Mystic River

Off to his right, he heard the sounds of a commotion, several people yelling at once, the rustle of mad scrambling, and the K-9 dogs snarling and barking in a mad fury. When he looked over, he saw Jimmy Marcus and Chuck Savage burst through the trees at the far side of the grove, where the land turned green and manicured and sloped gracefully down toward the screen, the place where summer crowds spread their blankets and sat in the grass to watch a play.

At least eight uniforms and two plainclothes converged on Jimmy and Chuck, and Chuck went down right away, but Jimmy was fast and Jimmy was slippery. He slid straight through the line with a series of quick, seemingly illogical pivots that left his pursuers grasping air, and if he hadn't stumbled coming down the slope, he would have made the screen with no one to stop him but Krauser and Friel.

But he did stumble, his foot slipping out from under him on the damp grass, and his eyes locked with Sean's as he belly-flopped on the grass, his chin punching through the soil. A young trooper, all square head and high-school-tight-end body, landed on top of Jimmy like he was a sled, and the two of them slid another few feet down the slope. The cop pulled Jimmy's right arm behind his back and went for his cuffs.

Sean stepped out onto the stage and called: "Hey! Hey! It's the father. Just pull him back."

The young cop looked over, pissed and muddy.

"Just pull him back," Sean said. "The both of them."

He turned back toward the screen and that's when Jimmy called his name, his voice hoarse, as if the screams in his head had found his vocal cords and stripped them: "Sean!"

Sean stopped, caught Friel looking at him.

"Look at me, Sean!"

Sean turned back, saw Jimmy arching up under the young cop's weight, a dark smudge of soil on his chin, whiskers of grass hanging off it.

"You find her? Is it her?" Jimmy yelled. "Is it?"

Sean stayed motionless, holding Jimmy's eyes with his own, locking them until Jimmy's surging stare saw what Sean had just seen, saw that it was over now, the worst fear had been realized.

Jimmy began to scream and ropes of spit shot from his mouth. Another cop came down the slope to help the one on top of Jimmy, and Sean turned away. Jimmy's scream blew out into the air as a low, guttural thing, nothing sharp or high-pitched to it, an animal's first stage of reckoning with grief. Sean had heard the screams of a lot of victims' parents over the years. Always there was a plaintive character to them, a beseechment for God or reason to return, tell them it was all a dream. But Jimmy's scream had none of that, only love and rage, in equal quantity, shredding the birds from the trees and echoing into the Pen Channel.

Sean went back over and looked down at Katie Marcus. Connolly, the newest member of the unit, came up beside him, and they looked down for a while without saying anything, and Jimmy Marcus's scream grew more hoarse and ragged, as if he'd sucked in kernels of glass every time he took a breath.

Sean looked down at Katie with her fist clenched to the side of her head in the drench of the red rain, then over her body at the wooden props that had kept her from reaching the other side.

Off to their right, Jimmy continued to scream as they dragged him back up the slope, and a helicopter chopped the air over the grove as it made a hard pass, the engine droning as it turned to bank and come back, Sean figuring it was from one of the TV stations. It had a lighter sound than the police choppers.

Connolly, out of the side of his mouth, said, "You ever seen anything like this?"

Sean shrugged. It wouldn't matter much if he had. You got to the point where you stopped comparing.

"I mean, this is?" Connolly sputtered, trying to find the words, "this is some kind of?" He looked away from the body, off into the trees, with an air of wide-eyed uselessness, and seemed on the verge of trying to speak again.

Then his mouth closed, and after a while he quit trying to give it a name.

12

THE COLORS OF YOU

SEAN LEANED AGAINST the stage below the drive-in screen with his boss, Detective Lieutenant Martin Friel, and they watched Whitey Powers give direction to the coroner's van as it backed down the slope that led to the doorway where Katie Marcus's body had been found. Whitey walked backward, his hands raised and occasionally cutting left or right, his voice sniping the air with crisp whistles that shot through his lower teeth like puppy yelps. His eyes darted from the crime scene tape on either side of him to the van tires to the driver's nervous eyes in the side-view like he was auditioning for a job with a moving company, making sure those fat tires never strayed an inch or more from where he wanted them to go.

"A little more. Keep it straight. Little more, little more. That's it." When he had the van where he wanted it, he stepped aside and slapped the rear doors. "You're good."

Whitey opened the rear doors and pulled them wide so they blocked anyone's view of the space behind the screen, Sean thinking it never would have occurred to him to form protective wings around the doorway where Katie Marcus had died, and then reminding himself that Whitey had a lot more time put in on crime scenes than he had, Whitey an old warhorse going back to a time when Sean was still trying to cop feels at high school dances and not pick at his acne.

The two coroner's assistants were both halfway out of their seats when Whitey called to them. "Ain't going to work that way, guys. You're gonna have to come out through the back."

They shut their doors and disappeared through the back of the van to retrieve the corpse, and Sean could feel a finality in their disappearance, a certainty that this was his to deal with now. The other cops and teams of techs and the reporters hovering in their copters overhead or on the other side of the crime scene barriers that surrounded the park would move on to something else, and he and Whitey would bear the lion's share of Katie Marcus's death alone, filing the reports, preparing the affidavits, working her death long after most of the people here had moved on to something else? traffic accidents, larcenies, suicides in rooms gone stale with recirculated air and overflowing ashtrays.

Martin Friel hoisted himself up onto the stage and sat there with his small legs dangling over the earth. He'd come here from the back nine at the George Wright and smelled of sunblock under his blue polo and khakis. He drummed his heels off the side of the stage, and Sean could feel a hint of moral annoyance in him.

"You've worked with Sergeant Powers before, right?"

"Yeah," Sean said.

"Any problems?"

"No." Sean watched Whitey take a uniformed trooper aside, point off to the stand of trees behind the drive-in screen. "I worked the Elizabeth Pitek homicide with him last year."