Monk and Ainsworth stayed quiet, letting their unspoken question fill the silence. 'I'm afraid of them,' she murmured with muted shame. 'When I saw her picture, I told myself they'd find her. But not like that.'
Monk thrust his hands in his pockets. 'If the girl was Thuy Sen, by the time you saw her picture she was dead. All you could have done you're doing now.'
But not without a house call from us, he thought to himself. And maybe not if you'd called us when the big one pushed her through the door.
'It would help,' Monk said, 'if you could remember what the girl was wearing.'
The old white lady looked more grateful to him than she deserved to feel. 'A plaid skirt,' she answered. 'And a dark green sweater. As long as I live, I'll never forget.'
* * *
Monk and Ainsworth stood with a burly plainclothes cop in the squad room of the Bayview station. 'Shit,' Larry Minnehan said.
Monk shrugged. 'If the girl was Thuy Sen, she wasn't taking her usual route. You started looking where you should have.'
'I meant about this old lady. She damned well should have called us. Now all we've got is another fucking homicide.'
Monk nodded toward an oversize bulletin board on the cinder-block wall behind Minnehan. 'So tell me about the brothers Price.'
'They're fungible, man. Like a lot of these gangbangers.' Turning to the board, Minnehan contemplated roughly a hundred mug shots of young men organized by gang affiliation, with typed notations of their more salient characteristics—arrest records, whether they were in prison or dead, maybe even who had killed them. A wall of blank eyes staring from blank faces which were all black.
'This one's Payton,' Minnehan told Monk, pointing out a picture at the right side of the board.
Moving closer, Monk began committing the face to memory. It was more memorable than most: thin and handsome, close to refined, with a glint of irony rarely found in such photographs, whose subjects tended to prefer stone-cold indifference. 'Payton's the supposed mastermind,' Minnehan said. 'Runs a network of dealers.'
'Crack?'
'Natch. But I give him this—he's not hooked up with any gang. A true small businessman, with the kind of entrepreneurial spirit which makes this country great.'
Ainsworth studied the photograph. 'Not easy, down here.'
'Payton's a nervy bastard,' Minnehan responded. 'A real survivor. You know what dealing crack is like in the Bayview. A lot of scuffling and hustling on the street—fractious, paranoid, and violent. We're like the Balkans for black folks.'
Monk gave a short, mirthless laugh. 'How's Payton work his business?'
'The usual way. Buys powder cocaine from a dealer, in kilos, and then turns it into rocks.
'But his dealer's only going to sell powder in significant quantities. So there's economic pressure for Payton to keep selling enough rocks to buy the next batch of powder, even if he has to sell them on consignment.
'He sells through a franchise of twenty or so street dealers—juveniles, people someone vouches for, anyone he thinks he can trust at all. That insulates him from the danger of hanging out on the corner drinking beer and mingling with the crackheads, maybe getting killed for the rocks or cash in his pocket.' Minnehan tugged his Notre Dame sweatshirt down over the small protuberance of his belly. 'You can sell a dozen rocks for maybe one fifty. Payton will want the money up-front. But if someone says he's short till Monday, and Payton's under pressure, he'll maybe have to trust him. For that you need muscle, a collector. Just what Rennell was born for.'
Listening, Monk felt a weary familiarity, the inevitable arc in the lives of the two boys who had grown up across from Flora Lewis. Crack was the first business kids learned in the Bayview. It is tough to sell powder cocaine on the street—the customers are cynical, and can't be sure what they're getting isn't cut with sugar or salt. But any twelve-year-old can take powder, combine it with baking soda and water, then cook it into rocks a buyer can sample and know—from the first rush hitting his bloodstream—that it's the real deal. And so kids become both dealers and users—smoking crack for pleasure, dispensing crack for business, and trading crack for sex for the rest of what is likely to be their very brief lives.
'Payton have a girl?' Monk asked.
'Nice-looking boy like that? Always. Plenty of coke whores to go around, even if you look like a fucking gargoyle. Some of these sweet young things would suck the chrome off a trailer hitch.'
'So what they need with a nine-year-old Cambodian girl?'
Minnehan shrugged. ' 'Cause this whole fucking place is depraved, with a capital D. No rules, no limits, no respect for life or anything which might grow up to have a pussy. Add the crazy sexual rush which comes from smoking crack and see if guys like Payton and Rennell bother with these fine distinctions.'
The mention of Rennell reminded Monk that he had not seen the man who, if Flora Lewis was right, had led Thuy Sen to her death. 'Show me Rennell,' he directed.
Minnehan jabbed at a picture. 'Right here. Piss-poor protoplasm for sure.'
Monk took it in. Not much to see, he thought—a round, expressionless face, eyes even deader than normal.
'Let's run 'em in,' he said. 'Both of them.'
FIVE
ON THE WAY TO PICK UP PAYTON AND RENNELL, THEY CRUISED down what passed in Bayview for the business district, Third Street—do-shops, thrift shops, liquor stores, check-cashing businesses, barbecue and soul food restaurants, corner stores run by Arabs too smart to live
