Quirk shook his head. 'So we're right back to knowing nothing.'
'He did know your home address,' I said.
'Like I said, it's in the book.'
'But not the Boston book,' I said. 'He had to know to look in the South Suburban listing.'
'It's an easy guess,' Quirk said. 'An Irish name, not living in the city, you look for him on the Irish Riviera.'
'Sure, but it means he went to some trouble,' I said. 'If he wasn't a cop, and didn't know you, it means he had to find out who the officer in charge was, and then track you down through phone books or whatever, all to tell you he's a cop.'
'Give him a feeling of power,' Quirk said. 'Lotta psychos get to feel powerful by learning stuff about the cop that's chasing them.'
Quirk stood quietly by the board for a moment. Then he put the chalk down and walked to my desk and sat in my client's chair. My office window was open an inch and the sound of traffic filtered up from Berkeley and Boylston streets. I looked over my shoulder out the window and glanced automatically at the window where Linda Thomas used to be.
There was a set of pastel Levolor blinds in there now.
The rain still slid down the window as it had all week. There were flood warnings in western Mass. Clouds hung around the top of the Hancock building, and places where the storm drains had clogged, the water ran over the curbing onto the sidewalk.
I looked back at Quirk. He was staring at his empty coffee cup as he turned it slowly in his thick fingers.
'How about ballistics?' I said.
'Bullets are from the same gun, but we don't know what gun,' Quirk said.
'How about taking a sample from every cop?' I said.
'Commissioner says no. Says the union would raise hell. Says it unjustly casts suspicion on every officer, and would impair the function of the department, which is, as you know, to serve and protect our citizens.'
Quirk gave the coffee cup a sudden sharp spin with his fingers and scaled it into my wastebasket.
'Probably wouldn't use his own piece anyway,' Quirk said. . The tension in his groin was intense.
'She used to compete with me,' he said.
'Your mother?' the shrink said.
'Yes. She used to want to shoot baskets with us, stuff like that.'
'How old were you?'
'Little kid, 8, 9 maybe.'
'And so it was hard to compete with her,' the shrink said.
'Well, when I was little.'
'Difficult for a child to compete with an adult,' the shrink said.
'Well, hell, yes, if you're a real little kid it's hard, even if it's a woman.'
The tension in his pelvis buzzed along the nerve paths. His breath was shallow.
'But pretty soon, you know, pretty soon I got older and then she couldn't compete with me.'
'At least not in basketball,' the shrink said.
He'd caught them once, at night, when he went to the bathroom. He heard his mother's voice and stopped and listened. The door wasn't closed entirely.
'For God's sake, George, you're too drunk to even do it.'
He heard the bed rustle and the springs jounce.
'What am I supposed to do, rub it until you remember what it's for?' she said.
His father's voice was a mumble. There was more movement. He edged closer to the door. And then it was suddenly wide open and his mother was there naked.
'You dirty little pig, 'she said. He could remember the feeling, the tightness in his stomach, as she dragged him by the hair back to his room and slammed the door. He heard the knob rattle, and when he tried to open it he couldn't. She had tied it shut. He still needed to go to the bathroom and he sat on the floor by the door, needing to go and filled with dread and something else he didn't understand, and cried.
'Momma, momma, momma.'
I was in my office thinking about whether to go out for a second cup of coffee when Hawk came in without knocking and sat in my client chair and put his Air Jordans on the edge of my desk. He was wearing starched jeans and a double-breasted leather jacket that looked like it had been made from the hide of an Arabian armadillo. He had two coffees in a paper sack. Well, why not. I wouldn't want to offend him.
'Tony Marcus called me today,' Hawk said. 'Wanted to know if you and me would have lunch with him.'
'Lunch?' I said. 'With Tony Marcus? What's on for tonight, dinner and dancing with Imelda Marcos?'
