CPC 54 pulls into the driveway at 298 Tannenbaum Street. Officers Amarilis Rosario and Jason Laverty—known as Toody and Muldoon because their car number was featured in an old cop sitcom—get out and approach the door. Rosario rings the doorbell. There’s no answer, so Laverty knocks, good and hard. There’s still no answer. He tries the door on the off chance, and it opens. They look at each other. This is a good neighborhood, but it’s still the city, and in the city most people lock their doors.
Rosario pokes her head in. “Mrs. Scapelli? This is Police Officer Rosario. Want to give us a shout?”
There is no shout.
Her partner chimes in. “Officer Laverty, ma’am. Your daughter is worried about you. Are you okay?”
Nothing. Laverty shrugs and gestures to the open door. “Ladies first.”
Rosario steps in, unsnapping the strap on her service weapon without even thinking about it. Laverty follows. The living room is empty but the TV is on, the sound muted.
“Toody, Toody, I don’t like this,” Rosario says. “Can you smell it?”
Laverty can. It’s the smell of blood. They find the source in the kitchen, where Ruth Scapelli lies on the floor next to an overturned chair. Her arms are splayed out as if she tried to break her fall. They can see the deep cuts she’s made, long ones up the forearms almost to the elbows, short ones across the wrists. Blood is splattered on the easy-clean tiles, and a great deal more is on the table, where she sat to do the deed. A butcher knife from the wooden block beside the toaster lies on the lazy Susan, placed with grotesque neatness between the salt and pepper shakers and the ceramic napkin holder. The blood is dark, coagulating. Laverty guesses she’s been dead for twelve hours, at least.
“Maybe there was nothing good on TV,” he says.
Rosario gives him a dark look and takes a knee close to the body, but not close enough to get blood on her uni, which just came back from the cleaners the day before. “She drew something before she lost consciousness,” she says. “See it there on the tile by her right hand? Drew it in her own blood. What do you make of it? Is it a 2?”
Laverty leans down for a close look, hands on his knees. “Hard to tell,” he says. “Either a 2 or a Z.”
BRADY
“My boy is a genius,” Deborah Hartsfield used to tell her friends. To which she would add, with a winning smile: “It’s not bragging if it’s the truth.”
This was before she started drinking heavily, when she still had friends. Once she’d had another son, Frankie, but Frankie was no genius. Frankie was brain-damaged. One evening when he was four years old, he fell down the cellar stairs and died of a broken neck. That was the story Deborah and Brady told, anyway. The truth was a little different. A little more complex.
Brady loved to invent things, and one day he’d invent something that would make the two of them rich, would put them on that famous street called Easy. Deborah was sure of it, and told him so often. Brady believed it.
He managed just Bs and Cs in most of his courses, but in Computer Science I and II he was a straight-A star. By the time he graduated from North Side High, the Hartsfield house was equipped with all sorts of gadgets, some of them—like the blue boxes by which Brady stole cable TV from Midwest Vision—highly illegal. He had a workroom in the basement where Deborah rarely ventured, and it was there that he did his inventing.
Little by little, doubt crept in. And resentment, doubt’s fraternal twin. No matter how inspired his creations were, none were moneymakers. There were guys in California—Steve Jobs, for instance—who made incredible fortunes and changed the world just tinkering in their garages, but the things Brady came up with never quite made the grade.