Smoke

Grimm turned the laptop around so that they could see the satellite photo of the New Day Farms.

“I don’t know what you’re planning here, my friends. But let’s sit down and have a little talk about what you think you know about The New Day.”

Twenty-Three

Is it her? How do you know it’s her?”

Baby Boy Mendez kept asking the same two questions as they drove him from the Alphabet City apartment he’d shared with his sister to the morgue at Belleview Hospital. It was like he’d been caught in some kind of hysterical loop since they showed up at his apartment and gave him the news. He’d been eating a Whopper and watching Sponge-Bob SquarePants on Nickelodeon when they’d entered the apartment, told him the body of a woman and her child had been found in the East River.

“We’ll need you to identify her, Baby Boy,” Evelyn told him quietly. “We’ll confirm her identity with dental records but that’ll take time. It’s going to be hard but you need to come and see if the woman we found is your sister.”

He’d looked at them, eyes moving back and forth between the two women as if he was looking for an expression that would tell him it was a joke or a mistake. Then he ran from them. They waited patiently as they listened to him throw up in the bathroom.

“What if you’re wrong?” Evelyn whispered to Jesamyn.

She put her hands in her pockets and rocked back on her heels, considering the question. Then, “He still needs to identify her.”

“He could do it from a photograph or on a video monitor.”

Jesamyn shook her head. She wanted Baby Boy Mendez to see his sister’s body and the body of his nephew. She wanted him to see what she suspected he had done to them. If she was wrong, well, she was unnecessarily traumatizing an innocent family member. And that would suck for him and for her; she’d feel very badly about it. She just didn’t think she was wrong.

Evelyn looked doubtful. She didn’t see it in Mendez. But Jesamyn saw a kind of childish rage, a jealousy over the baby who would soon be the focus of his sister’s life, leaving Baby Boy without a mother, in his mind anyway. The child who no one ever cared about enough to even name would be losing the only mother he’d ever known. He probably hadn’t meant to kill her. Or maybe he had. It didn’t much matter in the scheme of things.

In the car, she could still smell his vomit and the acrid odor of fear, sweat.

“Is it her? How do you know it’s her?”

She’d be doubting herself if he was wailing, accusing Jorge Alonzo of his sister’s murder. But he wasn’t doing any of those things. He was pale, the features on his face slack, his eyes shifting back and forth almost imperceptibly. To Jesamyn all of these things said guilt and fear, not grief, not terror over the fate of a loved one, not hope that the police were mistaken in their tentative identification of the body.

“That’s why we need you to make the positive ID, Baby Boy,” said Evelyn. “We could be wrong.”

Evelyn threw her a look and Jesamyn folded her arms. No one would ever ask a family member to ID a body as badly decomposed as Rosario Mendez’s and Jesamyn could see that Evelyn was sick over it. They could wind up getting sued, especially since this was technically no longer their case. It was a homicide case now.

“She never changed to go out to the clubs that night,” Jesamyn had said to Evelyn on the dock. “She stayed home.”

“Which contradicts what Baby Boy told us,” said Evelyn, watching the Medical Examiner’s van pull away.

“He pointedly told us that she had changed. That he saw what she’d been wearing when he left folded on her bed.”

Evelyn nodded.

“When Mount and I talked to him, he wavered back and forth between referring to her in the past and present tense,” Jesamyn went on when the other woman didn’t say anything.

“He did that with us, too. Wong thought it meant something.”

“I don’t think Alonzo cared enough about Rosario and their baby to bother killing them. I mean, what’s his motive? What does he have to gain?”

“He claimed the baby wasn’t his,” said Evelyn.

“So?” she said with a shrug. “That’s not a motive. She never asked him for anything, not even money, according to her friends.”

“So what are you suggesting?” Evelyn had asked, putting her hands in her pocket and shrugging against the cold.

“Let’s bring the brother in for the ID.”

Baby Boy started to sniffle as the three of them walked up the cold gray hallway. Until then, there had only been the sound of her and Evelyn’s heels, the squeaking of Baby Boy’s sneakers on the linoleum floors. The smell of death and chemicals was already strong and the morgue was still a few doors down. The fluorescent lights above buzzed.

“I don’t know if I can do this,” he said, coming to a stop. Jesamyn took a hard look at him. There was only fear there in his liquid brown eyes. He’d wrapped his arms around himself, was shifting from foot to foot.

“There’s no other way,” said Jesamyn. “I’m sorry.”

“One of her friends, maybe,” he suggested. “One of them could do it.”

Jesamyn shook her head. “You’re her next of kin, Baby Boy. It’s your job to do this for her. You’re all she has, now. The only one. She took care of you all your life; now you have to do this for her.” It was a bull’s-eye; she saw it as his face fell to pieces. His liquid brown eyes ran over and the tears started to fall. He doubled over, gripping his stomach as if he were in terrible pain.

“Oh, God,” he wailed. “I’m so sorry. Rosie, I’m so sorry. Oh, God. I miss her so much.” He dropped to his knees and Jesamyn was beside him.

“You were so jealous of that baby, weren’t you?” she whispered, putting her arm around him. He wailed harder. “You were so angry with her for betraying you, loving someone else as much as she loved you. More. He wasn’t even born yet and she already loved him more, didn’t she?”

He pushed Jesamyn away and leaned against the wall. “Get away from me,” he shrieked.

“There’s nothing like the love between a mother and her son,” said Jesamyn, standing, her voice low and sure now. “It can’t even compare to the love between a sister and her brother; it’s not the same.”

He released the most heartbreaking cry. “He was all she ever talked about,” he screamed. “The baby, the baby, her baby boy. I just wanted her to shut the fuck up about him. I was her baby boy. That’s my name.”

Jesamyn felt a stab of pity for him. Pity and disgust.

“She was in labor, wasn’t she, when you came home?” asked Evelyn, as if the thought had just occurred to her. “She needed you to take her to the hospital.”

Jesamyn shot her a look, afraid the shaking judgment in Evelyn’s voice would shut him down. Baby Boy was sobbing now, sliding down the wall until he was sitting on his haunches.

“She was in labor and you killed her,” said Evelyn with a shake of her head. “How did you do it?”

He stopped crying then. He wiped his eyes and his nose with the sleeve of his Rangers jersey. He issued a couple of shuddering breaths. Jesamyn was sure he had realized that he was on the brink of confessing, that he’d come back to himself.

“I hit her in the back of the head with a bat,” he said, quietly. “She never even saw it coming. She never knew.”

Evelyn let go of a sigh and bowed her head. Baby Boy’s face went blank then and he glanced up at the ceiling for a second.

When he looked down, he said quietly, “I want my lawyer.”

The homicide guys tried to take the collar but Evelyn fought them for it. It was her case from the beginning and she wanted the arrest. She wasn’t going to let someone stroll in during the last round and take the credit for all her weeks of late nights and dead ends. It didn’t give Jesamyn any satisfaction to put the cuffs on Baby Boy and