Darkness, Take My Hand (Kenzie & Gennaro 2)

“And this girl you knew? The one who was killed?”

I shrugged. “Nothing. All her known acquaintances have been cleared, even the scumbags she hung out with, and Devin isn’t taking my calls. It’s sort of fuck—”

“Patrick,” Grace said.

I looked down, saw Mae.

“Whoops,” I said. “It’s sort of messed up.”

“Much better.”

“Scottie,” Mae said. “Scottie.”

Just ahead, a middle-aged couple sat on the lawn by the jogging path, a black Scottish terrier lying beside the man’s knee as he petted it absently.

“Can I?” Mae asked Grace.

“Ask the man first.”

Mae walked off the path onto the grass with a slight hesitancy as if approaching a strange, uncharted frontier.

The man and woman smiled at her, then looked at us and we waved.

“Is your dog friendly?”

The man nodded. “Too friendly.”

Mae held out a hand about nine inches from the head of the Scottie, who still hadn’t noticed her. “He won’t bite?”

“He never bites,” the woman said. “What’s your name?”

“Mae.”

The dog looked up and Mae jerked her arm back, but the dog merely rose slowly on its hind legs and sniffed.

“Mae,” the woman said, “this is Indy.”

Indy sniffed Mae’s leg and she looked back over her shoulder at us, uncertain.

“He wants to be petted,” I said.

In increments, she lowered her body and touched his head. He turned his snout into her palm, and she lowered herself even more. The closer she got to him, the more I wanted to ask the couple if they were sure their dog didn’t bite. It was and odd feeling. On the danger scale, Scottish terriers fall somewhere in between guppies and sunflowers, but that wasn’t much comfort as I watched Mae’s tiny body inch closer and closer to something with teeth.

When Indy jumped on Mae, I almost dove at them, but Grace put a hand on my arm, and Mae shrieked and she and the dog rolled around on the grass like old pals.

Grace sighed. “That was a clean dress she was wearing.”

We sat down on a bench and watched for a while as Mae and Indy chased each other and stumbled into each other and tackled each other and got up and did it again.

“You have a beautiful daughter,” the woman said.

“Thank you,” Grace said.

Mae came dashing past the bench, hands up at her head, shrieking as Indy nipped at her heels. They went about another twenty yards and then went down in a tiny explosion of grass and dirt.

“How long have you been married?” the woman asked.

Before I could answer, Grace dug her fingers into my thigh.

“Five years,” she said.

“You seem like newlyweds,” the woman said.

“So do you.”

The man laughed and his wife poked him with an elbow.

“We feel like newlyweds,” Grace said. “Don’t we, honey?”

“We put Mae to bed around eight, and she dropped off quickly, her fuel supply exhausted by our long walk around the river and her game of tag with Indy. When we came back into the living room, Grace immediately began picking things up off the floor—coloring books, toys, tabloid magazines, and horror paperbacks. The tabloids and books weren’t Grace’s, they were Annabeth’s. Grace’s father died when she was in college, and he left both girls a modest fortune. Grace depleted hers pretty quickly by paying what wasn’t covered by her scholarship during her final two years at Yale, then supporting herself, her then-husband Bryan, and Mae before Bryan left her and Tufts Medical accepted her on fellowship, and she burned through most of what remained on living expenses.

Annabeth, four years younger, did a year of community college and then blew through the bulk of her inheritance during a year in Europe. She kept photographs of the trip taped to her headboard and vanity, and every one of them was taken in a bar. How to Drink Your Way Through Europe on Forty Grand.

She was great with Mae, though—made sure she was in bed on time, made sure she ate right and brushed her teeth and never crossed the street without holding her hand. She took her to children’s school shows and to the Children’s Museum and to playgrounds and did all the things that Grace didn’t have time for while working ninety-hour weeks.

We finished cleaning up after Mae and Annabeth and then curled up on the couch and tried to find something worth watching on TV and failed. Springsteen was right—fifty-seven channels and nothing on.

So we shut it off and sat facing each other, legs crossed at the knees, and she told me about her past three days in ER, how they kept coming, the bodies stacking up on gurneys like cordwood in a winter cabin, and the noise level reaching the pitch of a heavy metal concert, and an old woman who’d been knocked over in a purse-snatching and banged her head against the sidewalk holding Grace’s wrists as silent tears leaked from both eyes and she died just like that. Of fourteen-year-old gang members with baby’s faces and blood sluicing off their chests like wet paint as doctors tried to plug the leaks and a baby brought in with a left arm twisted completely backwards at the shoulder joint and broken in three places around the elbow, his parents claiming he’d fallen. Of a crack addict screaming and fighting the orderlies because she needed her next fix and didn’t give a shit if the doctors wanted to remove the knife from her eye first.

“And you think my job is violent?” I said.

She placed her forehead against mine. “One more year and I’m in cardiology. One more year.” She leaned back, took my hands in hers, rested them on her lap. “That girl who got killed in the park,” she said, “isn’t connected to this other case, is she?”

“What gave you that idea?”

“Nothing. I was just wondering.”

“No. Just happens we took the Warren case around the same time Kara was murdered. Why’d you think that?”

She ran her hands up my arms. “Because you’re tense, Patrick. Tenser than I’ve ever seen you.”

“How so?”

“Oh, you’re acting real well, but I can feel it in your body, see it in the way you stand, like you’re expecting to get hit by a truck.” She kissed me. “Something’s got you wigged out.”

I thought of the last eleven days. I’d sat at a dinner table with three psychotics, four if you counted Pine. Then I saw a woman crucified to a hill. Then someone sent me a package of bumper stickers and a “HI!” Then I found the “don’tforgettolockup” note. People were shooting up abortion clinics and subway cars and blowing up embassies. Homes were sliding off the sides of hills in California and falling through the earth in India. Maybe I had reason to be wigged out.