Last Call

Tracey swipes her tears with her palm. She gets up and clatters around the kitchen for a few minutes. She returns with a bowl of cherries.

'Noah hated cherries,' she says with a pale grin.

'In a pie, he'd have said, and wiggled his eyebrows like Groucho.'

'Yeah, yeah.' Tracey waves. 'He was all talk.'

The joking disappears and Tracey leans closer to Frank.

'Wasn't he? Did he ever cheat on me? I know cops can get laid like that—' She snaps her fingers. 'Did he ever—'

'Absolutely not.' Frank is shaking her head. 'He wouldn't have. He couldn't have, Trace. He loved you. Loved the kids too much. The guilt would've killed him.' Tracey sits back, and Frank throws in, 'Besides. You were a good wife. He didn't have any reason to go elsewhere.'

'I hope so. He was a good husband.'

They are quiet, fiddling with the cherries.

At length Tracey says, 'Did I ever tell you I can tie a cherry stem with my tongue?'

'Couple times. I ever show you a lesbian with a hard-on?'

Tracey bulges her cheek out with her tongue and Frank grins.

'I was so jealous of you when we were first married. He had such a crush on you.'

'Yeah.'

Noah had always been respectful with his ardor and Frank had gracefully ignored it. His passion eventually died for lack of fuel and what took its place was their friendship. Sitting here next to his wife, it occurs to Frank that Noah did have an affair. With her. Not a conventional one, surely, but an affair that endured all these years nonetheless. Tracey is watching her, and Frank knows she's seen the naked thought when she asks, 'Is there something I should know about that?'

'No. Never anything like that. You know that.'

Frank envies Tracey and Leslie their tears. She feels them churning inside her and wants to blurt how much Noah loved her and how much she loved him. How she took for granted that he'd always be there. Always interfering, always telling Frank what to do. Saying what she couldn't. And still can't.

Frank clamps her teeth together, but a quaver still escapes when she reminds Tracey, 'It's late. We've gotta work tomorrow.' She drains her glass and stands.

Tracey stands with her, taking Frank into a hug. 'You love him as much as I do.'

The tears make a final stand against their stony prison walls, but Frank is prepared, quelling the surge before it can rally. 'Maybe.' She shrugs. 'Different, but maybe.'

She kisses Tracey good-bye. It will be a long time before she comes back.

Chapter 15

The dumpsite hasn't changed. A useless, handwritten sign warns, NO GARBAGE. Crude paths transect the lot. Frank looks at a crime scene photo from the same angle it was taken. There's no path in the picture.

Frank steps into the cored ruin, checking it against a couple of pictures. It's gone now, but there was a mattress about ten feet from where the bodies were found. Frank thinks the perp dumped the kids on the ground, but that the woman took the time to arrange them properly. She'd have felt remorse, but he would have been trying to hustle her out. She wasn't familiar enough with the site to have him at least put the kids on the mattress. A guy like that wouldn't be secure enough to leave his wife alone for very long. They probably did everything together, so Frank assumes he's equally unfamiliar with what's behind the improvised walls. They probably know the dumpsite in passing but never stepped foot in it until they left the kids there. This reinforces Frank's suspicion that her perps live in the neighborhood and lead relatively respectable lives. They aren't junkies or loonies crawling around in abandoned buildings.

Frank wanders the lot in a grid. She picks her way around broken bottles and chunks of concrete. Dried weeds brush against her legs. Their seeds hitchhike on her socks and trousers. She wonders if there are ticks. Gail would know. She'd probably laugh at Frank's squeamishness, and for an instant Frank regrets the distance she's put between them.

Having walked the entire lot, she surveys it from different angles. The perp would have been vulnerable from the north where the lot faces the street, and from the house on the west overlooking the site. High fences on the east and south block the view. Frank knows that the house directly across the street was vacant when the Pryce kids were dumped. Not a bad gamble to dump two bodies here. Especially in a part of the city where no one minds anyone else's business, and if they do, they don't tell.

But why not farther away? Frank wonders. The perps were obviously mobile enough to get the kids here, so why not keep going and hide them really well? Organized offenders usually make some attempt to hide the bodies. The Pryce attempt was half-assed, leading again to the idea of two perps. Frank thinks the woman might have pleaded to leave the children close to home, in a place where they'd be found quickly. The thought of the children rotting and being eaten by animals might have been so disturbing that for once she argued with her man. He might have been distracted enough to cave. He would have been anxious to get rid of the bodies. If the abduction was as spontaneous as it seemed, he wouldn't have planned out a disposal site. The lot probably put a comfortable enough distance from where they lived, or from wherever they abducted the kids, while concealing the bodies in the rubble bought them time to clean up.

She is mindful as she walks that one of Ladeenia's shoes was found next to a sprung sofa. It appeared that the shoe had snagged off her foot in passing. Either the killer hadn't noticed or didn't care. Probably the latter as he was no doubt in a hurry and what evidence would there be in a shoe? But it tells Frank her perp is tall enough to carry Ladeenia so that her foot dangled at the height of the couch. It's also in the back of her mind that Ladeenia's panties were never found. Frank has thought about this.

Power-assertive rapists, as she has tentatively classified her perp, don't usually take trophies, but it's possible this is one of the ways her perp doesn't completely fit the profile. Frank's hope is that whoever killed Ladeenia kept her underwear. It's a long shot, she knows, and she mumbles, 'If wishes were horses ...'

Frank is so deep in thought that she reminds herself to ask Noah if Mrs. Pryce might know what was in Trevor's pockets. Then memory guts her like a switchblade. Her immediate reaction to the pain is fury. It mutates into helplessness. Frank swallows it down, all the hot little knives. She clenches her teeth and stares at a tag on the south fence. She will absolutely not lose it and certainly not here.

Noah was rarely in the office after the case went down. When she'd catch up to him, he'd explain this was where he'd been, probing inch by inch through garbage, dog shit and weeds, climbing up on rooftops to survey the scene from that vantage, sitting for endless hours amid the cold debris. This is where he'd been. And for Frank, this is where he still is. She's awed by how much she misses him.

Frank blinks hard, forging her composure on the anvil of deliberation. The transformation is made manifest— her jaw unclenches, shoulders drop and fingers relax. The effort is exhausting, but Frank disregards this too. Stoic the Magnificent is back and at the top of her game. She continues through her grids as if nothing has happened.

For the next few weeks Frank runs on alcohol, caffeine and a smoldering rage. Pacing the cage of her office, she is Blake's 'tiger, tiger burning bright.' Her detectives give her a wide berth. She can feel their edginess around her. Though they would never admit it, they are probably afraid of her, afraid of being in her line of fire if and when she should blow. And they're likely even more nervous that whatever Frank has might be contagious, so they keep their distance.

Frank helps. She does what she has to do in the office as quickly as possible then heads for Raymond Street. Unless she has a meeting or gets called to a homicide, she is gone all day. She has become a regular fixture in the neighborhood. The crazy-ass white bitch walking up and down the street late afternoons is such a familiar sight that the dopers smoking on stoops don't even bother hiding their chronic. The really perking ones might call out to her, but an ugly void in Frank's eye keeps them where they are.

She mad-dogs each house. One of them must have borne witness to Ladeenia and Trevor's abduction. She curses that she can't get wood to speak. Prowling the sidewalk day after day, she waits for the houses to yield their secrets. She can't envision what the sign, the clue, will look like, yet she walks and waits for the burning bush that will crack the case. When it doesn't appear, she's not disappointed. Burning bushes work on their own schedule.