Detective Sturgis is around, see if he’d be kind enough to take the rest of Mr. Lacey’s statement. Otherwise, I’ll do it when I get back.’ To Lacey he added, ‘Make sure you let us know where we can find you. Here’s a card with my number on it. We may have to talk to you again. Do you understand?’
‘Aye, aye, Captain.’ He threw McCabe a shaky salute and staggered toward Comisky’s car. ‘Canadian whiskey’s not so bad, y’know,’ he said, looking sadly at his now empty bottle. ‘It’s not Irish, but it’s not bad.’ The homeless man climbed unsteadily into the back of the car.
Before Comisky could follow, McCabe said softly, ‘Make sure you check his pockets for a gold earring or anything else he might have picked up here.’
The patrol officer nodded, slid behind the wheel, turned the key, and opened all four windows before starting off.
Bill Jacobi and Terri Mirabito were completing their tasks. There didn’t seem to be much more McCabe could do. He approached one of the other uniformed patrol officers. ‘Keep the reporters out until the body’s picked up and the area’s clear — and don’t listen to any of their bullshit.’
‘Don’t worry, Sergeant. I’ve heard it all before.’
McCabe and Maggie Savage got into Maggie’s Crown Vic for the short ride back to the office. ‘Do you want to join Sturgis interviewing Lacey?’ McCabe asked.
‘No. There’s no way he’s the killer. I’m sure Carl can get whatever else there is to get. I just hope he doesn’t start doing his bullying Carl shit. Lacey’s got enough problems already.’
‘Well, Maggie, that’s very thoughtful of you. Maybe, instead of interviewing Lacey, we should just get him a bottle of Jameson’s and ask him to read us some more Yeats.’
Maggie didn’t laugh. ‘You know, McCabe, I love you dearly, but sometimes you’re really an asshole,’ she said. ‘Anyway, I called Katie’s mother and stepfather when I saw the news van pull up. I didn’t want them hearing about their daughter’s death from News Center 6. So I told them, as gently as I could, that I thought we’d found her and that we needed to talk to them again.’
‘How’d they take it?’
‘About what you’d expect. The mother broke down sobbing. Couldn’t talk. Just wanted to know if I was sure it was Katie. I told her I was, and she put the stepfather on the phone. He was quieter. They agreed to come downtown and talk to me when I told him how important starting fast could be on cases like this. We’ll see if maybe they can remember anything new.’
‘Okay. Just drop me off. I want to take another look at the missing persons file on Katie. Then I’m going to hit the computer. See if anybody’s reported anything similar.’
Maggie pulled into the curb in front of 109 Middle Street, the PPD’s small headquarters building on the edge of the Old Port.
‘You’ve got the world-famous memory. Anything ring a bell?’
McCabe didn’t answer. He just sat staring out the windshield. A few raindrops were splattering against the glass. Why the hell would anybody neatly and precisely cut a girl’s heart out of her body? Sexual nutcase? Some kind of anatomical collector filling his trophy case?
‘McCabe?’
He looked at her and nodded, almost imperceptibly. ‘I do remember something,’ he said.
‘D’ya want to share it?’ she asked.
‘Let me check it out first. I also want to set up appointments with a couple of the cardiac surgeons up at Cumberland Med. Find out what it takes to cut out somebody’s heart.’
‘Think this could be the start of a serial string?’ Maggie asked as McCabe exited the car.
McCabe turned back and leaned in the open window. ‘I don’t know. It’s sure got the earmarks.’
The streets were emptier now. As McCabe walked toward the building, he could feel that the air had become noticeably cooler, the first hint of the coming autumn and the dark winter that lay beyond.
3
Friday. 10:30 P.M.
Two foam cups partially filled with cold coffee greeted McCabe at his desk. He checked his messages. There were two from his boss, Lieutenant Bill Fortier. In the first, Fortier delivered fair warning that Chief Tom Shockley was going to take a personal interest in this case. In the second, he asked McCabe to set up a detectives’ meeting for the morning to organize the investigation. Finally, there was one from the great man himself, Portland Police Chief Thomas H. Shockley. ‘Hey, Mike. It’s Tom Shockley. We need to talk about Dubois ASAP. I’m giving a speech at a fund-raiser tonight. I can fend off the press until tomorrow, but then I need a complete update. Meantime, don’t talk to the media. I’ll handle that. Give me a call at home tomorrow A.M. You’ve got the number.’
McCabe knew Shockley liked making any and all public statements on major cases himself. He thought he was better at it than anyone else in the department, and that was probably true. Shockley was a political animal, and McCabe knew that could be useful even in a small city like Portland. Still, it amazed him how much the chief loved looking at himself on the tube.
As usual, McCabe’s desk was a chaos of paper, none of it critical and all of it irrelevant to the Dubois case. He swept it, in a batch, into the left-hand drawer of his desk. The important stuff, files from a couple of ongoing cases, was already locked safely in the right-hand drawer on top of a pair of Casey’s ski mittens. The background on the Dubois case wasn’t among it.
He pulled the missing persons file on Katie Dubois and brought it back to his desk. He’d read it once, but he wanted to go over it more carefully now that he knew for sure her death was a homicide. As he sat, he glanced at Casey’s mischievous face, age seven, beaming up at him from within the confines of a metal picture frame. The simple fact that Casey was now just a couple of years younger than the girl dumped in the scrap yard somehow made this case more personal. Not more important. Just more personal.
McCabe opened the file. Right up front were three digital photos of Katie Dubois, alive. The first was a family shot from her last birthday. He checked Date Of Birth on her personal info data form. The birthday was two months earlier, July 14. In the picture Katie looked even prettier than he’d thought. She was sitting in front of a big white cake with two candles on it in the shape of a one and a six. Sweet sixteen. Her lips formed an exaggerated pucker, mugging for the camera, ready to blow out the candles. He wondered what she’d wished for. Whatever it was, it wasn’t what she got.
The second picture was the one they posted around town and gave to the media. A formal close-up, it had a Sears Portrait Studio look about it. The third one showed Katie, wearing a Portland High School soccer uniform, standing on the field with her mother. Probably just after a game. Other players and fans could be seen in the background. Both mother and daughter were smiling a little stiffly as if someone had asked them to say ‘cheese.’ Katie’s mother, Joanne Ceglia, looked younger than McCabe expected, probably under forty. Reddish blond hair. Freckles. He checked the file for her maiden name. O’Leary. He thought as much. A McCabe will always recognize an O’Leary. She had the same shaped face and mouth as Katie. There was a similarity in the eyes as well, but the energetic, fresh-faced prettiness of the daughter was gone from the mother.
He put the photos back and skimmed the file summary of the missing persons report. He’d read it before, and there wasn’t much that stood out. Katie was Joanne Ceglia’s only child. Katie’s father, Louis Dubois, was a commercial fisherman who’d drowned ten years back when the trawler he was working on capsized in an ice storm off the Georges Bank. All hands were lost, Dubois’s body never recovered. Two years later, in 1997, Joanne married Frank Ceglia. Ceglia made a good living as a union pipe-fitter, probably forty dollars an hour or more. The only thing to notice about him was the AutoTrack report Tom Tasco had recorded showing Ceglia had done a little time for petty drug dealing when he was a kid, followed by a couple of years on probation. He’d been clean ever since.
McCabe skimmed Tasco and Fraser’s interview summaries and case reports. They’d done a thorough job. They conducted scores of interviews. They grilled her boyfriend, Ronnie Sobel. They gamely followed up on every tipster’s call, and there’d been dozens. Despite these efforts, the department hadn’t come close to finding Katie or preventing her death.
McCabe put the reports back in their jacket. He tapped the computer to life and Googled the name ‘Elyse Andersen,’ getting 437 hits. He found the one he was looking for on page two. An article in the Orlando Sentinel,
