Darkness, Take My Hand (2 page)

Angie and I
were up in our belfry office trying to fix the air conditioner when Eric Gault called.

Usually in the middle of a New England October, a broken air conditioner wouldn’t be a problem. A broken heater would. But it wasn’t turning out to be a normal autumn. At two in the afternoon, the temperature hung in the mid-seventies and the window screens still carried the damp, baked odor of summer.

“Maybe we should call someone,” Angie said.

I thumped the window unit on the side with my palm, turned it on again. Nothing.

“I bet it’s the belt,” I said.

“That’s what you say when the car breaks down, too.”

“Hmm.” I glared at the air conditioner for about twenty seconds and it remained silent.

“Call it foul names,” Angie said. “Maybe that’ll help.”

I turned my glare on her, got about as much reaction as I got from the air conditioner. Maybe I needed to work on my glare.

The phone rang and I picked it up, hoping the caller knew something about mechanics, but I got Eric Gault instead.

Eric taught criminology at Bryce University. We met when he was still teaching at U/Mass and I took a couple of his classes.

“You know anything about fixing air conditioners?”

“You try turning it on and off and then back on?” he said.

“Yes.”

“And nothing happened?”

“Nope.”

“Hit it a couple of times.”

“I did.”

“Call a repairman then.”

“You’re a lot of help.”

“Is your office still in a belfry, Patrick?”

“Yes. Why?”

“Well, I have a prospective client for you.”

“And?”

“I’d like her to hire you.”

“Fine. Bring her by.”

“The belfry?”

“Sure.”

“I said I’d like her to hire you.”

I looked around the tiny office. “That’s cold, Eric.”

“Can you stop by Lewis Wharf, say about nine in the morning?”

“I think so. What’s your friend’s name?”

“Diandra Warren.”

“What’s her problem?”

“I’d prefer it if she told you face to face.”

“Okay.”

“I’ll meet you there tomorrow.”

“See you then.”

I started to hang up.

“Patrick.”

“Yeah?”

“Do you have a little sister named Moira?”

“No. I have an older sister named Erin.”

“Oh.”

“Why?”

“Nothing. We’ll talk tomorrow.”

“See you then.”

I hung up, looked at the air conditioner, then at Angie, back at the air conditioner, and then I dialed a repairman.

Diandra Warren lived in a fifth-story loft on Lewis Wharf. She had a panoramic view of the harbor, enormous
bay windows that bathed the east end of the loft with soft morning sunlight, and she looked like the kind of woman who’d never wanted for a single thing her whole life.

Hair the color of a peach hung in a graceful, sweeping curve over her forehead and tapered into a page boy on the sides. Her dark silk shirt and light blue jeans looked as if they’d never been worn, and the bones in her face seemed chiseled under skin so unblemished and golden it reminded me of water in a chalice.

She opened the door and said, “Mr. Kenzie, Ms. Gennaro,” in a soft, confident whisper, a whisper that knew a listener would lean in to hear it if necessary. “Please, come in.”

The loft was precisely furnished. The couch and arm-chairs in the living area were a cream color that complemented the blond Scandinavian wood of the kitchen furniture and the muted reds and browns of the Persian and Native American rugs placed strategically over the hardwood floor. The sense of color gave the place an air of warmth, but the almost Spartan functionalism suggested an owner who wasn’t given to the unplanned gesture or the sentimentality of clutter.

By the bay windows, the exposed brick wall was taken up by a brass bed, walnut dresser, three birch file cabinets, and a Governor Winthrop desk. In the whole place, I couldn’t see a closet or any hanging clothes. Maybe she just wished a fresh wardrobe out of the air every morning, and it was waiting for her, fully pressed, by the time she came out of the shower.

She led us into the living area, and we sat in the arm-chairs as she moved onto the couch with a slight hesitation. Between us was a smoked-glass coffee table with a manila envelope in the center and a heavy ashtray and antique lighter to its left.

Diandra Warren smiled at us.

We smiled back. Have to be quick to improvise in this business.

Her eyes widened slightly and the smile stayed where it was. Maybe she was waiting for us to list our qualifica
tions, show her our guns and tell her how many dastardly foes we’d vanquished since sunup.

Angie’s smile faded, but I kept mine in place for a few seconds longer. Picture of the happy-go-lucky detective, putting his prospective client at ease. Patrick “Sparky” Kenzie. At your service.

Diandra Warren said, “I’m not sure how to start.”

Angie said, “Eric said you may be in some trouble we could help you with.”

She nodded, and her hazel irises seemed to fragment for a moment, as if something had come loose behind them. She pursed her lips, looked at her slim hands, and as she began to raise her head, the front door opened and Eric entered. His salt-and-pepper hair was tied back in a ponytail and balding on top, but he looked ten years younger than the forty-six or -seven I knew he was. He wore Khakis and a denim shirt under a charcoal sport coat with the lower button clasped. The sport coat looked a bit strange on him, as if the tailor hadn’t counted on a gun sticking to Eric’s hip.

“Hey, Eric.” I held out my hand.

He shook it. “Glad you could make it, Patrick.”

“Hi, Eric.” Angie extended her hand.

As he leaned over to shake it, he realized he’d exposed the gun. He closed his eyes for a moment and blushed.

Angie said, “I would feel a lot better if you placed that gun on the coffee table until we leave, Eric.”

“I feel like a fool,” he said, trying to crack a smile.

“Please,” Diandra said, “just put it on the table, Eric.”

He unsnapped the holster as if it might bite and put a Ruger .38 on top of the manila envelope.

I met his eyes, confused. Eric Gault and a gun went together like caviar and hot dogs.

He sat beside Diandra. “We’ve been a little on edge lately.”

“Why?”

Diandra sighed. “I’m a psychiatrist, Mr. Kenzie, Ms. Gennaro. I teach at Bryce twice a week and provide counseling for staff and students in addition to maintaining my practice off campus. You expect a lot of things in my line
of work—dangerous clients, patients who have full psychotic episodes in a tiny office with you alone, paranoid dissociative schizophrenics who find out your address. You live with those fears. I guess you expect them to be realized one day. But this…” She looked at the envelope on the table between us. “This is…”

I said, “Try telling us how ‘this’ started.”

She sat back on the couch and closed her eyes for a moment. Eric placed a hand lightly on her shoulder, and she shook her head, eyes still closed, and he removed it, placed it on his knee and looked at it as if he wasn’t sure how it had gotten there.

“A student came to see me one morning when I was at Bryce. At least she said she was a student.”

“Any reason to think otherwise?” Angie said.

“Not at the time. She had a student ID.” Diandra opened her eyes. “But once I did some checking I found there was no record of her.”

“What was this person’s name?” I said.

“Moira Kenzie.”

I looked at Angie and she raised an eyebrow.

“You see, Mr. Kenzie, when Eric said your name I jumped on it, hoping you’re related to this girl.”

I thought about it. Kenzie isn’t a terribly common name. Even back in Ireland, there’s only a few of us around Dublin and a few more scattered up near Ulster. Given the cruelty and violence that festered in the hearts of my father and his brothers, it wasn’t necessarily a bad thing that the bloodline looked to be close to its end.

“You said this Moira Kenzie was a girl?”

“Yes?”

“So she was young?”

“Nineteen, maybe twenty.”

I shook my head. “Then, no, I don’t know her, Doctor Warren. The only Moira Kenzie I know is a cousin of my late father. She’s in her mid-sixties and she hasn’t left Vancouver in twenty years.”

Diandra nodded, a curt, bitter one, and her pupils seemed to dim. “Well, then…”

“Doctor Warren,” I said, “what happened when you met this Moira Kenzie?”

She pursed her lips and looked at Eric, then up at a heavy ceiling fan above her. She exhaled slowly through her mouth and I knew she’d decided to trust us.

“Moira said she was the girlfriend of a man named Hurlihy.”

“Kevin Hurlihy?” Angie said.

Diandra Warren’s golden skin had paled to eggshell in the last minute. She nodded.

Angie looked at me and again raised her eyebrows.

Eric said, “You know him?”

“Unfortunately,” I said, “we’ve met Kevin.”

Kevin Hurlihy grew up with us. He’s pretty silly-looking—a gangly, tall guy with hips like doorknobs and unruly, brittle hair that looks like he styles it by sticking his head in a toilet bowl and flushing. When he was twelve years old, a cancerous growth was successfully removed from his larynx. The scar tissue from the surgery, however, left him with a cracked, high-pitched mess of a voice that sounds like the perpetual angry whine of a teenage girl. He wears Coke-bottle glasses that make his eyes bulge like a frog’s, and he has the fashion sense of an accordionist in a polka band. He’s Jack Rouse’s right-hand man and Jack Rouse runs the Irish Mafia in this city, and if Kevin looks and sounds comical, he isn’t even close.

“What happened?” Angie said.

Diandra looked up at the ceiling and the skin over her throat trembled. “Moira told me Kevin scared her. She told me he had her followed constantly, forced her to watch him have sex with other women, forced her to watch him have sex with associates, how he beats men who even look at her casually, and how…” She swallowed, and Eric placed a tentative hand on top of her own. “Then she told me how she’d had an affair with a man and Kevin found out and how he…killed the man and buried him in Somerville. She begged me to help her. She…”

“Who contacted you?” I said.

She wiped her left eye, then lit a long white cigarette with the antique lighter. As afraid as she was, her hand
only betrayed the slightest tremor. “Kevin,” she said, the word popping out of her mouth like it was sour. “He called me at four in the morning. When the phone rings at four in the morning, do you know how you feel?”

Disoriented, confused, alone, and terrified. Just the way a guy like Kevin Hurlihy wants you to feel.

“He said all these foul things. He said, and I quote, ‘How’s it feel to be living your last week on earth, you useless cunt?’”

Sounded like Kevin. Class all the way.

She inhaled with a hiss.

I said, “When did you receive this call?”

“Three weeks ago.”

“Three weeks?” Angie said.

“Yes. I tried to ignore it. I called the police, but they said there was nothing they could do since I had no proof it was Kevin who called.” She ran a hand through her hair, curled into herself a bit more on the sofa, looked at us.

“When you talked to the police,” I said, “did you mention anything about this body buried in Somerville?”

“No.”

“Good,” Angie said.

“Why have you waited so long before seeking some help?”

She reached over and slid Eric’s gun off the manila envelope. She handed the envelope to Angie, who opened it and pulled out a black-and-white photograph. She looked at it, then handed it to me.

The young man in the photo looked to be about twenty—handsome, with long, sandy brown hair and two days’ beard stubble. He wore jeans with rips in the knees, a T-shirt under an unbuttoned flannel shirt, and a black leather jacket. The college grunge uniform. He had a notebook under his arm and was walking past a brick wall. He seemed unaware his picture was being taken.

“My son, Jason,” Diandra said. “He’s a sophomore at Bryce. That building is the corner of the Bryce Library. The photograph arrived yesterday by regular mail.”

“Any note?”

She shook her head.

Eric said, “Her name and address are typed on the front of that envelope, nothing else.”

“Two days ago,” Diandra said, “when Jason was home for the weekend, I overheard him telling a friend on the phone that he couldn’t shake the feeling someone was stalking him. Stalking. That’s the word he used.” She pointed at the photo with her cigarette and the tremor in her hand was more noticeable. “The next day, that arrived.”

I looked at the photo again. Classic Mafia warning—you may think you know something about us, but we know everything about you.

“I haven’t seen Moira Kenzie since that first day. She isn’t enrolled at Bryce, the phone number she gave me is for a Chinese restaurant, and she’s not listed in any local phone directories. But yet she came to me. And now I have this in my life. And I don’t know why. Christ.” She slapped both palms down into her thighs and closed her eyes. When she opened them, all the courage she’d presumably been sucking out of the thin air for the last three weeks was gone. She looked terrified and suddenly aware of how weak the walls we erect around our lives truly are.

I looked at Eric, his hand on Diandra’s, and tried to gauge their relationship. I’d never known him to date a woman and always assumed he was gay. Whether true or not, I’d known him for ten years and he’d never mentioned a son.

“Who’s Jason’s father?” I said.

“What? Why?”

“When a child’s involved in a threat,” Angie said, “we have to consider custody issues.”

Diandra and Eric shook their heads simultaneously.

“Diandra’s been divorced almost twenty years,” Eric said. “Her ex-husband is friendly but distant with Jason.”

“I need his name,” I said.

“Stanley Timpson,” Diandra said.

“Suffolk County District Attorney Stan Timpson?”

She nodded.

“Doctor Warren,” Angie said, “since your ex-husband
is the most powerful law enforcement officer in the Commonwealth, we’d have to assume that—”