Moonlight Mile (Kenzie & Gennaro 6)

“You fill out your 479s on the Trescott case?”

“No.”

“Well, take the sub office and do that. Fill out your expense reports and don’t forget to file your 692s as well. See Barnes in equipment so he can clear you on the gear you used—what’d you go with, the Canon and the Sony?”

I nodded. “I used those new Taranti bugs in the kid’s place, too.”

“I heard they were glitchy.”

I shook my head. “Worked like a charm.”

He finished his drink and leveled his gaze at me. “Look, we’ll find a new case for you. And if you can just get through that one without pissing anybody off, we’ll hire you permanent, okay? You can tell your wife I gave you my word.”

I nodded, a hole in my stomach.

Back in the empty office, I considered my options.

I didn’t have many. I was working one case and it was far from a cash cow. An old friend, Mike Colette, had asked me to help figure out which employee was embezzling from his freight company. It took me a few days with the paperwork to narrow it down to his night-shift supervisor and one or two of his short-haul truckers, but then I did some further digging and they didn’t look as right for it as I’d originally thought. So now I’d turned my attention to his accounts-payable manager, a woman he’d promised me was a trusted confidante, beyond reproach.

I could expect to bill another five, maybe six, hours for that job.

At day’s end, I’d walk out of Duhamel-Standiford and wait for their next call, their next trial. In the meantime, the bills arrived in the mailbox every day. The food in the fridge got eaten and the shelves didn’t miraculously fill back up. I had a Blue Cross Blue Shield bill due at the end of the month and not enough money to pay it.

I sat back in my chair. Welcome to adulthood.

I had half a dozen files to update and three Brandon Trescott reports to write, but I picked up the phone instead and called Richie Colgan, the Whitest Black Man in America.

He answered the phone, “Tribune, Metro Desk.”

“Not an ounce of you sounds like a brother.”

“My people don’t have a sound, just a proud and royal legacy temporarily interrupted by racist crackers with whips.”

“You telling me if Dave Chappelle answers one phone and George Will answers the other, I’m gonna have trouble guessing which is the white guy?”

“No, but to discuss it in polite company is still verboten.”

“Now you’re German,” I said.

“Only on my French racist father’s side,” he said. “What up?”

“Remember Amanda McCready? Little girl went—”

“Missing, what, five years ago?”

“Twelve.”

“Shit. Years? How old are we?”

” ’Member how we felt in college about old geezers who talked about, like, the Dave Clark Five and Buddy Holly?”

“Yeah?”

“That’s how kids today feel when we talk about Prince and Nirvana.”

“Naw.”

“Believe it, bitch. So anyway, Amanda McCready.”

“Yeah, yeah. You found her with the cop’s family, brought her back, everyone on the force hates your guts, you need a favor from me.”

“No.”

“You don’t need a favor?”

“Well, I do, but it’s directly connected to Amanda McCready. She went missing again.”

“No shit.”

“No shit. And her aunt says no one cares. Not the cops, not you guys.”

“Hard to believe. Twenty-four-hour news cycle and all? These days we can make a story out of anything.”

“Explains Paris Hilton.”

“Nothing explains that,” he said. “Point is—a girl disappears again twelve years after her first disappearance brought down a gang of cops and cost the city a few mil during a bad budget year? Shit, that’s news, white boy.”

“That’s what I thought. You almost sounded black there, by the way.”

“Racist. What’s the aunt’s name, uh, bitch?”

“Bea. Well, Beatrice McCready.”

“Aunt Bea, uh? Well, this ain’t Mayberry.”

He called me back twenty minutes later. “That was simple.”

“What happened?”

“I talked to the investigating officer, a Detective Chuck Hitchcock. He said they investigated the aunt’s claim, went to the mother’s house, poked around, and talked to the girl.”

“Talked to the girl? Amanda?”

“Yeah. It was all a hoax.”

“Why would Bea make up a—?”

“Oh, Bea’s a champ, what she is. You know Amanda’s mother—what’s it, Helene?—she’s had to take out a couple restraining orders on this woman. Ever since her kid died, she left the reser—”

“Wait, whose kid?”

“Beatrice McCready’s.”

“Her kid didn’t die. He’s at Monument High.”

“No,” Richie said slowly, “he’s not at Monument High. He’s dead. Him and a few other kids were in a car last year, none of them old enough to drive, none of them old enough to drink, but they did both anyway. They blew a stop sign at the bottom of that big-ass hill where St. Margaret’s Hospital used to be? Got pancaked by a bus on Stoughton Street. Two kids dead, two kids talking funny for the rest of their lives but not walking while they’re doing it. One of the dead was this Matthew McCready. I’m looking at it in our Web archives right now. June 15, last year. You want the link?”

Chapter Five

I exited JFK/UMass Station and headed for home, my head still buzzing. I’d hung up the phone and clicked on the link Richie sent me, and there it was—a page 4 story from last June about four boys who took a joyride in a stolen car and came flying down a hill stoked on pot and Jager. The bus driver never had time to hit his horn. Paralyzed from the waist down, Harold Endalis, 15. Paralyzed from the neck down, Stuart Burr-field, 15. Dead on arrival at the Carney ER, Mark McGrath, 16. Dead on scene, Matthew McCready, 16. I descended the station stairs and headed up Crescent Avenue toward home, thinking about all the stupid shit I’d done at sixteen, ten or twelve ways I could have died—probably should have died—before seventeen.

The first two houses on the south side of Crescent, a matching pair of small white Capes, were abandoned, victims of the wonderful mortgage crisis that had spread such cheer across the land of late. A homeless guy approached me in front of the second one.