He made a quick left onto Woodhaven Boulevard. Up in the woods on her right she could barely make out the soft lights of the merry-go-round.
This is it, thought Claire. Nothing on God’s earth can stop us now. She settled back in the big plush seat of the vast American car and let him take her wherever he wanted. There was a button on her door. She pushed it and the window opened. The night time came in, the huddled streets blurred past and she still felt the hard, kinetic weight of him on top of her. Good thing I shaved my legs, she thought. A siren passed them, a squad car racing in the opposite direction. He said he loves me, she marveled. He’s watching me out of the corner of his eye and he wants me as much as I want him. Another bweep bweep bweep of a radio car cut through the noise of the deafening el train. Johnny did a U-turn on 111th and Jamaica. She saw her reflection in the bakery window, sliding across the seat and flattened against the car door like a passenger on the Roundabout, the carnival ride that whips you around until you’re dizzy. “What are you doing?” she cried.
“I’m taking you back home,” he said, his mind on something else entirely now. “Something’s going on.”
He pulled up in front of her mother’s house with a screech and practically pushed her out the door. She stood on the curb, looking at him as though he were mad. “Go in the house,” he ordered and turned the big car around one two three. “I said go in the house, dammit.”
She went into the house.
Johnny followed the noise. In the very same pine forest where they’d found the body of the little boy Miguel, where no one in his right mind would ever think to look for trouble again, some kids up there, young kids getting high in the summer night, had stumbled across the mutilated body of a five-year-old girl.
This time the papers had a field day. Furgueson at the 102nd had everybody working overtime, and that meant everybody. Nobody said boo. They all wanted this guy and they wanted him quick. This was their precinct. It made them nauseous to think of some monster out there just sick enough to try it again. There weren’t too many cops who didn’t have little ones of their own at home.
By morning, all of New York had had a tour of the Richmond Hill pine forest over three major networks. The squirrels were mad with joy from all the Drake’s Cakes and doughnuts the crowds had left all over the place. Reporters got in everybody’s way down at the station house and when Furgueson had them thrown out, they interviewed the people on the street. This was no longer one alleged “minority crime.” Or something within one family. This was beginning to look like a habit. The dead girl had been a perfectly charming blond innocent with cherry lips and pink hair ribbons—the whole thing. She’d been missing only five hours, last seen on her tricycle in front of the Park Lane South candy store. This was news, big news, and the media was out to milk it for every ounce of hypnotized fear and fascination its viewers were sure to tune in for.
A few of the reporters had themselves televised up in front of the carousel. It was awful to see it on television that way, they all thought. How hard they had worked in the community to bring it back to life. Nothing over the years had brought the people together with such pride and happiness. Nobody didn’t love the carousel. And now, to see it used like this. It was a sin. A real sin.
At the Breslinsky’s, the newspapers were spread out on the kitchen table. There they sat, recounting with fascinated horror just how close they’d come to being at the candy store yesterday and, who knew, right now it could have been themselves, God forbid, dressing up to go solemnly down to the morgue.
“And I say,” Stan insisted, “that it could never happen in a family like ours, where we keep such close tabs on the kid. We would notice the moment someone talked to him.”
“Stanley. Sweetheart. It only takes a second. Look how the children run around the block wild as Indians and there’s no one to pay them a never you do mind. I mean it can happen to anyone.” She shuddered. “You can be as careful as you like, but then there’s always that unguarded moment.”
“Oh, come on. I saw that Miguel kid around here a hundred times, up and down the block with the other kids. You can’t tell me his parents kept tabs on him.”
“Daddy, that’s easier said than done. How many times have I come home from work and there was Michaelaen, across the street,” her voice rose. “Alone. No one around. So you come on.”