“Just a thug, a local screw-up,” he said. He fanned out the pictures again. “Look again now.”
Two of the men had blond facial hair; I eliminated them. One had too much gray. I stared at the mouth of the man who had dark stubble, at his blank dark eyes. Maybe. Maybe. I was shaking a little, from the inside out.
“I just don’t know,” I said. “Him maybe. The masks.”
“I get it,” he said. He raised a palm, gave an understanding nod. “I’m not trying to force you into saying something you’re not sure of.”
“Okay, kid,” said Paul. “Go do your homework.”
I lingered in the hallway just beyond the kitchen door. I heard Paul get up and pour Boz another cup.
“I think we’re going to have to face that she’s got nothing left to give,” said Paul. “She’s shattered, Boz.”
There was a long pause, a sigh. “Did you know he was in trouble?”
“Who?” said Paul. “Chad? What kind of trouble?”
“He was drowning in debt,” said Boz.
A spoon against the edge of a mug. A scraping chair.
“I had a sense that money was tight,” said Paul. “How much debt?”
“He was borrowing for private school. There were high credit card balances, multiple cards. He was nearing ninety thousand.”
“Christ.”
“On a cop’s salary,” Boz said.
“Okay,” said Paul. “So what? So he had debt. Lots of folks have debt.”
“A couple weeks before the murders,” said Boz. “Some money was stolen. A lot of money, a million.”
There was a leaden silence; I slid down the wall to my haunches, vibrating.
“Stolen from where?”
“Word is, from my confidential informant, that three heavily armed masked men shot two guards and absconded with a pile of cash belonging to Whitey Malone.”
“The drug dealer you guys never seem to be able to bring in.”
“That’s right,” said Boz. “My CI says that the robbers were trained, organized, and ruthless. They killed the two thugs on guard, collected their rounds and casings. They knew where the money was buried. Came and went quickly. Word is that they were cops, or maybe paramilitary. My guy was hiding, saw the whole thing go down.”
“You think the two incidents are connected.”
“The men who killed your stepbrother and his wife,” said Boz. “They were looking for money.”
“And why would they be looking at Chad’s?” asked Paul. What was there in his tone? Something I’d never heard.
One of them coughed. “I don’t know,” said Boz. “Why do you think?”
“How the hell should I know?”
More silence.
“So,” said Paul, his voice coming up an octave. “If you think it’s connected, make life a living hell for Malone and his thugs. Who else would be looking for that money but them?”
“We’ve done that,” said Boz. “We’re doing it. No one knows anything; or no one’s talking. Of the locals, these four come closest to Zoey’s physical descriptions—size, coloring, whatnot. They’re by far the worst guys we have on the streets in the area, armed robbers, drug dealers, rapists, killers—convicted felons every one.”
“So it makes sense that they’re out walking around.”
“Hey, I don’t make the laws,” said Boz. “Neither do you.”
“Did they work for Malone?”
“I didn’t find any connections, no.”
I heard a chair groan as one of them shifted his weight.
“You’ve got fibers, the boot print,” said Paul.
“There’s no definitive match on any of it,” he said. “This guy, Beckham, has a size ten boot, but so do a lot of guys. We haven’t found any guns with a ballistics match in their possession. We brought this guy, Didion, in on gun charges; found a cache of illegal weapons—not the ones stolen from Chad’s locker. None of which were used in the commission of the Drake murders. Didion will go back to jail anyway. This other one looks like he’s been trying to go straight, has a job at the gas station. Hasn’t been in any trouble”
More silence.
“So what are you saying, Boz?” said Paul. What was it? Was it menace? Anger? There was something sizzling between them. What?
“Hey, I’m not saying anything,” said Boz gently. “I got to look at everything, for my notes, every single angle. You know that. This is a cop killing. All eyes are on me.”
There was a hard thump on the kitchen table. I couldn’t see what.
“They’re going to get away with it, aren’t they?” said Paul. His voice didn’t even sound like his; it was small now and tight with anger. “The men who did this to Chad and Heather, to Zoey. They’re out there.”
“I swear to you, Paul, and to Zoey,” Boz said, “I’ll never rest until we find who did this.”
Paul made some kind of strangled noise. It took me a second to realize that he was crying.
? ? ?
BOZ WAS ALMOST AN OLD man now, but he never got the memo. Retirement had agreed with him. He’d grown leaner, had lost the purple gullies under his eyes. We’d stayed in touch over the years, so I knew he’d married late to a much younger woman, drove a white Corvette that he pampered like a baby, took up golf. He still lived in the town where I grew up. I brought my theories to him. He called me sometimes when the odd thought occurred to him.
The lights were burning inside his tidy Victorian when I pulled up in the old truck that Paul kept in a garage uptown.
I walked up the flower-lined path and knocked at the door, heard the television go off inside. In spite of the hour, he didn’t seem that surprised to see me when he opened the door.
“Zoey,” he said. He wore a tattered old John Jay College sweatshirt. They all went there, Boz, Paul, my dad, even Mike. “Come in.”
He held the door open for me, and I walked into the foyer.
There was a mirror there and before I could look away, I caught sight of myself, someone narrow with shoulders hiked high, pale with dark circles under her eyes, hair pulled back tight. Jeans, black hoodie. Not someone who belonged in this carefully decorated home of older people. An interloper, an unwelcome guest. What’s with the getup? that doorman had asked.
“Mike called you,” I guessed.
“Said Paul’s in a bad way, that you might be stopping by.”
“I want to go over it again.”
Even though the people who killed my parents were never caught, Boz has never stopped working the case, even after he retired. He has an office toward the back of the house, where he still pores over cold cases. Lately, he’s closed a couple. The new DNA technology and evolving federal and state requirements that mandate DNA samples be taken from anyone arrested have led to new evidence on cases that might have forever remained unsolved.
“Where’s Miranda?” I asked. Funny name for a cop’s wife.
“She’s visiting her sister,” he said, motioning that I follow him into the kitchen. He put on the kettle, pulled out a chair for me. I sat at the table, looked around—lots of flowers and ducks, pictures of kids on the refrigerator, a standing mixer, a rack of copper pots. Homey.
“John Didion is dead,” he said, leaning against the counter.