Gone, Baby, Gone (Kenzie & Gennaro 4)

He’d have a target scope on his rifle equipped with a light amplification device, and through the scope we’d all look like we stood in a misty seaweed world, moved within a photograph that was still developing before his eyes.

The walkie-talkie on Broussard’s hip went off, and the squawk was like a scream in the midst of all that quiet. He fumbled with it and brought it up to his mouth.

“Broussard.”

“This is Doyle. Sixteenth Precinct just received a call from a woman with a message for you. We think it’s the same woman who called Lionel McCready.”

“Copy. What’s the message?”

“You’re to walk to your right, Detective Broussard, up onto the southern cliffs. Kenzie and Gennaro are to walk to their left.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it. Doyle out.”

Broussard clipped the walkie-talkie back on his hip, looked off at the line of cliffs on the far side of the water. “Divide and conquer.”

He looked at us, and his eyes were small and empty. He looked much younger than usual, nerves and fear stripping ten years from his face.

“Be careful,” Angie said.

“You too,” he said.

We stood there for another few seconds, as if by not moving we could stave off the inevitable, the moment when we’d discover whether Amanda McCready was alive or dead, the moment when all this hoping and planning would be out of our hands and whoever was hurt or lost or killed wouldn’t be up to us any longer.

“Well,” Broussard said. “Shit.” He shrugged and then walked off along the flat path, the flashlight beam bouncing in front of him through the dust.

Angie and I moved back from the edge about ten feet and followed the stone until a gap appeared and another granite slab rose six inches on the other side. I gripped her hand and we stepped over the gap and up onto the next slab, followed that stone another thirty feet until we met a wall.

It rose a good ten feet above us, and its creamy beige color was mixed with swirls of chocolate. It reminded me of a marble cake. A six-ton marble cake, but still.

We shone our flashlights to the left of it and found nothing but sheer mass back about thirty feet and into the trees. I brought the light back to the section in front of me, found cuts in the rock, as if layers had been chipped away in places like shale. A small lip about a foot wide opened like a smile two and a half feet up the face, and four feet above that I saw another, wider smile.

“Done much rock climbing lately?” I asked Angie.

“You’re not thinking…?” Her light beam danced across the rock face.

“Don’t see any alternative.” I handed her my flashlight and raised the toe of my shoe until it found the first small lip. I looked back over my shoulder at Angie. “I wouldn’t stand directly behind me, if I were you. I might be coming back down real quick.”

She shook her head and stepped to my left, kept both flashlights shining on the rock as I flexed the toe of my shoe against the lip and pushed up and down a couple of times to see if the smile crumbled. When it didn’t, I took a deep breath and pushed up off it, grabbed for the higher shelf. I got my fingers in there, and they slid on dust and rock salt and then popped back out again, and I bounced back off the rock face and fell on my ass.

“That was good,” Angie said. “You definitely have a genetic predisposition toward all things athletic.”

I stood and wiped the dust off my fingers, smeared it on my jeans. I scowled at Angie and tried again, and again I fell back on my ass.

“It’s getting nervous, though,” Angie said.

The third try, I actually held my fingers in the shelf for a good fifteen seconds before I lost my grip.

Angie’s lights shone down in my face as I looked up at the beast slab of stubborn granite.

“May I?” she said.

I took the flashlights from her, shone them on the rock. “Be my guest.”

She walked backward several feet and peered at the rock. She squatted and rose up and down on her haunches several times, stretched her torso from the small of her back, and flexed her fingers. Before I even knew what her plan was, she rose, took off, and ran full speed at the rock face. A few inches before she would have smacked into it like Wile E. Coyote into a painted-on door, her foot dug into the lower shelf, her right hand grabbed the upper one, and her small body vaulted up another two feet as her left arm slapped over the top.

She hung there for a good thirty seconds like that, pressed flat into the rock as if she’d been hurled there.

“Now what are you going to do?” I said.

“I thought I’d just lie here awhile.”

“That sounds like sarcasm.”

“Oh, you recognize it?”

“One of my talents.”

“Patrick,” she said, in a tone that reminded me of my mother and several nuns I’ve known, “get under me and push.”

I shoved one flashlight into my belt buckle, so that the light shone up into my face, and the other in my back pocket, stood under Angie, got both hands under her heels, and pushed up. Both flashlights together were probably heavier than she was. She shot up the rock face and I extended my arms until they were straight above my head and her heels left the palms. She turned around on top of the rock, looked down at me from her hands and knees, and extended her hand.

“Ready, my Olympian?”

I coughed into my hand. “Bitch.”

She withdrew the hand and smiled. “What was that?”

“I said I have to switch the other flashlight to my back pocket.”

“Oh.” She lowered the hand again. “Of course.”

After she’d pulled me up, we shone the lights across the top of the rock. It ran unbroken for at least twenty yards and was as smooth as a bowling ball. I lay on my stomach and stuck my head and flashlight over the edge, watching the cliff face drop straight and smooth another sixty-five feet to the water.

We were about midway up the north side of the quarry. Directly across the water was a row of cliffs and shelves, littered with graffiti and even a stray climber’s piton. The water, when under my beam, shimmered against the rock like heat waves off a summer road. It was the pale green I remembered, slightly milkier, but I knew the color was deceptive. Divers looking for a body in this water last summer had been forced to abandon their search when a high concentration of silt deposits combined with the natural lack of visibility in depths of more than one hundred and fifty feet made it impossible to see more than two to three feet in front of their faces. I brought my beam back across the water toward our side, skipped over a crumpled license plate floating in the green, a chunk of log that had been gnawed open in the center by animals until it resembled a canoe, and then the edge of something round and the color of flesh.