Darkness, Take My Hand (Kenzie & Gennaro 2)

Angie said, “Gerry, can I use your phone?”

“What’s the matter?” Bolton said.

She was already at the bar, dialing.

“And the other guy, Stimovich?” I said.

“No one at his dorm room,” Angie said and hung up, dialed another number.

“What’s up, Patrick?” Devin said.

“Tell me about Stimovich,” I said, trying to keep the panic from my voice. “Devin. Now.”

“Stimovich’s girlfriend, Alice Boorstin—”

“No one at Diandra’s office,” Angie said and slammed the phone down, picked it up, began dialing again.

“—received a similar photo of him in the mail two weeks ago. Same thing. No note or return address, just a photo.”

“Diandra,” Angie said into the phone, “where’s Jason?”

“Patrick,” Oscar said, “tell us.”

“I have his class schedule,” Angie said. “He only has one class today and it was over five hours ago.”

“Our client received a similar photograph weeks ago,” I said. “Of her son.”

“We’ll be in touch. Stay there. Don’t worry.” Angie hung up the phone. “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” she said.

“Let’s go.” I stood up.

“You’re not going anywhere,” Bolton said.

“Arrest me,” I said and followed Angie out the door.

18

We found Jade, Gabrielle, and Lauren dining together in the student union, but no Jason. The women gave us “Who the fuck are you?” looks, but answered our questions. None of them had seen Jason since this morning.

We stopped by his dorm room, but he hadn’t been by since the previous night. His roommate stood in a haze of pot fumes with Henry Rollins’s pissed-off wail booming through his speakers and said, “Nah, man, I got like no idea where he’d be. ’Cept with that dude, you know.”

“We don’t know.”

“That dude. You know, that, like, dude he hangs out with sometimes.”

“This dude got a goatee?” Angie said.

The roommate nodded. “And like the most hollow eyes. Like he ain’t walking among the living. Be a babe if he was a chick, though. Weird, huh?”

“Dude got a name?”

“None I ever heard.”

As we walked back to the car, I could hear Grace asking me a few nights ago, “Are these cases connected in any way?”

Well now, yeah, they were. So what did that mean?

Diandra Warren receives a photograph of her son and makes a reasonable logical leap that it’s connected to the Mafia hood she inadvertently angered. Except—she didn’t inadvertently anger him. She was contacted by an imposter, and they met in Brookline. An imposter with a harsh Boston accent and wispy blond hair. Kara Rider’s hair,

when I saw it, looked freshly dyed. Kara Rider used to have blonde hair and her credit card receipts put her in Brookline around the same time “Moira Kenzie” had contacted Diandra.

Diandra Warren had no TV in her apartment. If she read a newspaper, she read The Trib, not The News. The News had plastered Kara’s photograph across page one. The Trib, far less sensationalistic and actually late on the story, hadn’t published a photograph of Kara at all.

As we reached the car, Eric Gault pulled behind it in a tan Audi. He looked at us with mild surprise as he got out.

“What brings you kids by?”

“Looking for Jason.”

He opened his trunk, began picking up books from a pile of old newspapers. “I thought you’d given up on the case.”

“There’ve been some new developments,” I said and smiled with confidence I didn’t feel. I looked at the newspapers in Eric’s trunk. “You save them?”

He shook his head. “I toss them in here, take them to a recycling station when I can’t close the trunk anymore.”

“I’m looking for one about ten days old. May I?”

He stepped back. “Be my guest.”

I pulled back the top News on the pile, found the one with Kara’s photo four down. “Thanks,” I said.

“My pleasure.” He shut the trunk. “If you’re looking for Jason, try Coolidge Corner or the bars on Brighton Avenue. The Kells, Harper’s Ferry—they’re big Bryce hangouts.”

“Thanks.”

Angie pointed at the books under his arm. “Overdue at the library?”

He shook his head, looked at the stately white and red-brick dorm buildings. “Overtime. In this recession, even us tenured profs have to stoop to tutoring now and again.”

We climbed into our car, said good-bye.

Eric waved, then turned his back to us and walked up to the dorms, whistling softly in the gradually cooling air.

We tried every bar on Brighton Ave., North Harvard, and a few in Union Square. No Jason.

On the drive to Diandra’s place, Angie said, “Why’d you grab that newspaper?” I told her.

“Christ,” she said, “this is a nightmare.”

“Yeah, it is.”

We rode the elevator up to Diandra’s as the waterfront rose, then fell away from us into an overturned bowl of black ink harbor. The apprehension that had been sitting tightly in my stomach for the last few hours expanded and eddied until I felt nauseous.

When Diandra let us in, the first thing I said was, “This Moira Kenzie, did she have a nervous habit of tucking her hair behind her right ear, even if there was nothing to tuck?”

She stared at me.

“Did she?”

“Yes, but how did you…?”

“Think. Did she make this weird, sort of laughing, sort of hiccup-ing sound at the ends of her sentences?”

She closed her eyes for a moment. “Yes. Yes, she did.”

I held up The News. “Is this her?”

“Yes.”

“Son of a bitch,” I said loudly.

“Moira Kenzie” was Kara Rider.

I paged Devin from Diandra’s.

“Dark hair,” I told him. “Twenty. Tall. Good build. Cleft in his chin. Usually dresses in jeans and flannel shirts.” I looked at Diandra. “Do you have a fax here?”

“Yes.”

“Devin, I’m faxing you a photo. What’s the number?”

He gave it to me. “Patrick, we’ll have a hundred guys looking for this kid.”

“You get two hundred, I’ll feel better.”

The fax machine was at the east end of the loft, by the desk. I fed it the photo Diandra had received of Jason, waited for the transmission report, walked back to Diandra and Angie in the living area.