hockey stick that was missing the blade. The dust rose in angry, ephemeral clouds, and the man kept whacking without seeming to notice us.
Poole lowered himself to his haunches, picked at a blade of grass by the mound. “You remember the Jeannie Minnelli case? Couple years back?”
Angie and I shrugged. It was sad how many horrible things you forgot.
“Nine-year-old girl,” Broussard said. “Disappeared riding her bike in Somerville.”
I nodded. It was coming back.
“We found her, Mr. Kenzie, Miss Gennaro.” Poole snapped the blade of grass between his fingers at both ends. “In a barrel. Soaked in cement. The cement hadn’t hardened yet because the geniuses who killed her had used the wrong ratio of water to cement in the mix.” He slapped his hands together, to clear them of dust or pollen or just because. “We found a nine-year-old’s corpse floating in a barrel of watery cement.” He stood. “Sound pleasant?”
I looked over at Broussard. The memory had blanched his face, and several tremors spilled down his arms until he put his hands in his pockets, tightened his elbows against the sides of his torso.
“No,” I said, “but if this goes wrong, you’ll-”
“What?” Poole said. “Lose my benefits? I’m retiring soon, Mr. Kenzie. You ever see what the policemen’s union can do to someone trying to take away the retirement money of a decorated officer with thirty years in?” Poole pointed a finger at us, wagged it. “It’s like watching starving dogs go after meat hung on a man’s balls. Not pretty.”
Angie chuckled. “You’re something else, Poole.”
He touched her shoulder. “I’m a broken-down old man with three ex-wives, Miss Gennaro. I’m nothing. But I’d like to go out my last case a winner. With luck, take down Chris Mullen and bury Cheese Olamon deeper in jail while I’m at it.”
Angie glanced at his hand, then up into his face. “And if you blow it?”
“Then I drink myself to death.” Poole removed the hand and ran it through the hard stubble on his head. “Cheap vodka. The best I can do on a cop’s pension. Sound okay to you?”
Angie smiled. “Sounds fine, Poole. Sounds fine.”
Poole glanced over his shoulder at the guy whacking his throw rug, then back at us. “Mr. Kenzie, did you notice that gardening spade on the porch?”
I nodded.
Poole smiled.
“Oh,” I said. “Right.”
I went back through the house and got the spade. As I came back through the living room, Helene said, “We outa here soon?”
“Pretty soon.”
She looked at the spade and the plastic gloves on my hands. “You find the money?”
I shrugged. “Maybe.”
She nodded, looked back at the TV.
I started walking again, and her voice stopped me at the doorway to the kitchen.
“Mr. Kenzie?”
“Yeah.”
Her eyes sparkled in the glow from the TV screen in such a way they reminded me of the cats’. “They wouldn’t hurt her. Would they?”
“You mean Chris Mullen and the rest of Cheese Olamon’s crew?”
She nodded.
On the TV a woman told another woman to stay away from my daughter, you dyke. The audience hooted.
“Would they?” Helene’s eyes remained fixed on the TV.
“Yes,” I said.
She turned her head sharply in my direction. “No.” She shook her head, as if doing so would make her wish come true.
I should have told her I was kidding. That Amanda would be fine. That she’d be returned and things would go back to normal and Helene could drug herself with TV and booze and heroin and whatever else she used to cocoon herself from just how nasty the world could be.
But her daughter was out there, alone and terrified, handcuffed to a radiator or a bedpost, electrical tape tied around the lower half of her face so she couldn’t make any noise. Or she was dead. And part of the reason for that was Helene’s self-indulgence, her determination to act as if she could do whatever she chose and there’d be no consequence, no opposite and equal reaction.
“Helene,” I said.
She lit a cigarette, and the match head jumped around the target several times before the tobacco ignited. “What?”
“Are you getting all this finally?”
She looked to the TV, then back at me, and her eyes were moist and pink. “What?”
“Your daughter was abducted. Because of what you stole. The men who have her don’t give a shit about her. And they might not give her back.”
Two tears rolled down Helene’s cheeks, and she wiped at them with the back of her wrist.
“I know that,” she said, her attention back on the TV. “I’m not stupid.”
“Yes you are,” I said, and walked out to the backyard.
Standing in a circle around the mound, we blocked it from the view of any neighboring row houses. Broussard pushed the spade into the dirt and overturned it several times before we saw the wrinkled top of a green plastic bag appear.
Broussard dug a little more, and then Poole looked around and bent over, pulled at the bag, and wrenched it free from the hole.
They hadn’t even tied the top of the bag, just twisted it several times, and Poole allowed it to revolve in his hand, the green plastic crinkling as the tight lines spread apart at the neck and the bag grew wider. Poole dropped it to the ground and the top of the bag opened up.
A pile of loose bills greeted us, mostly hundreds and fifties, old and soft.
“That’s a lot of money,” Angie said.
Poole shook his head. “That, Miss Gennaro, is Amanda McCready.”
Before Poole and Broussard called in the forensics team and medical examiner, we shut off the TV in the living room and ran it down for Helene.
“You’ll trade the money for Amanda,” she said.
Poole nodded.
“And she’ll be alive.”
“That’s the hope.”
“And I have to do what again?”
Broussard lowered himself to his haunches in front of her. “You don’t have to do anything, Miss McCready. You just have to make a choice right now. Us four here”-he waved his hand at the rest of us-“happen to think this might be the right approach. But if my bosses find out I plan to do it this way, I’ll get suspended or fired. You understand?”
She half nodded. “If you tell people, they’ll want to arrest Chris Mullen.”
Broussard nodded. “Possibly. Or, we think, the FBI might put the capture of the kidnapper before your daughter’s safety.”
Another half nod, as if her chin kept meeting an invisible barrier on its way down.
Poole said, “Miss McCready, the bottom line is, it’s your decision. If you want us to, we’ll call this in right now, hand over the money, and let the pros handle it.”
“Other people?” She looked at Broussard.
