guess Battaglia wants to stick his great big Roman nose in, too.'
'What are you going to do about Frank Shea?' Mercer asked. 'He's not going to want to come to the table, Alex. Saturday night's fiasco with Kiernan, the closing of the bar, Jimmy Dylan's affair with Amber Bristol-and now it's all over the news that the bouncer at Ruffles is a sexual predator?'
I rubbed my eyes. 'I'll think more clearly tomorrow. I've got to be able to convince Shea that we need Troy Rasheed's employment application-what name he used, what address he gave.'
'Coop, we don't even know what the relationship is between Kiernan and Troy. Kiernan admitted to us that he cleaned out Amber's apartment himself. And now we find some of her things at Rasheed's father's house,' Mike said. 'If the Dylans have been paying him off the books, chances are they never bothered with the State Liquor Authority and a proper record check. I bet they just hoped that strong, scarylooking creep would show up at the right time every night to keep the rowdy twerps in line.'
I remembered the look of disgust on Kiernan's face when he claimed to us he had thrown out some of Amber's 'weird, freaky stuff.' He and Rasheed appeared to have nothing in common on the surface, but something had linked them both to the deaths of two young women who disappeared on a single weekend in August.
The late hour and steady downpour seemed to lighten the traffic, and it was close to midnight when I saw the first signs for the George Washington Bridge. Mike was cruising at eighty now, southbound on the Jersey Turnpike.
'Aren't you taking the bridge?' It would be a faster way to get to my apartment than either of the tunnels that crossed into Midtown and Lower Manhattan.
'No backseat driving, Coop. We've got one more stop. That last java wired me up.'
'Have mercy, man. Vickee's going to board me in the hound hotel before this case is over.' Mercer tried to straighten out his arms, stretching to wake himself up, but there wasn't enough room in the car. 'Where to?'
'It's summertime, isn't it? And you guys have hardly been to the beach.'
'Slow down and let me out,' I said. 'I'd rather walk. I want to go home. Why do I have the feeling I'm not going to enjoy this?'
'Anything I offer you is better than going home to an empty bed. There'll be no pleasant dreams with that image of Mr. Rasheed dancing in your brain.'
'I take it you're planning to rap on Jimmy Dylan's door,' Mercer said. 'You've got the address?'
'It's the one Kiernan gave me when I booked him.'
'Seriously, Mike. I'm out of this car the minute you slow down. He's got a lawyer, damn it,' I said.
'He's also got a father and lots of little siblings.'
We had left the turnpike and were on the Goethals Bridge, about to cut across Staten Island and over the massive Verrazano to loop onto the Belt Parkway.
'Mike's not wrong,' Mercer said, turning his head to talk to me. 'Jimmy Dylan's got more problems than he can handle. You think he lost control at the squad the other night. He opens his paper tomorrow and reads that his boy is linked to a convicted rapist? To the murders of three women?'
'A convicted rapist who happens to be a black man? He'll thank me for coming to tell him myself.'
'What do you mean by that?' I asked.
'Breezy Point is not only private, it's also lily-white. I don't think social diversity is Jimmy Dylan's strong suit.'
'I'll be waiting in the car with you, Alex,' Mercer said. 'I'd probably be about as welcome as one of Wilson Rasheed's black bears.'
Thirty-five minutes later, we went through the toll plaza on the Marine Parkway Bridge, the gateway to Rockaway Beach.
Mike drove slowly, pausing at each corner in the quiet community, looking for street names. There were small groups of teenagers walking along the roadway, talking and laughing, oblivious to the rain, and several locals out with their dogs. It was shortly after midnight and lights were still on in many of the homes.
We turned off at Beach 221st Street, near the Surf Club, and Mike looked for numbers on the houses.
'That's it,' he said. 'That big old rambling job, right on the water.'
Three houses stood side by side, facing the ocean. Two of them were well lighted, upstairs and down, including the one in the middle of the cluster, to which Mike was pointing.
He got out of the car and walked down a path bordered by huge hydrangeas. I couldn't see or hear anything, but Mercer and I figured that when Mike didn't return he'd been admitted to the house.
'The water looks mighty rough,' Mercer said, turning on the radio to check the track of the rainstorm that had been predicted for the next day. 'Hope that damn thing blows out to sea instead of hitting us.'
'They downgraded it from a hurricane, didn't they?'
'That's the last I heard.'
We were talking through the case with each other when a screen door slammed on the back porch. Two girls who appeared to be teenagers came out together, and a man's voice called after them.
'Shauna? Damn it, girl, get back in here.'
'I'm just walking Erin home, Dad. I'll be right back.'
Mercer and I watched as they passed in front of our parked car. The one called Erin removed a joint from her pants pocket, lighted it, and then passed it to Shauna, who took a few drags before they resumed their walk.
They continued on their way until they were out of sight, but the distinctive sweet smell of the marijuana wafted through the car window in the heavy night air.
A few minutes later, Shauna came back down the street by herself, the hood of her rain jacket drawn tightly around her face. She stopped in the driveway behind her house for a few more tokes before going back in.
'Take a shot at her, Alex. You've got nothing to lose.'
I hesitated for several seconds, then opened the car door. When I shut it behind me, the girl turned her head to check me out and threw her cigarette to the ground.
'Shauna Dylan?'
She didn't move, but she didn't answer either.
'Are you Shauna Dylan?'
'Yeah. And you're the police, aren't you?' She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and I could see that she had been crying.
'I'm not a cop. I'm with the DA's office. And yes, I'm here with Detective Chapman.'
'Well, Kiernan's not home, if that's what you've come for.'
'I'm glad to hear that, actually.'
'Right,' she said. She was steadying herself with the handrail on the steps, twisting her body to look at me, as though she was stoned or had been drinking too much. 'You're totally full of shit. You've wrecked Kiernan's life, you know. You've wrecked his life over what? My father's mad as all hell at him, he won't let my mother come back from Ireland till all this stuff in the newspapers calms down, and everything they've both put into Ruffles will be gone. Completely gone.'
She was crying now, reaching down with one hand to lower herself onto the top step of the porch, beneath the roof that shielded her from the rain. I took a couple of steps in her direction.
'Stay away from me, okay? I don't even have a family anymore. The detective thinks Kiernan's a murderer and now my mother's threatening to leave my father because she's so mortified about that-that whore. We're all sick over this, and Frank Shea won't even tell my dad where Kiernan's gone. Now I'm glad. I don't want him to come back here so you can try to make a fool out of him again.'
Shauna pulled herself up to walk to the back door of the house.
'You reek of marijuana, Shauna. Unless your father doesn't mind that.'
She stopped in place, swaying a bit from side to side. She sniffed a few times, first the air and then her hands. 'You gonna lock me up, too? You gonna lock me up 'cause I'm wasted-'cause my whole family is falling apart?'
'I didn't want my friend to arrest your brother on Saturday. We had a big fight about it, too.'
She eyed me warily now.
'We really didn't come here to talk to Kiernan tonight. Mike Chapman wanted to tell your father some things we found out today. About somebody else. About a man Kiernan knows who may have killed the three women who've disappeared.'
