right thumb, severing the tendon, then dropping to the seat. Her head grabbed and whacked against the dash again and again. And the mantra: “Gonna fuck your ass, you nosy bitch.” A mantra just for her.
Suddenly the voice stopping, his body falling over hers, pinning her to the seat. Two of them out of sight, still as death. Was someone passing by? The DiMaggios? A police patrol?
Her car keys had gone flying when their dance began. He found them now on the passenger-side floor mat, fired the ignition, drove. She tried to peek out the window, to catch a glimpse of freedom, but he slapped her hard for it, then put his big hand on top of her head and pushed it down. She wasn’t sure how long they had been driving when she felt the car slow and stop.
“It’s time, nosy picture-taking bitch.”
His hands at her clothes now, yanking the sweatshirt over her breasts, ripping off the bra. The fists again. An endless beating. Pointing the knife at her throat, making her tug off her jeans and panties. Thick fingers snaking clumsily between her legs.
Remembering. You don’t resist a rapist. Something she read somewhere.
Her voice: “Let’s get in the backseat so we can both enjoy this.”
His voice: “Yeah. Go ahead, bitch.”
Scrambling over the seat on all fours into the back, feeling in the dark for the lever that unlatches the hatchback. The man just behind her, his big hands groping.
Her good hand finding the latch, jerking it, flinging the hatchback open. Scrambling out. Slamming the hatch in his face. Running blindly, smack into a telephone pole. Turning and running, naked and bloody, through the cold, cold rain.
Jesus. She’d asked me to go with her.
“What did he look like?”
She mumbled something I didn’t catch.
“Short? Muscular?”
Could it have been the little thug?
Another mumble.
I stopped pressing. I’d put her through enough.
49
“She never saw his face,” Laura Villani, the sex-crimes sergeant, told me late that afternoon. “He kept the ski mask on the whole time. All we got is white male, smoker’s voice, wedding band, green windbreaker. She never saw him standing, so she couldn’t guess his height.”
Did the little thug wear a wedding band? I tried picturing his hands, but I couldn’t remember.
“She was prowling the neighborhood waiting for the next fire,” I said.
“So she told me.”
“And he called her ‘nosy picture-taking bitch.’ ”
“Yeah,” she said. “That’s the angle we’re working. Her description doesn’t give us much to go on, but we pulled a couple of fingerprints from her vinyl camera bag. If they’re his and he’s in the system, we’ll get him.”
“If you do, I’d like to have a few minutes alone with him.”
“If we do, I just might let you.”
* * *
I went back to the office, pulled all my notes on the fires out of my file drawer, and stacked them on my desk. Twenty-two notepads crammed with fire scene descriptions, property ownership records, arson findings, and countless interviews with victims, firefighters, and arson investigators. Twenty-two notebooks full of nothing.
Or were they?
When a homicide detective hits a dead end, he studies the murder book, a chronological record of every detail of his investigation. I didn’t have a murder book, but I did have all those notebooks. Was there something in them that I had overlooked? Was there something that should have been in them but wasn’t? Could I find some sort of pattern in four months worth of scribbles? I flipped the first one open and started reading.
I’d just started the second notebook when Mason walked up.
“I’m so sorry about Gloria,” he said.
“I know you are.”
“I sent flowers.”
“I know. I saw them in her room.”
He frowned and shook his head.
“Her right eye,” he said. “It’s the one she uses to look through the viewfinder.”
He’d noticed that? Maybe he had some reporter in him after all.
“Maybe she can learn to use her left,” I said.
“Either way, she’s got a job for life. I’ll see to it.”
He stood silently for a moment, a slim file folder clutched in his left hand.
“Whatcha got there?” I said, already knowing what it was.
“My manhole-covers file. I’d really appreciate it if you could take a few minutes and go over this with me, make sure I haven’t missed anything.”
“Okay. Drag that empty chair over here and let’s have a look.”
He sat down, pushed an empty pizza box aside, and laid the folder on my desk. He opened it carefully, as if he were handling a Gutenberg Bible, and took out three sheets of paper—photocopies of city purchasing records showing transactions with a local manufacturer called West Bay Iron.
“How many does it add up to?” I asked.
“Nine hundred and ten.”
“Quit whispering, Thanks-Dad. Nobody’s going to steal your story.”
“The orders are spread over a year,” he said, “each one kept under fifteen hundred dollars to evade the city’s competitive-bidding requirement. All together, nine hundred and ten cast-iron manhole covers at fifty-five dollars each comes to just over fifty thousand.”
“What does the city highway department need with nine hundred and ten new manhole covers?”
“That’s what I wondered. I went over there to ask Gennaro Baldelli, but he threw me out.”
“ ‘Blackjack’ Baldelli.”
“Excuse me?”
“That’s what our highway superintendent likes to be called.”
“So I went to see his deputy, Louis Grieco. He have a nickname, too?
“ ‘Knuckles.’ ”
“Yeah, well Knuckles told me to get lost.”
“Then what did you do?”
“I went over to city hall and checked campaign contribution records,” he said, extracting another sheet of paper from the file folder. “Turns out that Peter Abrams, the owner of West Bay Iron, gave the legal limit to the mayor’s last reelection campaign.”
“Pretty good work, Thanks-Dad.”
“I’ve been working on my lead. Can you take a look at it?”
“No.”
“Why not?
“Because you aren’t ready to write.”
“I’m not?”
“You don’t have enough. All you’ve got is the city throwing a little business to a big campaign contributor. That might be a story in Iowa or Connecticut, but in Rhode Island it’s not news. It’s business as usual.”
“I wasted my time, then?”
“Not necessarily.”
“So what’s my next step?”
