concentration, I’m sure we and everything else vanished from the room.
“Mr. Ryerson,” Beatrice said. “I’m afraid we haven’t met.”
Her small hand disappeared in his long one. “Neal Ryerson, ma’am. I’m with the Justice Department.”
Beatrice glanced at Matt, lowered her voice. “So this is about Amanda?”
Ryerson shrugged. “We wanted to check a few things with your husband.”
“What things?”
Ryerson had been clear before we left the diner that the last thing we wanted to do was spook Lionel or Beatrice. If Beatrice notified her husband that he was under suspicion, he could disappear for good, and Amanda’s whereabouts might just go with him.
“Be honest with you, ma’am. The Justice Department has what’s called the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. We do a lot of follow-up work with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, Nation’s Missing Children Organization, and their databases. General stuff.”
“So this isn’t a break in the case?” Beatrice kneaded her shirttail between her fingers and the heel of her palm, looked up into Ryerson’s face.
“No, ma’am, I wish it were. As I said, it’s just some basic follow-up questions for the database. And because your husband was first on the scene the night your niece disappeared, I wanted to go over it with him again, see if there was anything he might have noticed-a small thing here or there, say-which might produce a fresh way of looking at this.”
She nodded, and I almost winced to see how easily she bought Ryerson’s lies.
“Lionel helps a friend of his who sells antiques. Ted Kenneally. He and Lionel have been friends since grade school. Ted owns Kenneally Antiques in Southie. Every month or so, they drive to North Carolina and drop some off in a town called Wilson.”
Ryerson nodded. “The antiques center of North America, yes, ma’am.” He smiled. “I’m from those parts.”
“Oh. Is there anything I could help you with? Lionel will be back tomorrow afternoon.”
“Well, sure, you could help. Mind if I ask you a bunch of boring questions I’m sure you’ve been asked a thousand times already?”
She shook her head quickly. “No. Not at all. If it can help, I’ll answer questions all night. Why don’t I make some tea?”
“That’d be great, Mrs. McCready.”
While Matt continued to color, we drank tea and Ryerson asked Beatrice a string of questions that had long ago been answered: about the night Amanda disappeared, about Helene’s mothering skills, about those early crazy days after Amanda had first disappeared, when Beatrice organized searches, established herself as media contact, plastered the streets with her niece’s picture.
Every now and then Matt would show us his progress on the picture, the skyscrapers with rows of misaligned window squares, the clouds and dogs he’d added to the paper.
I began to regret coming here. I was a spy in their home, a traitor, hoping to gather evidence that would send Beatrice’s husband and Matt’s father to prison. Just before we left, Matt asked Angie if he could sign her cast. When she said of course, his eyes lit up and he took an extra thirty seconds finding just the right pen. As he knelt by the cast and signed his full name very carefully, I felt an ache creep behind my eyes, a boulder of melancholia settle in my chest at the thought of what this kid’s life would be like if we were right about his father, and the law stepped in and blew this family apart.
But still, the overriding concern remained strong enough to stanch even my shame.
Where was she?
Goddammit. Where was she?
Once we’d left, we stopped at Ryerson’s Suburban as he peeled the cellophane from another thin cigar, used a sterling silver cutter to snip the end. He looked back at the house as he lit it.
“She’s a nice lady.”
“Yes, she is.”
“Great kid.”
“He’s a great kid, yeah,” I agreed.
“This sucks,” he said, and puffed at the cigar as he held the flame to it.
“Yes, it does.”
“I’m going to go stake out Ted Kenneally’s store. It’s, what, like a mile from here?”
Angie said, “More like three.”
“I didn’t ask her the address. Shit.”
“There’s only a few antique stores in Southie,” I said. “Kenneally’s is on Broadway, right across from a restaurant called Amrheins.”
He nodded. “Care to join me? Could be the safest place for both of you right now with Broussard out there on the loose.”
Angie said, “Sure.”
Ryerson looked at me. “Mr. Kenzie?”
I looked back at Beatrice’s house, the yellow squares of light in the living room windows, thought of the occupants on the other side of those squares, the tornado they weren’t even aware of circling their lives, gathering strength, blowing and blowing.
“I’ll meet you guys.”
Angie gave me a look. “What’s up?”
“I’ll meet you,” I said. “I got to do something.”
“What?”
“Nothing big.” I put my hands on her shoulders. “I’ll meet you. Okay? Please. Give me some room here.”
After a long look in my eyes, she nodded. She didn’t like it, but she understands my stubbornness as she understands her own. And she knows how useless it is to argue with me at certain times, the same way I recognize those moments in her.
“Don’t do anything stupid,” Ryerson said.
“Oh, no,” I said. “Not me.”
It was a long shot, but it paid off.
At two in the morning, Broussard, Pasquale, and a few other members of the DoRights football squad left the Boyne. By the way they hugged in the parking lot, I could tell they’d heard about Poole’s death, and their pain was genuine. Cops, as a rule, don’t hug, unless one of them has gone down in the line.
Pasquale and Broussard talked for a bit in the parking lot after the others drove off, and then Pasquale gave Broussard a last hard hug, rapped his fists on the big man’s back, and they separated.
Pasquale drove off in a Bronco, and Broussard made his way with the careful, self-conscious steps of a drunk to a Volvo station wagon, backed out onto Western Avenue, and headed east. I stayed way back on the mostly empty avenue, and almost missed him when his taillights disappeared at the Charles River.
I speeded up because he could have turned onto Storrow Drive, cut over to North Beacon, or gone either east or west on the Mass Pike at that juncture.
From the avenue, as I craned my head, I picked up the Volvo as it slipped under a wash of light heading for the westbound tollbooths on the pike.
I forced myself to slow down and passed through the toll about a minute after he had. After about two miles, I picked up the Volvo again. It traveled in the left lane, doing about sixty, and I hung back a hundred yards and matched its speed.
Boston cops are required to live in the greater metro area, but several I know get around that by subletting their Boston apartments to friends or relatives while they live farther out.
Broussard, I discovered, lived way out. After over an hour and a departure from the turnpike onto a series of small dark country roads, we ended up in the town of Sutton, nestled in the shadows of the Purgatory Chasm Reservation and far closer to both the Rhode Island and Connecticut borders than it was to Boston.
When Broussard turned off into a steep, sloping driveway that led up to a small brown Cape, its windows
