Gone, Baby, Gone (4 page)

She looked at me, her mouth half open, as if afraid to put it into words, hear them hit the air, and know that it made her someone who refused to help a child in need.

“I don’t want to tell them yes quite yet,” she managed, as we reached our car.

I nodded. I knew the feeling.

“Everything about this disappearance smells bad,” Angie said, as we drove down Dorchester Avenue toward Helene and Amanda’s apartment.

“I know.”

“Four-year-olds don’t vanish without help.”

“Definitely not.”

Along the avenue, people were beginning to come out of their homes now that dinner was over. Some placed lawn chairs on their small front porches; others walked up the avenue toward bars or twilight ball games. I could smell sulfur in the air from a recently discharged bottle rocket, and the moist evening hung like an untaken breath in that bruised hue between deep blue and sudden black.

Angie pulled her legs up to her chest and rested her chin on her knees. “Maybe I’ve become a coward, but I don’t mind chasing iguanas across golf courses.”

I looked through the windshield as we turned off Dorchester Avenue onto Savin Hill Avenue.

“Neither do I,” I said.

When a child disappears, the space she’d occupied is immediately filled with dozens of people. And these people—relatives, friends, police officers, reporters from both TV and print—create a lot of energy and noise, a sense of communal intensity, of fierce and shared dedication to a task.

But amid all that noise, nothing is louder than the silence of the missing child. It’s a silence that’s two and a half to three feet tall, and you feel it at your hip and hear it rising up from the floorboards, shouting to you from corners and crevices and the emotionless face of a doll left on the floor by the bed. It’s a silence that’s different from the one left at funerals and wakes. The silence of the dead carries with it a sense of finality; it’s a silence you know you must get used to. But the silence of a missing child is not something you want to get used to; you refuse to accept it, and so it screams at you.

The silence of the dead says, Goodbye.

The silence of the missing says, Find me.

It seemed like half the neighborhood and a quarter of the Boston Police Department were inside Helene McCready’s two-bedroom apartment. The living room stretched through an open portico into the dining room, and these two rooms were the center of most of the activity. The police had set up banks of phones on the floor of the dining room, and all were in use; several people used their personal cell phones as well. A burly man in a
PROUD TO BE A DOT RAT
T-shirt looked up from a stack of flyers on the coffee table in front of him and said, “Beatrice, Channel Four wants Helene at six tomorrow night.”

A woman put her hand over the receiver of her cell phone. “The producers of
Annie in the AM
called. They want Helene to go on the show in the morning.”

“Mrs. McCready,” a cop called from the dining room, “we need you in here a sec.”

Beatrice nodded at the burly man and the woman with the cell phone and said to us, “Amanda’s bedroom is the first on the right.”

I nodded, and she cut off into the crowd and headed for the dining room.

Amanda’s bedroom door was open, and the room itself was still and dark, as if the sounds from the street below couldn’t penetrate up here. A toilet flushed, and a patrolman came out of the bathroom and looked at us as his right hand finished zipping up his fly.

“Friends of the family?” he asked.

“Yes.”

He nodded. “Don’t touch anything, please.”

“We won’t,” Angie said.

He nodded and went up the hall into the kitchen.

I used my car key to turn on the light switch in Amanda’s room. I knew that every item in the room had been dusted and analyzed for fingerprints by now, but I also knew how perturbed cops get when you touch anything with bare hands at a crime scene.

A bare lightbulb hung from a cord above Amanda’s bed, the copper housing plate gone and the exposed wires dusty. The ceiling was badly in need of a paint job, and the summer heat had done its work on the posters that had hung from the walls. There were three that I could see, and they lay curled and rumpled by the baseboards. Squares of tape were spaced in uneven rectangle formations on the wall where the posters had been. I had no idea how long they’d lain there, wrinkling, growing hairline creases like veins.

The apartment was identical in layout to my own, and to that of apartments in most three-deckers in the neighborhood, and Amanda’s bedroom was the smaller of the two by about half. Helene’s bedroom, I assumed, was the master and would be past the bathroom on the right, directly across from the kitchen and looking out on the rear porch and small yard below. Amanda’s bedroom looked out on the three-decker next door and was probably as deprived of light at noon as it was now, at eight o’clock in the evening.

The room was musty, the furniture sparse. The dresser across from the bed looked as if it had been picked up at a yard sale, and the bed itself had no frame. It was a single mattress and box spring placed on the floor, covered in a top sheet that didn’t match the bottom and a Lion King comforter that had been pushed aside in the heat.

A doll lay at the foot of the bed, looking up at the ceiling with flat doll’s eyes; a stuffed bunny turned on its side against the foot of the dresser. An old black-and-white TV sat up on the dresser, and there was a small radio on the bedside table, but I couldn’t see any books in the room, not even coloring books.

I tried to picture the girl who’d slept in this room. I’d seen enough photos of Amanda in the last few days to know what she looked like, but a physical likeness couldn’t tell me what set her face had taken when she walked into this room at the end of a day or woke to it first thing in the morning.

Had she tried to put those posters back up on the wall? Had she asked for the bright blue and yellow pop-up books she’d seen in malls? In the dark and quiet of this room late at night, when she was awake and alone, did she fixate on the lone nail sticking out from the wall across from the bed or the sallow brown water mark that puddled down from the ceiling at the east corner?

I looked at the doll’s shiny, ugly eyes, and I wanted to close them with my foot.

“Mr. Kenzie, Miss Gennaro.” It was Beatrice’s voice, calling from the kitchen.

Angie and I took one last look at the bedroom, and then I used my key to switch the light off and we walked down the hall into the kitchen.

There was a man leaning against the oven, hands stuffed in his pockets. By the way he watched us as we approached, I knew he was waiting for us. He was a few inches shorter than I am, wide and round as an oil drum with a boyish, jolly face, slightly ruddy, as if he spent a lot of time outdoors. His throat had that paradoxically pinched and flabby look of someone nearing retirement age, and there was a hardness to him, an implacability that seemed a hundred years old, seemed to have judged you and your entire life in a glance.

“Lieutenant Jack Doyle,” he said, as he fired his hand into my own.

I shook the hand. “Patrick Kenzie.”

Angie introduced herself and shook his hand, too, and we stood before him in the small kitchen as he peered intently into our faces. His own face was unreadable, but the intensity of his gaze had a magnet’s pull, something in there you wanted to look into even when you knew you should look away.

I’d seen him on TV a few times over the last few days. He ran the BPD’s Crimes Against Children squad, and when he stared into the camera and spoke of how he’d find Amanda McCready no matter what it took, you felt a momentary pity for whoever had abducted her.

“Lieutenant Doyle was interested in meeting you,” Beatrice said.

“Now we’ve met,” I said.

Doyle smiled. “You got a minute?”

Without waiting for an answer, he crossed to the door leading out to the porch, opened it, and looked back over his shoulder at us.

“Apparently we do,” Angie said.

The porch railing needed a paint job even more than the ceiling in Amanda’s bedroom. Every time one of us leaned on it, the chipped, sun-baked paint crackled under our forearms like logs in a fire.

On the porch I could smell the odor of barbecue a few houses away, and from somewhere on the next block came the sounds of a backyard gathering—a woman’s loud voice complaining about a sunburn, a radio playing the Mighty Mighty Bosstones, laughter as sharp and sudden as ice cubes shifting in a glass. Hard to believe it was October. Hard to believe winter was near.

Hard to believe Amanda McCready floated farther and farther away out there, and the world continued turning.

“So,” Doyle said, as he leaned over the railing. “You solve the case yet?”

Angie looked at me and rolled her eyes.

“No,” I said, “but we’re close.”

Doyle chuckled softly, his eyes on the patch of concrete and dead grass below the porch.

Angie said, “We assume you advised the McCreadys not to contact us.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Same reason I would if I were in your position,” Angie said, as he turned his head to look at her. “Too many cooks.”

Doyle nodded. “That’s part of it.”

“What’s the other part?” I said.

He laced his fingers together, then pushed the hands out until the knuckles cracked. “These people look like they’re rolling in dough? Like they got cigarette boats, diamond-studded candelabras I don’t know about?”

“No.”

“And ever since the Gerry Glynn thing, I hear you two charge pretty steep rates.”

Angie nodded. “Pretty steep retainers, too.”

Doyle gave her a small smile and turned back to the railing. He gripped it lightly with both hands and leaned back on his heels. “Time this little girl is found, Lionel and Beatrice could be a hundred grand in the hole. At least. They’re only the aunt and uncle, but they’ll buy spots on TV to find her, take out full-page ads in every national paper, plaster her picture on highway billboards, hire psychics, shamans, and PIs.” He looked back at us. “They’ll go broke. You know?”

“Which is one of the reasons we’ve been trying not to take this case,” I said.

“Really?” He raised an eyebrow. “Then why are you here?”

“Beatrice is persistent,” Angie said.

He looked back at the kitchen window. “She is that, isn’t she?”

“We’re a little confused why Amanda’s mother isn’t as well.”

Doyle shrugged. “Last time I saw her, she was doped up on tranquilizers, Prozac, whatever they give the parents of missing kids these days.” He turned back from the railing, his hands out by his side. “Whatever. Lookit, I don’t want to get off on the wrong foot with two people might help me find this kid. No shit. I just want to make sure that,
A
, you don’t get in my way;
B
, you don’t tell the press how you were brought on board because the police are such boneheads they couldn’t find water from a boat; or,
C
, you don’t exploit the worry of those people in there for money. Because I happen to like Lionel and Beatrice. They’re good people.”

“What was
B
again?” I smiled.

Angie said, “Lieutenant, as we said, we’re trying hard not to take this case. It’s doubtful we’ll be around long enough to get in your way.”

He looked at her a long time with that hard, open gaze of his. “Then why are you standing on this porch talking to me?”

“So far Beatrice refuses to take no for an answer.”

“And you think that’s somehow going to change?” He smiled softly and shook his head.

“We can hope,” I said.

He nodded, then turned back to the railing. “Long time.”

“What?” Angie said.

His eyes remained on the backyard and the one just beyond it. “For a four-year-old to be missing.” He sighed. “Long time,” he repeated.

“And you have no leads?” Angie asked.

He shrugged. “Nothing I’d bet the house on.”

“Anything you’d bet a second-rate condo on?” she said.

He smiled again and shrugged.

“I take that as a ‘not really,’” Angie said.

He nodded. “Not really.” The dry paint sounded like brittle leaves under his clenched hands. “Tell you how I got into the kid-finding racket. ’Bout twenty years ago, my daughter, Shannon? She disappears. For one day.” He turned to us, held up his index finger. “Not even one day, really. Actually, it was from like four o’clock one afternoon till about eight the next morning, but she was six. And I’ll tell you, you have no clue how long a night can be until your child goes missing in one. The last time Shannon’s friends had seen her she was heading home on her bicycle, and a couple of them said they saw a car following her real slow.” He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hand and blew a rush of air out of his mouth at the memory. “We found her the next morning in a drainage ditch near a park. She’d cracked up the bike and broken both ankles, passed out from the pain.”

He noticed the looks on our faces and held up his hand.

“She was fine,” he said. “Two broken ankles hurt like hell and she was one scared kid for a while, but that was the worst trauma her or my wife and me suffered through her whole childhood. That’s good luck. Hell, that’s amazing luck.” He blessed himself quickly. “My point, though? When Shannon was missing and the whole neighborhood and all my cop buddies are looking for her, and me and Tricia are driving or walking everywhere and tearing our hair out, we stopped for a cup of coffee. To go, believe me. But for two minutes, while we’re standing in this Dunkin’ Donuts waiting for our coffee, I look at Tricia and she looks at me and both of us, without saying a word, know that if Shannon is dead, we’re dead, too. Our marriage—over. Our happiness—over. Our lives would be one long road of pain. Nothing else, really. Everything good and hopeful, everything we lived for, really, would die with our daughter.”

“And that’s why you joined Crimes Against Children?” I said.

“That’s why I
built
Crimes Against Children,” he said. “It’s my baby. I created it. Took me fifteen years, but I did it. CAC exists because I looked at my wife in that doughnut shop and I knew, right then and beyond any doubt, that no one can survive the loss of a child. No one. Not you, not me, not even a loser like Helene McCready.”