around neck…panties on floor with lipstick stain above crotch (used as gag?)…sperm in V’s mouth…crumpled tissues on floor smeared with semen, lipstick…” “11/22/63…Grove St., West End…63…blood…blood covers entire head, face and ears…slight injuries to external genitalia…no sperm in vagina…manual and ligature strangulation… classical LP (Sibelius) still turning…tied spread-eagle to chair…posed, facing door…”
Already Michael knew he did not have the stomach for this sort of work. He could not live with months of that shrieking woman in his mind’s eye. It had been a mistake to let Byron and Wamsley talk him into this.
He slipped the photos of the last victim out of their envelope. The old woman in the West End, the Sibelius fan. My God, what did you go through?
Somewhere there was a murder book for Michael’s father, too. Buried in a file at BPD Homicide. No doubt it contained the same sort of photographs, of Joe Daley, Sr., lying dead. It was a scene Michael had imagined a thousand times. He had created for himself a still life, a formal composition of a few elements arranged in a painterly way: body, scally cap, pavement. But had he got it right? The body-had the old man sprawled, or curled, or crumpled? Michael pictured him lying stiff as a fallen tree, a carryover of the distinctive toy-soldier posture Joe Senior had had in life. There would be a tight shot of the face, too, to document the victim’s identity. What had his expression been? Grimaced or peaceful? One cheek on the pavement, or looking straight up to the sky?
In his fingers, Michael adjusted the photo of the murdered old woman in the West End. My God, what did you go through?
He wanted out. He’d tell Wamsley, maybe tomorrow, but soon. He just wasn’t cut out for this work. He’d had enough of murder books.
12
The night lieutenant in Station Sixteen was a white-haired, florid man. He had a long nose but his every other feature was weak, a combination that gave his face the snouted look of certain rodents or streamlined locomotives. This lieutenant-his name does not matter here-was among the last of the generation of cops that joined the force during the Boston police strike of 1919, when standards were not so much lowered as thrown out entirely. These men were always at a disadvantage in their relationships with other cops, who regarded them as second-rate and incorrigibly lazy, if not scabs. There was something fraudulent about them. They were not quite cops. The wave of young men that poured into the BPD after World War II was particularly disdainful. The young guys were in a hurry. They had a lot of time to make up for. They had fought in the war, then come home and got married and set up house and passed the police exam-only to find their path blocked by these indolent potbellied old men who, if they could be counted on for anything, dependably sought out the least taxing duty in the least busy precincts. Of course there were lazy and second-rate cops among the younger generation, too, and decent cops among the 1919 strikebreakers, but the perception was settled. So, to deflect it, the 1919 men often adopted a showy scrupulousness about the military formalities of BPD life, the saluting and yes-sirring. That sort of punctilio drove the young guys up the fucking wall. They had done their share of saluting, and done it when it counted. But the night lieutenant was positively Prussian in this regard, and it showed in the way he relished the roll call before each shift.
He read out a few advisories. There had been several purse snatches on Boylston Street, and homosexuals loitering in the Public Garden. The men were to remember that the “Strangler corps”-properly called the Tactical Patrol Force, a police unit formed to calm the mounting public hysteria-would be appearing at certain calls. Finally, he called the men to attention and strolled among them as they held up their notebooks and call-box keys for inspection. He marched back to the podium and returned the cops’ lethargic salute with a smarter one of his own. And the whole thing was about to break up, the men about to head out to their beats, when the lieutenant seemed to recall one last thing. “Wait, wait! Sit! I nearly forgot the most important case we have!” He reached into his coat and produced, grandly, an envelope. Inside was a note composed of letters cut from magazines and pasted to the page, a prototypical ransom note. “We have a missing person case, a missing child. Let me see now.” He put on his reading glasses. “‘i H a V E T A kE n Y OuR L O R d a N d mEs S ia H h os T A Ge.’”
The room broke up.
“‘h Is bl OOd bE up ON J O se P h Da L EY.’”
In the back of the room, Joe groaned. He had been suffering already. Bone-tired from working last-halfs. Fish was dogging him to pay off his bookie tab. There was a woman in Brookline who kept calling and wouldn’t get lost, and now she was threatening to call Joe’s wife and spill the whole story. Worse, he was squashed into his uniform pants, which Kat had let out as much as the remaining material would allow. And he was choking on the stiff white collar that he’d crafted years before from a cheap plastic belt, an old cops’ trick to spare their wives from scrubbing the collars of their uniform shirts every night-but he’d made this one when he still wore a seventeen-inch collar. And now this.
The lieutenant basked in the laughter. He was more often the butt of the joke. “The missing child is described as follows. Height: twenty inches. Hair: none. Age: approximately two thousand years, give or take. Last seen wearing a diaper and blanket and emitting a strange heavenly glow.”
The lieutenant had to pause until the laughing subsided.
“The boy’s father-hold on, fellas, hold on now-the boy’s father is a very powerful man. I can vouch for that: I used to be an altar boy-I worked for the guy.”
Joe slouched, tugged the brim of his hat down over his eyes. He smiled defensively.
“Officer Daley,” the lieutenant called. Of course Joe had not lost his rank, but it was no time to quibble. “Shall I send this case up to the detectives?”
“No, sir.”
“You have a suspect then, I trust?”
“Oh yes I do.”
“And who might the…malefactor be?”
“I’d rather not say.”
“Alright then, Daley. Just get this poor child back. His birthday’s coming up.”
Standing guard on the Common that night, the baby Jesus’s vacant straw bed inspired in Joe a single thought: Kill Ricky. Kill that fuckin’ little prick. He paced. Skinny little shit. Kill him, wake him up, then kill him again. The weather had warmed up the last few days and most of the snow had melted, but Joe wouldn’t have felt the cold anyway. He wouldn’t need a shot to warm himself up and he wouldn’t be hiding out in no hotel lobby because his anger at his dickhead little brother could have melted the North fucking Pole. His hands hung bucket-heavy at the ends of his arms. There was twitchy energy loose in his shoulders, his triceps. Ricky just loved making Joe look like a fool and a fuckup, he always fucking had. But it was okay because this time-this time-Joe was going to kick Ricky’s ass but good A woman screamed. Somewhere.
The trees rustled.
Joe rucked up his sleeve to check his watch: 11:50.
The scream was choked off. Distant.
Joe listened-there it was again-and he was already running.
A third scream, a panicky shriek: “No! Get away! Get-!”
And already Joe’s legs were driving him, arms pumping, mouth chuffing, down the Hill, down Tremont toward Scollay Square, the Square already beginning to vanish building by building, street by street, the whole city dematerializing like a dream, different every time you saw it, disorienting Another yelp, short, softer, a chirrup.
He was running so fast now it felt like one long fall, felt like he had to keep throwing his legs forward just to keep from spilling face-first on the street.
There was a couple on the street, the man pointing, “That way!”
Down Bromfield. A clatter, from an alley.
And there it was, this sudden tableau: A guy, no, a giant, gaunt and gawky but towering. He had a girl pinned against the wall, one hand fisted around her neck, the other exploring under her coat, between her legs. The girl’s feet wavered a few inches off the ground. One shoe had fallen off.
“Hey!”
The giant turned and glared, confused then angry, offended at the cop for intruding.
