You tell us if Mary-Ann shows back up.” She passed him a business card that carried the office number and wrote LaMoia’s extension on the back. “I’m concerned I may have given you the wrong impression, Mr. Walker. About this being Mary-Ann. I apologize for that. I don’t want you doing something stupid-harming Mr. Neal in some way. All for nothing.”
“People get what they give in this world. It’s no concern of yours.”
“Sure it is. It’s every concern of mine.” She added, “Could you give me a phone number? Residential. Something other than work.”
“I told you, after Neal got into her head … I don’t have a phone.”
“An address?”
“I’m kind of between places right now, okay?”
“This is pretty miserable weather, this time of year.”
“There’s ways around it.”
“So this is where I reach you,” she said, looking around.
“What’s your work schedule right now?”
He ignored the question. “I asked what’s next, in terms of if I don’t happen to call you, if Anna doesn’t happen to show back up.”
“We’re attempting to identify the body.”
“And I should be part of that.”
She heard herself say, “We could arrange for you to view the body, but there’s absolutely no requirement for you to do so at this time. Mr. Neal could do it, if you’d prefer.”
Walker read meaning into her statement. “That help you get him? Watching him look at her? Something like that?”
“I’m not going to speculate on where the lead detective might take this. I am not the lead detective.”
“You are as far as I’m concerned,” he said.
Matthews wished she could start again.
He said, “If Neal looks at that body, then I want to be there.
I got any kind of rights like that, me being her brother and all?”
