“All’s I want is to marry her.”
“And she’s already said yes. So?”
“The problem is your brother. He calls her three times a day, trying to talk her out of it. It’s pretty clear he despises me.”
“Frankie doesn’t like any kind of change, period.”
“He’s got her all upset and now she’s thinking of calling off the wedding, just to keep him happy.” His deep sigh ended on what sounded close to a whimper, and he turned to stare at the booth across the aisle. At a toddler in a high chair who took one look at him and wailed. The mother shot Korsak a dirty look and pulled the baby into her arms. Poor Korsak, homely enough to scare small children who couldn’t see past his coarse exterior to the kind heart inside.
“It’s okay,” she said. “I’ll talk to Frankie.” If that didn’t work, she’d also give her brother a good whack upside the head.
His head lifted. “You’d do that for me? Really?”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“I don’t know. I got the idea you weren’t wicked crazy about me and your ma, you know. Getting it on.”
“I just don’t want to hear the sweaty details, okay?” She reached across the table and gave him an affectionate punch on the arm. “You’re cool, Korsak. And you make her happy. That’s all I care about.” She stood up. “I gotta get home. You okay now?”
“I love her. You know that.”
“I know, I know.”
“I love you, too.” He scowled and added: “But
“That I totally understand.”
She left him to his seafood platter and exited through the crowded bar. Just as she reached the door, she heard someone call out: “Rizzoli!”
It was retired Detective Buckholz, who had investigated Charlotte Dion’s disappearance nineteen years ago. He was sitting at his usual place at the counter, a glass of scotch in front of him. “I gotta talk to you,” he said.
“I’m on my way home.”
“Then I’ll walk out with you.”
“Could we talk tomorrow, Hank?”
“No. I got something to say, and it’s really bugging me.” He drained his glass and slapped it down on the bar. “Let’s step outside. Too damn noisy in here.”
They walked out of Doyle’s and stood in the parking lot. It was a cool spring evening, the smell of damp earth in the air. Jane zipped up her jacket and glanced at her parked car, wondering how long this would take and whether she had time to pick up milk on the way home.
“You know your case against Patrick Dion and Mark Mallory? You got it wrong,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s been plastered all over the news. Two rich guys hunting girls together for twenty-five years. The whole country’s talking about it, wondering why we didn’t notice it. Why we didn’t stop them.”
“They were smart about it, Hank. They didn’t escalate and they didn’t get sloppy. They managed to stay in control.”
“Patrick Dion had alibis for some of those disappearances.”
“Because they took turns snatching the girls. Mallory abducted some of them, Dion took the others. We’ve already found six bodies on Dion’s property, and I’m sure we’ll find others.”
“But not Charlotte’s. I guarantee you won’t find her there.”
“How do you know?”
“When I worked that case, I didn’t do a half-assed job, okay? It may have been nineteen years ago, but I remember the details. Last night, I pulled out my old notes, just to be sure of my facts. I
“Okay, so you’re right about that detail. It’s easy to confirm.”
“I’m also right about Mark Mallory. He couldn’t have snatched Charlotte, either, because he had an alibi, too. He was visiting his mother. She’d had a stroke a year earlier, and she was in a rehab hospital.”
She eyed him in the fading daylight. Buckholz was defending his own record, so he couldn’t possibly be objective. Judging by his wasted face, his frayed shirt, retirement had not been kind to him. He practically lived at Doyle’s, as if only there, surrounded by cops, did he feel alive again. Useful again.
“You think you can just brush me off? I was a
“Because he said he was visiting his mother? Come on, Hank. You can’t take his word, or his mother’s. She would have lied to protect her own kid.”
“But you can trust the medical record.”
“What?”
He reached into his jacket and pulled out a folded paper, which he thrust at her. “I got that from Barbara Mallory’s hospital chart. It’s a photocopy of the nurses’ notes. Look at the entry for April twentieth, one PM.”
Jane scanned down to what the nurse had written at that time.
“At one PM,” said Buckholz, “Charlotte Dion was with her school group in Faneuil Hall. The teachers first noticed her missing around one fifteen. So tell me how Mark Mallory, who’s sitting in his mom’s hospital room twenty-five miles away, manages to snatch his stepsister off a street in Boston only fifteen minutes later?”
Jane read and reread the nurse’s entry. There was no mistaking the date and time. This is all wrong, she thought.
Except it wasn’t. It was there in black and white.
“Stop making it look like I screwed up,” said Buckholz. “It’s obvious that your two perps didn’t take Charlotte.”
“Then who did?” Jane murmured.
“We’ll probably never find out. I’m betting it was just some guy who saw her and made an opportunistic grab.”
She drove home with the photocopied page on the seat beside her and thought about the odds. Two killers in her family, and Charlotte gets snatched by an unrelated stranger? She pulled into her apartment parking space and sat brooding, not yet ready to walk into the noise and the chaos of motherhood. She thought about what they knew for certain: that Dion and Mallory had been stalking and killing girls together. That they’d buried at least six bodies on Dion’s property. Had Charlotte discovered her father’s secret? Was that the real reason they had to dispose of her? Had it been arranged through a third party, so that both Patrick and Mark had solid alibis?
Jane massaged her scalp, overwhelmed by the questions. Once again, the mystery revolved around Charlotte. What she knew and when she learned about it. And with whom she shared it. She thought of the last photos ever taken of Charlotte, at the funeral of her mother and stepfather. She remembered how Charlotte had been flanked by her father and Mark. Surrounded by enemies and unable to escape.
Jane sat up straight, suddenly struck by the answer that should have been obvious from the beginning.
THIRTY-EIGHT
