Gone, Baby, Gone (Kenzie & Gennaro 4)

“Dalton Street, Command, by the Hilton. Over.”

“Forty-nine, where is”—Doyle consulted the list by his elbow—”unit Seventy-three? Over.”

“Detective Gleason is in the lobby, Command. Detective Halpern is covering the rear exit. Over.”

“And where is the suspect? Over.”

“Suspect is in his room, Command. Over.”

“Confirm that, Forty-nine. Over.”

“Affirmative. Will get back to you. Over and out.”

While we waited for an answer no one spoke. We didn’t even look at each other. The same way you can watch a football game, and know that even though your team has a six-point lead with four minutes to go that they’re somehow going to blow it, so the five of us in the rear of the command post seemed to feel any edge we may have had slipping out under the door into the gathering dark. If Mullen had so easily given four experienced detectives the slip, then how many other times had he done it over the last few days? How many times had the police been sure they were watching Mullen, when in fact they were tailing someone else? Mullen, for all we knew, could have been making visits to Amanda McCready. He could have been establishing his escape route out of these hills tonight. He could have been buying off cops to look the other way or picking which ones he’d have removed from the equation sometime after eight in the pitch black of the hills at night.

Mullen, if he’d known we were on him from the get-go, could have been showing us everything he wanted us to see, and, while we were looking at that, the things he didn’t want us to see were going on behind our backs.

“Command, this is Forty-nine. We’ve got a problem. Gutierrez is gone. I repeat: Gutierrez is gone. Over.”

“How long, Forty-nine? Over.”

“Hard to say, Command. His rental car is still parked in the garage. Last physical observation occurred at oh-seven-hundred hours. Over.”

“Command out.”

Doyle seemed to consider crushing the receiver in his hand for a moment, but then he laid it gently and precisely on the corner of the console table.

Broussard said, “He probably had another car placed in the garage a day or two before he checked in.”

Doyle nodded. “When I check with the other teams, how many of Olamon’s men, do you think, will be unaccounted for?”

No one had an answer, but I don’t think he’d expected one.

18

If you head south out of my neighborhood and cross the Neponset River, you end up in Quincy, long thought of by my father’s generation as a way station for the Irish prosperous enough to escape Dorchester but not quite wealthy enough to reach Milton, the tony two-toilet-Irish suburb a few miles northwest. As you drive south along Interstate 93, just before you reach Braintree, you’ll see a cluster of sandy brown hills rising to the west that always seem on the verge of sudden crumbling.

It was in these hills that the grand old men of Quincy’s past discovered granite so rich with black silicates and smoky quartz that it must have shimmered at their feet like a diamond stream. The first commercial railway in the country was constructed in 1827, with the first rail clamped to the land with swinging spikes and metal bolts in Quincy, up in the hills, so that granite could be transported down to the banks of the Neponset River, where it was loaded onto schooners and transported to Boston or down to Manhattan, New Orleans, Mobile, and Savannah.

This hundred-year granite boom created buildings erected to withstand both time and fashion—imposing libraries and seats of government, towering churches, prisons that smothered noise, light, and hopes of escape, the fluted monolithic columns in custom houses across the country, and the Bunker Hill Monument. And what was left in the wake of all this rock lifted from the earth were holes. Deep holes. Wide holes. Holes that have never been filled by anything but water.

Over the years since the granite industry died, the quarries have become the favored dumping ground for just about everything: stolen cars, old refrigerators and ovens, bodies. Every few years when a kid vanishes after diving into them or a Walpole lifer tells police he dumped a missing hooker over one of the cliffs, the quarries are searched and newspapers run photos of topographical maps and underwater photography that reveal a submerged landscape of mountain ranges, rock violently disrupted and disgorged, sudden jagged needles rising from the depths, jutting crags of cliff face appearing like ghosts of Atlantis under a hundred feet of rain.

Sometimes, those bodies are found. And sometimes, they’re not. The quarries, given to underwater storms of black silt and sudden illogical shifts in their landscape, rife with undocumented shelves and crevices, yield their secrets with all the frequency of the Vatican.

As we trudged up the old railway incline, snapping branches out of our faces, trampling weeds and stumbling over rocks in the dark, slipping on sudden smooth stones and cursing under our breath, I found myself thinking that if we were pioneers trying to pass through these hills to reach the reservoir on the other side in the Blue Hills, we’d be dead by now. Some bear or pissed-off moose or Indian war party would have killed us just for disturbing the peace.

“Try and be a little louder,” I said, as Broussard slipped in the dark, banged his shin on a boulder, and straightened up long enough to kick it.

“Hey,” he said, “I look like Jeremiah Johnson to you? Last time I was in the woods, I was drunk, I was having sex, and I could see the highway from where I was.”

“You were having sex?” Angie said. “My God.”

“You have something against sex?”

“I have something against bugs,” Angie said. “Ick.”

“Is it true that if you have sex in the woods, the smell attracts bears?” Poole said. He supported himself on a tree trunk for a moment, sucked in the night air.

“There aren’t any bears left around here.”

“You never know,” Poole said, and looked off into the dark trees. He placed the gym bag of money by his feet for a moment, removed a handkerchief from his pocket, dabbed at the sweat on his neck, wiped his reddening face. He blew air out of his cheeks and swallowed a few times.

“You okay, Poole?”

He nodded. “Fine. Just out of shape. And, oh, yeah, old.”

“Want one of us to carry the bag?” Angie asked.

Poole grimaced at her and picked up the bag. He pointed up the slope. “‘Once more unto the breach.’”

“That’s not a breach,” Broussard said. “That’s a hill.”