Mystic River

Sean didn't want it, which, if prior experience was any kind of barometer, pretty much guaranteed he'd get it. He worked his way down a slope toward the base of the drive-in screen, his eyes on Krauser and Friel, trying to read the verdict in the smallest motions of their heads. If that was Katie Marcus in there? and Sean didn't have much doubt? the Flats would explode. Forget Jimmy? he'd probably be catatonic anyway. But the Savage brothers? Back at the Major Crimes Unit, they had files the size of doorstops on almost every one of those crazy fuckers. And that was just the State shit they'd pulled. Sean knew guys in the BPD said a Saturday night without at least one Savage in lockup was like a solar eclipse? other cops came down to have a look for themselves because they couldn't believe it.

On the stage below the screen, Krauser nodded once and Friel's head swiveled, looked around until he met Sean's eyes, and Sean knew this was his and Whitey's now. Sean saw a small amount of blood splattered on some leaves leading up to the base of the screen, saw some more on the steps leading up to the door.

Connolly and Souza looked up from the blood on the stairs, gave Sean grim nods, and went back to peering at the crevices where the steps met the risers. Karen Hughes came up off her haunches and Sean could hear the whir of her camera as she flicked a knob with her thumb and the film spooled to the end. She reached into her bag for a fresh roll and flicked open the back of the camera, Sean noticing that her ash blond hair had darkened at the temples and bangs. She glanced at him without expression and dropped the spent film in her bag, then reloaded.

Whitey was on his knees alongside the assistant ME, and Sean heard him say "What?" in a sharp whisper.

"Just what I said."

"You're sure now, yeah?"

"Not a hundred percent, but I'm leaning."

"Shit." Whitey looked back over his shoulder as Sean approached, and shook his head, jerked his thumb at the assistant ME.

Sean's view widened as he climbed up behind them and their shoulders dropped away and he was looking down into the doorway, down at the body scrunched in there, the space between the walls no more than three feet wide and the corpse sitting with her back against the wall on his left, her feet pushed up hard against the wall on his right, so that Sean's first impression was of a fetus seen through a sonogram screen. Her left foot was bare and muddy. What was left of the sock hung around her ankle, shriveled and torn. She wore a simple black shoe with a flat sole on her right foot, and it was caked in dried mud. Even after she'd lost the one shoe in the garden, she'd left the other one on. Her killer must have been breathing down her neck the whole way. And yet she'd come in here to hide. So for a moment she must have given him the slip, which meant something had slowed him down.

"Souza," he called.

"Yeah?"

"Get some uniforms to check the trail leading up here. Look in the bushes and shit for torn clothes, scraped-off skin, anything like that."

"We already got a guy doing casts on footprints."

"Yeah, but we need more. You on it?"

"I'm on it."

Sean looked down at the body again. She wore soft, dark pants and a navy blue blouse with a wide neck. Her jacket was red and torn and Sean figured it for a weekend outfit, too nice for everyday for a girl from the Flats. She'd been out somewhere, somewhere nice, maybe on a date.

And somehow she'd ended up stuffed in this narrow corridor, its mildewed walls the last thing she saw, probably the last thing she'd smelled.

It was as if she'd gone in here to escape a red rain, and the downpour remained in her hair and cheeks, stained her clothing in wet strings. Her knees were pressed close to her chest, and her right elbow was propped on her right knee, a clenched fist up by her ear so that again Sean was reminded of a child more than a woman, curled up and trying to keep some awful sound at bay. Stop it, just stop it, the body said. Stop it, please.

Whitey moved out of the way, and Sean squatted just outside the doorway. Even with all the blood on the body and pooled beneath it and the mildew clinging to the concrete around it, Sean could smell her perfume, just a hint of it, slightly sweet, slightly sensual, the lightest scent, which made him think of high school dates and dark cars, the panicky fumbling through fabric and the electric grazing of flesh. Underneath the red rain, Sean could see several dark bruises on her wrist and forearm and ankles, and he knew these were the places where she'd been hit with something.

"He beat her?" Sean said.

"Looks that way. The blood from the top of her head? That's from a split on the crown. Guy probably broke whatever he was hitting her with, he brought it down so hard."

Piled on the other side of her, filling this narrow corridor behind the screen, were wooden pallets and what looked like stage props? wooden schooners and cathedral tops, the bow of what looked like a Venetian gondola. She wouldn't have been able to move. Once she got in there, she was stuck. If whoever had been chasing her found her, then she'd die. And he'd found her.

He'd opened the door on her, and she'd curled tight into herself, trying to protect her body with nothing more substantial than her own limbs. Sean craned his head and peered around her clenched fist, looked into her face. It, too, was streaked with red, and her eyes were clenched as tight as her fist, trying to wish it all away, the eyelids locked by fear at first and now by rigor.

"That her?" Whitey Powers said.

"Huh?"

"Katherine Marcus," Whitey said. "That her?"

"Yeah," Sean said. She had a small scar curving underneath the right side of her chin, barely noticeable and faded with time, but you'd notice it on Katie when you'd see her around the neighborhood because the rest of her was so unblemished, her face a flawless record of her mother's dark, angular beauty combined with her father's more tousled good looks, his pale eyes and hair.

"Hundred percent positive?" the assistant ME asked.

"Ninety-nine," Sean said. "We'll have the father do a positive at the morgue. But, yeah, it's her."

"You see the back of her head?" Whitey leaned in and lifted the hair off her shoulders with a pen.

Sean peered back there, saw that a small piece of the lower skull was missing, the back of the neck gone dark with the blood.

"You telling me she was shot?" He looked at the ME.

The guy nodded. "That looks like a bullet wound to me."

Sean leaned back out of the smell of perfume and blood and mildewed concrete and sodden wood. He wished, for just a moment, that he could pull Katie Marcus's clenched fist down from her ear, as if by doing so those bruises he could see and the ones they were sure to find under her clothes would evaporate, and the red rain would ascend from her hair and body, and she would step back out of this tomb blinking sleep from her eyes, a bit groggy.