First Victim

‘‘I don’t see any fireflies,’’ she informed him.

‘‘Give it a minute,’’ he said. ‘‘Over toward the back fence.’’

She eyed the projector. ‘‘If we’d bought more carousels we wouldn’t have to load it each time.’’

‘‘Don’t use it enough to justify two carousels.’’

‘‘We should have the slides put onto video.’’

‘‘Then what would we use the projector for?’’ he asked.

She stared out into the lawn. ‘‘I don’t see them.’’

‘‘That’s what I was afraid of.’’

‘‘What are we looking at?’’

‘‘On her seventy-fifth birthday my mother gave each of us slides of old family photos.’’

‘‘I remember these.’’

‘‘Right.’’

‘‘Old, old family photographs.’’

‘‘Right. That’s what I said.’’ He got the projector up and running and focused the image of a gray-haired lady onto the overpainted door.

‘‘I love summer evenings,’’ she said. ‘‘The charcoal in the air, the fresh-cut grass. Shouldn’t ever take any of it for granted.’’

‘‘My mother’s mother,’’ he said. ‘‘She died in her sleep. I remember her clothes smelled like mothballs. Hair like cotton candy. But what sticks in my mind is that she died in her sleep.’’

‘‘That’s the cop in you. You’re always more concerned with how a person dies than how he lived.’’

He didn’t like the comment. He sensed she might apologize for it, and he didn’t want her doing that, and he wasn’t sure why. ‘‘I think it’s strange I’d remember that about her.’’

‘‘How’d your grandfather die?’’

‘‘No idea. They never told me, I guess. He came over first. He was the one who brought us here.’’ He fast- forwarded through a dozen slides. Liz wanted him to stop at a few, but he plowed through them with the determination of a man who knew where he was going.

He landed on a photograph, a sepia print, of a young boy of eighteen standing by the butt end of a huge fallen timber. He said, ‘‘We were Polish. My father called us Europeans.’’

‘‘This is about the container,’’ Liz stated. ‘‘This is about the women who died.’’

Boldt worked the projector through two more slides of his grandfather. ‘‘We all crossed an ocean at some point,’’ he observed. ‘‘Your people came in the early 1800s. Mine, during the Great War. You think our people would make it in now? All the qualifications and requirements?’’

‘‘Don’t do this to yourself.’’

‘‘Technically they died of malnutrition, but Dixie says that some kind of flu was a contributing factor. If they had lived longer, the flu might have killed them. How’s that for irony?’’

She pointed. ‘‘I think I saw one!’’ She craned forward. ‘‘I didn’t think we had fireflies!’’

‘‘Not over there. Those are those Christmas lights that they never take down.’’ He pulled off the carousel, leaving a blinding white box on the old painted door. Liz jumped out of her chair with the enthusiasm of a little girl and made hand shadows of birds flying. She wore shorts. Her legs were tan but too thin. She made a duck’s head and her voice changed to Donald Duck. Donald told him he worried too much. She wouldn’t have jumped up like that two years ago before the illness. She’d become unpredictable that way. He didn’t know what was coming next. She wouldn’t deprive herself of a single moment of joy. She seized each and every one unabashedly. He envied her that freedom, that allowance of youth. She was no longer painted shut.

‘‘Can you imagine leaving Christmas lights up all year?’’ she asked.

‘‘There ought to be an ordinance.’’

‘‘Always the cop.’’

He loaded the carousel with shots of a vacation they had taken years before.

‘‘If your grandfather had never made the crossing, we wouldn’t be here,’’ she said.

‘‘That’s what’s bugging me, I think. If those women had lived . . . At least for a while they would have had a legitimate chance at freedom.’’

‘‘They found a different kind of freedom,’’ she said.

He wasn’t going to go there. He wasn’t going to touch that one for anything.

CHAPTER 7

hat do we know?’’ Boldt asked LaMoia before the man ever sat down. Boldt’s office had been transformed into an art gallery, the present exhibition finger painting and crayon coloring by daughter Sarah and son Miles. He treasured each and every drawing, had invented titles for most; the scientists were wrong about the world spinning on an axis—it revolved around his two kids.

‘‘I been following up on that fabric. Spent the weekend with dockhands, Customs and my face in the Yellow Pages. That’s the part of this job you forget, Sarge. When you went up to Lieutenant you got your weekends back.’’

‘‘The polarfleece,’’ Boldt said.

‘‘Yeah, the bales we hauled out of that container along with the body bags,’’ LaMoia answered.

Boldt spoke with great but unfounded confidence, for he was only guessing. ‘‘There’s no bill of lading that can be connected to it. No record of the container number. No import company on record.’’

‘‘Two out of three ain’t bad, Sarge.’’

‘‘Where’d I miss?’’

‘‘Officially there’s no import company that we can tie to that container,’’ LaMoia corrected. ‘‘No paperwork—true enough. But unofficially?’’ When LaMoia got something right, which was more often than not, he enjoyed dragging out the success like a kid retelling an old joke he’s just heard for the first time. Bernie Lofgrin in the crime lab had the same bad habit of turning what could be a one-line answer into a ten-minute lecture. Boldt felt no obligation to egg him on by responding, so he waited him out. ‘‘After I struck out IDing that container, I decided to put the word out on the street. Nice and gentle like . . . nothing too severe. There’s an art to working the street, you

know?’’ he said, fishing for a compliment.

‘‘Uh-huh,’’ Boldt agreed.

‘‘It’s like lovemaking: You start slow and easy and let things develop of themselves.’’

‘‘Try to get around to your point sometime today, if possible.’’

LaMoia didn’t so much as flinch. He was on stage; he was performing. Nothing could rattle him. ‘‘So rather than make an issue out of this, I just let it be known that we would be interested in whosoever might be ordering polarfleece by the container load. Okay? I know it’s not Eddie Bauer or REI’cause I’ve already checked with them. Can’t be a mom-and-pop with that kind of quantity. So what the fuck, chuck?’’

‘‘John!’’ Boldt raised his voice enough to send the two-minute warning.

‘‘It wasn’t a snitch, Sarge—wasn’t no squirrel. The right snitch, and I coulda worked some Monopoly magic on him, you know? ‘Get out of jail for free,’ or something along those lines. Okay? Coulda come up with a name, a contact, something firm enough to squeeze by the neck and start choking. Okay?’’ He stopped talking. Stopped, and stood there, waiting to elicit some kind of response from his lieutenant, who sat impassively enough to allow another unsuspecting person to believe he had died there in the chair. Boldt would not, did not, move. He waited. LaMoia took this all in and finally understood that he was to blink first. ‘‘Part of me thinks we should contact I.I. before they contact us. Save ’em the trouble.’’

I.I.—Internal Investigation—a pair of initials that drove a heat rash to the back of the neck of even the most honest and upright soldier-in-blue. I.I. could stall careers, stop paychecks and cause months of consultation with