I ignored them. “You said she talked shit. What’d she say?”
“Nothing, man.”
I came to the bars. I looked through them into his face. “What did she say?”
“Said she needed the car.” He looked down again and nodded several times to himself. “Said she needed that car. How’s anyone need a car that much?”
“You know any bus lines run at three in the morning, Bigs?”
He shook his head.
“The woman you killed? She worked two jobs. One in Lewiston, one in Auburn. Her shift in Lewiston ended half an hour before her shift in Auburn began. You seeing it now?”
He nodded, the tears coming off him in strings, shoulders quaking.
“Peri Pyper,” I said. “That was her name.”
He kept his head down.
I turned to Coach Mayfield. “I’m done.”
I stood by the door while Coach Mayfield conferred with his client for a few minutes, their voices never rising above whispers, and then he picked his briefcase up off the bench and headed toward me and the guard.
As the door opened, Bigs yelled, “It was just a fucking
car
.”
“Not to her.”
• • •
“I’m not going to give you a bunch of bleeding-heart bullshit about Bigs being a great kid and all,” Coach Mayfield said. “He was always high-strung, always shortsighted when it came to the big picture. Always had a hair-trigger temper and when he wanted something, he wanted it now. But he wasn’t
this
.” He waved out the window of his Chrysler 300 as we drove through the streets with their white-steeple churches, broad green commons, and quaint B&Bs. “You look behind the face this town puts up, you find a lot of cracks. Unemployment’s double-digits and those who are hiring ain’t paying shit. Benefits?” He laughed. “Not a chance. Insurance?” He shook his head. “All the stuff our fathers took for granted as long as you worked hard, the great safety net and the fair wage and the gold watch at the end of it all? That’s all gone around here, my friend.”
“Gone in Boston, too,” I said.
“Gone all over, I bet.”
We drove in silence for a bit. While we’d been inside the jail, the blue sky had turned gray. The temperature had dropped a good ten degrees. The air felt like it was made of wet tin foil. No question—snow was coming.
“Bigs had a shot at going to Colby. They told him if he spent a year at community college getting his grades up just north of acceptable, they’d hold him a place on next year’s baseball team. So, he buckled down.” He looked over at me with eyebrows raised in confirmation. “He did. Went to school days, worked nights.”
“So what happened?”
“Company he worked for shitcanned everyone. Then after a month, they offered them their jobs back. It’s that cannery right over there.” As we rolled over a small bridge, he pointed to a beige brick building along the banks of the Androscoggin River. “Only the unskilled labor got the offer; the skilled labor just got dumped. But the company offered the unskilled their jobs back at half their previous hourly wage. No bennies, no insurance, no nothing. But plenty of overtime if they wanted it, long as they didn’t expect time and a half or any of that commie bullshit. So he takes the job back, Bigs. To make his rent and pay for school? He’s working seventy-hour weeks. And going to school full-time. So guess how he stays awake?”
“Crank.”
He nodded as he turned into the parking lot of his law firm. “The shit that cannery pulled? Companies pulling that all over town, all over the state. And the meth business? Well, that’s booming.”
We got out of his car and stood in the cold parking lot. I thanked him and he shrugged it off, a guy far more comfortable with criticism than praise.
“He did a piece-of-shit thing, Bigs did, but until he started tweeking, he was not a piece of shit.”
I nodded.
“Don’t make it right what he did,” he said, “but it didn’t come from a vacuum.”
I shook his hand. “I’m glad he’s got you looking out for him.”
He shrugged that compliment off, too. “Over a fucking car.”
“Over a fucking car,” I said and got into my own car and drove off.
• • •
At a rest stop just over the Massachusetts border, I stopped for something to eat and sat in my car with it and opened my laptop on the front seat. I tapped my keyboard to bring it out of sleep mode. A pleasant tingle coursed over my scalp. When I reached the home page for IntelSearchABS, I entered my user name and password and clicked my way to the Individual Search Records page. A little green box waited there for me. It asked for a name or alias. I clicked on
NAME
.
Angie would kill me. I was supposed to be done with this rogue shit. I’d gotten my laptop back. I’d gotten my laptop bag and my picture of Gabby. I’d gotten my answers about Peri Pyper. It was over and done with. I could walk away.
I remembered Peri and myself having drinks at the Chili’s in Lewiston and the T.G.I. Friday’s in Auburn. Less than a year ago. We’d traded childhood anecdotes, argued over sports teams, jabbed each other for our political differences, quoted movies we both loved. There was zero connection between her whistle-blowing and her getting shot by some dumb, fucked-up kid in a parking lot at three in the morning. No connection whatsoever.
But it’s all connected.
This should not be about that,
a voice said.
You’re just pissed off. And when you’re pissed off, you lash out.
I leaned back in my seat, closed my eyes. I saw Beatrice McCready’s face—pained and prematurely aged and possibly crazed.
Another voice said,
Don’t do this
.
That voice sounded uncomfortably like my daughter’s.
Leave it be
.
I opened my eyes. The voices were right.
I saw Amanda from my morning dream, the envelopes she’d tossed in the bushes.
It’s all connected.
No, it’s not
.
What had I said in the dream?
I’m just the mailman
.
I leaned forward to shut down my computer. Instead, I typed in the box:
Kenneth Hendricks
I hit
RETURN
and sat back.
Mordovian Rhythm & Blues
K
enneth James Hendricks had several aliases. He’d been known, at various times, as KJ, K Boy, Richard James Stark, Edward Toshen, and Kenny B. He was born in 1969 in Warrensburg, Missouri, the son of an aircraft mechanic stationed with the 340th Bombardment Wing at Whiteman Air Force Base. From there, he’d bounced all over the United States—Biloxi, Tampa, Montgomery, Great Falls. First juvenile arrest occurred in King Salmon, Alaska; the second in Lompoc, California. At eighteen, he was arrested in Lompoc on charges of assault and battery and charged as an adult. The victim was his father. Charges dropped by alleged victim. Second arrest as an adult, two days later. Assault and battery again, same victim. This time his father pressed charges, maybe because his son had tried to cut off his ear. Kenny had been halfway through the job when his father’s shrieks alerted a neighbor. Hendricks did eighteen months for the assault, plus three years’ probation. His father died while he was in prison. Next arrested in Sacramento for loitering in an area known to be popular among male prostitutes. Six weeks later, still in Sacramento, his third assault arrest. This one for pummeling a man at the Come On Inn along I-80. The victim, a Pentecostal deacon and prominent political fund-raiser, had a hard time explaining how he’d come to be naked in a motel room with a male prostitute, so he refused to press charges. The State of California revoked Kenny’s parole anyway, for being under the influence of alcohol and cocaine during his arrest.
When he got out of prison in 1994, he’d picked up a Waffen SS tattoo at the base of his neck, courtesy of his new best buddies in the Aryan Brotherhood. He’d also picked up a dedicated criminal trade—all his arrests for the next several years were for suspicion of identity theft. The more sophisticated personal computers grew, the more sophisticated Kenny grew with them. Couldn’t quite tame the old ways, though, and in ’99 he was picked up for rape and battery of a minor in Peabody, Massachusetts. She was seventeen or sixteen, depending on which time of night the rape actually occurred. Kenny’s lawyer fought hard on the issue. The DA realized that if he put the victim on the stand, what was left of her would just get chewed to the marrow. Kenny ended up pleading to the reduced charge of sexual battery on an adult. Because the state took rape so seriously, he was given two years, less time than he’d done in ’91 for snorting a couple of lines of Sacramento blow and chugging a six of Bud. Final arrest was in 2007. He was caught receiving fifty grand worth of TVs he’d purchased with a stolen identity. The plan had been to sell them out the back door for five hundred dollars less than he’d paid using the corporate credit card of one Oliver Orin, owner of the Ollie O’s chain of sports bars, several of which had just finished structural renovations. I had to hand it to him—if anyone could order fifty K worth of plasma TVs without raising an eyebrow it would be a guy like Oliver Orin. Because of his priors, Kenny was convicted and sentenced to five years. He served just short of three. Since then, no convictions.
“But a nice man, all the same,” Angie said.
“A charmer, no doubt.”
“Just needs snuggle-time, a good hug.”
“And free weights.”
“Well, of course,” Angie said. “We’re not barbarians.”
We were in the spare bedroom/closet where we keep the home office desk. It was a little past nine and Gabby had dropped off around eight. Since then, we’d been digging deeper into Kenny Hendricks’s history.
“So this is Helene’s boyfriend.”
“ ’Tis.”
“Oh, well, it’s all fine, then.”
She sat back and blew air up at her eyebrows, a sure sign she was about to pop.
“God knows I never expected Helene to be a good parent,” she said, “but I didn’t expect even that crack whore to be this retarded with her child.”
“There, there,” I said, “she strikes me more as a tweeker than a crackhead. Technically that would make her a meth whore.”
Angie shot me the darkest look she’d shot me in months. Playtime was over. The elephant in the middle of our relationship that neither of us talked about was the actions we’d taken back when Amanda McCready disappeared the first time. When Angie was faced with choosing between the law and a four-year-old’s well-being, her reaction at the time could be summed up thusly: Fuck the law.
I, on the other hand, had taken the high road and helped the state return a neglected child to her neglectful parent. We broke up over it. Went nearly a year without speaking. Some years are longer than others; that year was about a decade and a half. Since we’d reconciled, we hadn’t said the names
Amanda
or
Helene McCready
in our home until three days ago. In those three days, every time one of us mentioned one of those names, it felt like someone had pulled the pin from a grenade.
Twelve years ago, I’d been wrong. Every day that had passed since, roughly 4,400 of them, I was sure of that.
But twelve years ago, I’d been right. Leaving Amanda with kidnappers, no matter how vested they were in her welfare, was leaving her with kidnappers. In the 4,400 days since I’d taken her back, I was sure this was true. So where did that leave me?
With a wife who was still certain I’d fucked up.
“This Kenny,” she said, tapping my laptop, “do we know where he lives?”
“We know his last known address.”
She ran her hands through her long, dark hair. “I’m going to step out on the porch.”
“Sure.”
We put our coats on. Out on our back porch, we carefully closed the door and Angie opened the top of the barbecue grill where she kept a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. She swore she only smoked a couple a day, but there were days I’d noticed the pack was a lot lighter than it should have been. So far she’d kept evidence of the vice from Gabby, but the clock was ticking and we both knew it. Yet as much as I’d love my wife to be vice-free, I normally can’t stand vice-free people. They conflate a narcissistic instinct for self-preservation with moral superiority. Plus, they suck the life right out of a party. Angie knows I’d love it if she didn’t smoke, and Angie would love it if she didn’t smoke. But, for now, she smokes. I, for my part, deal with it and stay off her ass.
“If Beatrice isn’t crazy,” she said, “and Amanda really is missing again, we’ve got a second chance.”
“No,” I said, “we do not.”
“You don’t even know what I was going to say.”
“Yes, I do. You were going to suggest that if we somehow manage to locate Amanda McCready, then
this time
we can make up for the sins of the past.”
She gave me a rueful smile as she blew smoke out over the railing. “So you did know what I was going to say.”
I took a vicarious whiff of secondhand smoke and planted a kiss on my wife’s collarbone. “I don’t believe in redemption.”
“I thought you didn’t believe in closure.”
“That either.”
“So what do you believe in again?”
“You. Her. This.”
“Babe, you’ve got to find more balance.”
“What’re you, my sensei?”
“Hai.”
She gave me a small bow. “I’m serious. You can either sit around the house brooding on what happened to Peri Pyper and how you helped a classic d-bag like Brandon Trescott avoid any responsibility for his actions, or you can do some good.”
“And this is good, uh?”
“You’re damn right it is. Do you believe a guy like Kenny Hendricks should be around Amanda McCready?”
“No, but that’s not enough to go mucking around in people’s lives.”
“What is?”
I chuckled.
She didn’t. “She’s missing.”
“You want me to go after Kenny and Helene.”
She shook her head. “I want
us
to go after Kenny and Helene. And I want
us
to find Amanda again. I might not have much free time.”
“You don’t have any.”
“Okay, any,” she admitted, “but I still have mad computer skills, m’ man.”
“Did you say
mad
computer skills?”
“I’m reliving the early aughts.”
“I remember the early aughts—we made money then.”
“And we were prettier and your hair was a lot thicker.” She put both palms on my chest and stood on tiptoe to kiss me. “No offense, babe, but what else are you doing these days?”
“You’re a cold bitch. I love you. But you’re a cold bitch.”
She gave me that throaty laugh of hers, the one that slides through my blood.
“You
love
it.”
• • •
Half an hour later Beatrice McCready sat at our dining-room table. She drank a cup of coffee. She didn’t look quite as broken as she had the other day, quite as lost, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t.
“I shouldn’t have lied about Matt,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
I held up a hand. “Beatrice, Jesus. No apology necessary.”
“He just . . . It’s one of those things you know you probably won’t get over but you still got to function, go about your day. Right?”
“My first husband was murdered,” Angie said. “That doesn’t mean I know about your grief, Bea, but I did learn that having one moment in a given day, just one second, when you’re not grieving? That’s never a sin.”
Beatrice gave that a soft nod. “I . . . Thank you.” She looked around our small dining room. “You have a girl now, uh?”
“Yes. Gabriella.”
“Oh, that’s a pretty name. Does she look like you?”
Angie looked at me for confirmation, and I nodded.
“More me than him, yeah,” she said. She pointed to a picture of Gabby that sat atop the credenza. “That’s Gabby.”
Beatrice took the photo in and eventually smiled. “She looks feisty.”
“She’s that,” Angie said. “They say the terrible twos?”
Beatrice leaned forward. “Oh, I know, I know. It starts at eighteen months and it goes until they’re three and a half.”
Angie nodded vigorously. “She was a monster. I mean, God, it was—”
“Awful, right?” Beatrice said. She looked as if she were about to tell us an anecdote about her son but caught herself. She looked down at the table with a strange smile on her face and rocked a bit in her chair. “But they grow out of it.”
Angie looked at me. I looked back at her, clueless about what to say next.
“Bea,” she said, “the police said they investigated your claim and found Amanda in the house.”
Beatrice shook her head. “Since they moved, Amanda calls me every day. Never missed until two weeks ago. Right after Thanksgiving. I haven’t heard from her since.”
“They moved? Out of the neighborhood?”
Bea nodded. “About four months ago. Helene owns a house in Foxboro. A three-bedroom.”
Foxboro was a suburb, about twenty miles south. It wasn’t Belmont Hills or anything, but it was a tall step up from St. Bart’s Parish in Dorchester.
“What’s Helene do for work these days?”
Beatrice laughed. “Work? I mean, last I heard, she was working the Lotto machine at New Store on the Block, but that was a while ago. I’m pretty sure she managed to get fired from there just like every other place. This is a woman who managed to get fired from Boston Gas back in the day. Who gets fired from a utility?”
“So, if she’s not working much . . .”
“How’s she afford a house?” She shrugged. “Who knows?”
“She didn’t get anything from the city in those lawsuits, did she?”
She shook her head. “It all went into a trust for Amanda. Helene can’t touch it.”
“Okay,” Angie said. “I’ll pull the tax assessment on the property.”
“What about the restraining orders against you?” I asked as softly as I could.
Beatrice looked over at me. “Helene works the system. She’s been doing it since she was a teenager. Amanda was sick a couple years ago. The flu. Helene had some new guy, a bartender who fed her free drinks, so she kept forgetting to check on Amanda. This is when they were in the old place by Columbia Road. I still had a key and I started letting myself in to care for Amanda. It was either that or let her catch pneumonia.”
Angie glanced at the photo of Gabby and then back at Bea. “So Helene found you there and filed the restraining order.”
“Yeah.” Bea fingered the edge of her coffee cup. “I drink more than I used to. Sometimes I get stupid and drunk-dial.” She looked up at me. “Like I did with you the other night. I’ve done it with Helene a few times. After the last time, she filed for another restraining order. That was three weeks ago.”
“What made you, I don’t want to say ‘harass’ her, but . . . ?”
“ ‘Harass’ is okay. Sometimes I like harassing Helene.” She smiled. “I had talked to Amanda. She’s a good kid. Hard, you know? Way older than her years, but good.”
I thought of the four-year-old I’d returned to that house. Now she was “hard.” Now she was “way older than her years.”
“Amanda asked me to check the mail at the old place, just some stuff that the PO forgot to forward. They do that all the time. So I went by there and it was mostly junk mail.” She reached into her purse. “Except for this.”