Gone, Baby, Gone (27 page)

“No bet,” I said.

Two hours later, they were still sorting out the mess. The night had turned suddenly cold, and a light sleet fell and splattered windshields and stuck in our hair like lice.

The troopers who’d entered the mill had come back out with a Winchester Model 94 lever-action rifle they’d found, with LAD target scope attached. The rifle had been dumped in a barrel of ancient oil on the second floor, just to the right of the window that led to the widow’s walk. The serial numbers had been filed off, and the first guy from Forensics who looked at it laughed when someone suggested the possibility of prints.

More troopers were sent into the mill to look for further evidence, but in two hours they hadn’t found shell casings or anything else, and Forensics had been unable to get any prints off the railing of the widow’s walk or the frame of the window leading out there.

The ranger who’d met Angie on the back side of the hill leading to Swingle’s Quarry had given her a bright orange raincoat to cover herself and a pair of thick socks for her feet, but still she shivered in the night, kept rubbing her dark hair with a towel even though it had dried or frozen hours ago. Indian summer, it appeared, had gone the way of the Massachusetts Indian.

Two divers had attempted a search of the Granite Rail Quarry but reported visibility at absolute zero below thirty feet, and once the weather kicked in, the slit deposits loosened from the granite walls had turned even the shallow water into a sandstorm.

The divers quit at ten without finding anything but a pair of men’s jeans hanging from a shelf about twenty feet below the water line.

When Broussard had reached the south side of the quarry, almost directly across from the cliff where Angie and I had seen the doll, a note had been waiting for him, placed neatly under a small boulder and illuminated by a pencil-thin flashlight hung from a branch above it.

Duck
.

As Broussard reached for the note, the trees erupted with gunfire, and he dove out from the tree line onto the cliff plateau, grappling for his gun and walkie-talkie, leaving the money bag and his flashlight back at the tree line. A second barrage of bullets drove him to the edge of the cliff, where he lay in darkness, his only safety, and trained his gun on the tree line but didn’t fire for fear the muzzle flashes would reveal his exact position.

A search of Broussard’s last position found the note, the kidnapper’s pencil light, Broussard’s flashlight, and the bag, which was open and empty. Over a hundred spent shells had been found in the trees and ledges directly behind Broussard’s cliff in the last hour and the trooper who radioed it in said:

“We’re gonna find a lot more. Looks like the shooters went house back here. Looks like Grenada, for Christ’s sake.”

The troopers and rangers on our side of the quarry had called down to report finding evidence of at least fifty rounds fired into our cliff plateau or the trees behind us.

The consensus was pretty much summed up by a trooper we heard over the radio. “Major Dempsey, sir, they weren’t supposed to walk back out of here. No way in hell.”

All roads into and out of the area remained locked down, but based on the fact that the shots were fired from the southern side of Granite Rail Quarry, troopers, rangers, and local police with hounds were sent to concentrate their search for the suspects there, and even from the street on the northern side we could occasionally see the symphony of lights playing off the treetops.

Poole had suffered what doctors believed was a myocardial infarction, exacerbated by his walk downhill to Quarry Street. Once there, Poole, already disoriented and possibly delirious, had apparently seen Gutierrez and Mullen in the Lexus heading for Pritchett Street and had made his way over there in time to find their corpses and call in from the car phone in the Lexus.

Last we’d heard, Poole was in ICU at Milton Hospital, his condition critical.

“Anybody done the math yet?” Dempsey asked us. We were leaning against the hood of our Crown Victoria, Broussard smoking one of Angie’s cigarettes, Angie shivering and slurping coffee from a cup with the seal of the MDC on it as I ran a hand up and down her back, trying to push some heat back into her blood.

“Which math?” I said.

“The math that puts Gutierrez and Mullen down on the road at about the same time you three were under fire.” He chewed a red plastic toothpick, touched it occasionally with his thumb and index, but never removed it from his mouth. “’Less they had a helicopter, too, and I don’t think they did somehow…. You?”

“I don’t think they had a helicopter,” I said.

He smiled. “Right. So, barring that, there’s really no way they could have been on top of those hills and tooling around down here in their Lexus a minute or so later. Just seems—I dunno—impossible. You follow?”

Angie’s teeth chattered as she said, “So who else was up there?”

“That’s the question, isn’t it? Among others.” He looked back over his shoulder at the dark shape of the hills rising on the other side of the expressway. “Not to mention, where’s the girl? Where’s the money? Where’s the person or persons who unloaded a Schwarzenegger movie’s worth of firepower up there? Where’s the person or persons who DOA’d Gutierrez and Mullen so smoothly?” He put his foot up on the fender, touched the toothpick again, and looked up at the cars racing past on the expressway just on the other side of the Lexus. “Press is going to have a field day.”

Broussard took a long pull of his cigarette, and exhaled loudly. “You’re playing CYOA, aren’t you, Dempsey.”

Dempsey shrugged, his owl eyes still on the expressway.

“CYOA?” Angie chattered.

“Cover Your Own Ass,” Broussard said. “Major Dempsey does not want to be known as the cop who lost Amanda McCready, two hundred thousand dollars, and two lives in one night. Right?”

Dempsey turned his head until the toothpick pointed directly at Broussard. “I would not want to be known as that cop, no, Detective Broussard.”

“So I will be.” Broussard nodded.

“You did lose the money,” Dempsey said. “We let you play it your way, and this is how it turned out.” He raised his eyebrows at the Lexus as two coroner’s assistants pulled Gutierrez’s body from the driver’s seat and laid it in the black bag they’d spread on the road. “Your Lieutenant Doyle? He’s been on the phone since eight-thirty with the Police Commissioner himself, trying to explain. Last time I saw him, he was trying to stick up for you and your partner. I told him it was a waste of time.”

“What exactly,” Angie said, “was he supposed to do when they opened up on him like that? Have the presence of mind to grab the bag and dive off the cliff with it?”

Dempsey shrugged. “That would have been one alternative, sure.”

“I don’t fucking believe this,” Angie said. Her teeth stopped chattering. “He risked his life for—”

“Miss Gennaro.” Broussard stopped her with a hand on her knee. “Major Dempsey is not saying anything Lieutenant Doyle isn’t going to say.”

“Listen to Detective Broussard, Miss Gennaro,” Dempsey said.

“Someone’s got to take the fall for this cluster fuck,” Broussard said, “and I’m elected.”

Dempsey chuckled. “You’re the only one running for the office.”

He left us there and walked over to a group of troopers, speaking into his walkie-talkie as he looked back up at the quarry hills.

“This isn’t right,” Angie said.

“Yes,” Broussard said, “it is.” He flicked his cigarette, smoked down to the filter, into the street. “I fucked up.”

“
We
fucked up,” Angie said.

He shook his head. “If we still had the money, they could live with Amanda being still missing or dead. But without the money? We look like clowns. And that’s my fault.” He spit into the street, shook his head, and kicked the tire at his feet with the back of his heel.

Angie watched a Forensics tech slide Amanda’s doll into a plastic bag, seal it, and write on the bag with black marker.

“She’s in there, isn’t she?” Angie looked up at the dark hills.

“She’s in there,” Broussard said.

20

When dawn arrived, we were still there as the tow truck pulled the Lexus down Pritchett Street and turned into the rotary toward the expressway.

Troopers moved in and out of the hills, returning with bags filled with shell casings and several shards of bullets recovered from rock face and dug out from tree trunks. One of them had also recovered Angie’s sweatshirt and shoes, but no one seemed to know who that trooper was or what he’d done with them. Over the course of our vigil, a Quincy cop had placed a blanket over Angie’s shoulders, but still she shivered and her lips often looked blue in the combination of streetlights, headlamps, and lights set up to illuminate the crime scene.

Lieutenant Doyle came down from the hills around one and beckoned Broussard with a crooked finger. They walked up the road to the yellow crime scene tape strung around the mill building, and once they’d stopped and squared their shoulders toward each other, Doyle exploded. You couldn’t hear the words, but you could hear volume, and you could see as he jabbed his index finger in Broussard’s face that a “Shucks, we tried” attitude wasn’t informing his mood. Broussard kept his head down through most of it, but it went on a while, a good twenty minutes at least, and Doyle seemed only to get more agitated. When he was spent, Broussard looked up, and Doyle shook his head at him in such a way that even from a distance of fifty yards you could feel the cold finality in it. He left Broussard standing there and walked into the mill building.

“Bad news, I take it,” Angie said, as Broussard bummed another of her cigarettes from the pack sitting on the hood of the car.

“I’m to be suspended sometime tomorrow pending an IAD hearing.” Broussard lit the cigarette and shrugged. “My last official duty will be to inform Helene McCready that we failed to recover her daughter.”

“And your lieutenant,” I said. “The one who approved this operation. What’s his culpability?”

“None.” Broussard leaned against the bumper, sucked back on the cigarette, exhaled a thin stream of blue smoke.

“None?” Angie said.

“None.” Broussard flicked ash into the street. “I take the fall and all the responsibility, admit to covering up pertinent information so I could get all the glory for the collar, and I won’t lose my badge.” He shrugged again. “Welcome to department politics.”

Angie said, “But—”

“Oh, yeah,” Broussard said, and turned to look at her. “The lieutenant made it very clear that if you speak to anyone about this entire affair, he’ll—let me see if I got this—’bury you up to your eyelids in the Marion Socia murder.’”

I looked off at the mill building door where I’d last seen Doyle. “He’s got shit.”

Broussard shook his head. “He never bluffs. If he says he can get you for it, he can.”

I thought about it. Four years ago, Angie and I had killed a pimp and crack dealer named Marion Socia in cold blood under the southeast expressway. We’d used unregistered guns and wiped them clean of prints.

But we’d left a witness, a gangbanger-to-be named Eugene. I never knew his last name, and I’d been pretty sure at the time that if I didn’t kill Socia he’d kill Eugene. Not then, but soon. Eugene, I decided, must have taken a few pinches over the years—a career with Shearson Lehman hadn’t seemed in the kid’s future—and during one of those pinches he must have offered us up in return for a lighter sentence. Given the utter lack of evidence tying us to Socia’s death in any other regard, I’m sure the DA had decided not to follow up, but someone had tucked the information away and passed it along to Doyle.

“He’s got us by the balls, is what you’re saying.”

Broussard glanced at me, then at Angie, and smiled. “Euphemistically speaking, of course. But, yeah. He owns you.”

“Comforting thought,” Angie said.

“This week’s been full of comforting thoughts.” Broussard tossed his cigarette. “I’m going to go find a phone, call my wife, tell her the good news.”

He walked off in the direction of the cops and vans circled around Gutierrez’s Lexus, his shoulders hunched, hands dug in his pockets, his steps just a bit uncertain, as if the ground felt different underfoot than it had half an hour ago.

Angie shuddered against the chill and I shuddered with her.

The divers went back to the quarry as morning rose in gradations of bruised purple and deep pink over the hills, and yellow tape and sawhorses were used to block off Pritchett and Quarry streets as the cops prepared for morning rush hour. A contingent of troopers formed a human barrier to the hills themselves. At 5
A.M.
, troopers were left stationed at the access points of all major roads, but traffic was allowed to flow through checkpoints, and the highway on and off ramps were opened. Pretty soon, as if they’d been waiting just around the bend, TV news vans and print reporters camped out on the expressway, clogged the breakdown lane, and shone their lights down on us and across at the hills. Several times a reporter called down to Angie to ask why she wasn’t wearing shoes. Several times Angie answered with her head down and her middle finger rising up from where her hands lay on her lap.

At first the reporters had shown up because word had leaked that someone had unloaded a few hundred rounds from an automatic weapon in the Quincy quarries and two corpses had been found on Pritchett Street in what looked like a professional execution. Then, somehow, Amanda McCready’s name slid down off the hills with the dawn breeze, and the circus began.

One of the reporters on the expressway recognized Broussard, and then the rest of them did, and pretty soon we felt like galley slaves as they shouted down to us.

“Detective, where is Amanda McCready?”

“Is she dead?”

“Is she in the quarry?”

“Where’s your partner?”

“Is it true Amanda McCready’s kidnappers were shot last night?”

“Is there any truth to the rumor that ransom money was lost?”

“Was Amanda’s body retrieved from the quarry? Is that why you’re not wearing shoes, ma’am?”