Mystic River

by Dennis Lehane

“Your partner’s out on that bullshit disability claim, pulled something in his spine so he’s recuperating on Jet Skis, parasailing in Florida, what I hear.” Friel shrugged. “Powers requested you when you got back. Now you’re back. We going to have any more incidents like the last one?”

  Sean had been expecting to eat shit, particularly from Friel, so he kept his voice perfectly contrite. “No, sir. A momentary lapse of judgment.”

  “Several of them,” Friel said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Your personal life’s a mess, Trooper, that’s your problem. Don’t let it bleed back into your job.” Sean looked at Friel, caught a charged-electrode sheen in his eyes he’d seen before, a sheen that meant Friel was in a place where you couldn’t argue with him.

  Again Sean nodded, sucking it up.

  Friel gave him a cold smile and watched a news copter arc in over the screen, flying lower than the agreed-upon distance, Friel getting a look on his face like he was going to be handing someone severance pay before sunset.

  “You know the family, right?” Friel said, tracking the chopper. “You grew up here.”

  “I grew up in the Point.”

  “That’s here.”

  “This is the Flats. Bit of a difference, sir.”

  Friel waved it away. “You grew up here. You were one of the first on-scene, and you know these people.” He spread his hands. “I’m wrong?”

  “About what?”

  “Your ability to handle this.” He gave Sean his summer-softball-coach smile. “You’re one of my bright boys, right? Served your penance, ready to get back on the ball?”

  “Yes, sir,” Sean said. You bet, sir. Whatever it takes to keep this job, sir.

  They looked over at the van as something thumped to the floor inside and the chassis dipped toward the wheels. The chassis bounced back up, and Friel said, “You notice they always drop them?”

  They always did. Katie Marcus, zipped in the dark, plastic heat of a body bag now. Dumped inside that van, her hair matting to the plastic, organs softening.

  “Trooper,” Friel said, “You know what I like even less than ten-year-old black boys getting shot by bullshit gang-war crossfire?”

  Sean knew the answer, but he didn’t say anything.

  “Nineteen-year-old white girls getting murdered in my parks. People don’t say ‘Oh, the vagaries of economics’ then. They don’t feel a wistful sense of the tragic. They feel pissed and they want somebody to be led onto the six o’clock in shackles.” Friel nudged Sean. “I mean, right?”

  “Right.”

  “That’s what they want, because they’re us and that’s what we want.” Friel grasped Sean’s shoulder so he’d look at him.

  “Yes, sir,” Sean said, because Friel had that weird light in his eyes like he believed what he was saying the way some people believed in God or NASDAQ or the Internet-as-global-village. Friel was Born Again all the way, although what the Again had been Sean couldn’t say, just that Friel had found something through his work that Sean could barely recognize, something that gave solace, maybe even belief, a certainty underfoot. Times, to be truthful, Sean thought his boss was an idiot, spouting bullshit platitudes about life and death and the ways to make it all right, cure the cancers and become one collective heart, if only everyone would listen.

  Other times, though, Friel reminded Sean of his father, building his birdhouses in the basement where no birds ever flew, and Sean loved the idea of him.

  Martin Friel had been Homicide Detective Lieutenant of Barracks Six going back a couple of presidents, and as far as Sean knew, no one had ever called him “Marty” or “buddy” or “old man.” To look at him on the street, you would have guessed he was an accountant or maybe a claims adjuster for an insurance agency, something like that. He had a bland voice to go with his bland face, and nothing but a brown horseshoe remained of his hair. He was a small guy, particularly for a guy who’d worked his way up through the state trooper ranks, and you could lose him easily in a crowd because there was nothing distinctive to his walk. Loved the wife and two kids, forgot to remove the lift ticket from his parka during wintertime, active in his church, fiscally and socially conservative.

  But what the bland voice and bland face couldn’t begin to hint at was the mind—a dense, unquestioning combination of the practical and the moralistic. You committed a capital crime in Martin Friel’s jurisdiction—and it was his, fuck you if you didn’t get that—and he took it very, very personally.

  “I want you sharp and I want you edgy,” he’d said to Sean his first day in the Homicide Unit. “I don’t want you overtly outraged, because outrage is emotion and emotion should never be overt. But I want you pretty fucking annoyed at all times—annoyed that the chairs here are too hard and all your friends from college are driving Audis. I want you annoyed that all perps are so dumb they think they can do their heinous shit in our jurisdiction. Annoyed enough, Devine, that you stay on the details of your cases so they don’t get the ADAs blown out of court because of nebulous warrants and lack of probable cause. Annoyed enough to close every case clean and ram these nasty bastards into nasty cell blocks for the rest of their nasty fucking lives.”

  Around the barracks it was called “Friel’s Spiel,” and every new trooper to the unit got it on day one in exactly the same way. Like most of the things Friel said, you had no idea how much he believed and how much was just rah-rah-law-enforcement shtick. But you bought it. Or you washed out.

  Sean had been in the State Police Homicide Unit two years, during which time he’d amassed the best clearance rate of anyone in Whitey Powers’s squad, and Friel still looked at him sometimes like he wasn’t sure about him. He was looking at him that way now, gauging something in him, deciding whether he was up to this: a girl killed in his park.

  Whitey Powers ambled over to them, flipping through his report pad as he nodded at Friel. “Lieutenant.”

  “Sergeant Powers,” Friel said. “Where are we so far?”

  “Preliminary indications put time of death at roughly two-fifteen to two-thirty in the morning. No signs of sexual assault. Cause of death was most likely the GSW to the back of the head, but we’re not ruling out blunt trauma from that bludgeoning she took. Shooter was most likely a righty. We found the slug embedded in a pallet to the left of the victim’s body. Looks to be a thirty-eight Smith slug, but we’ll know for sure once Ballistics takes a look. Divers in the channel are looking for weapons now. We’re hoping the perp might have tossed the gun or at least what he beat her with, which looks to have been a bat of some kind, maybe a stick.”

  “A stick,” Friel said.

  “Two BPD officers on the house-to-houses along Sydney spoke with a woman claims she heard a car hit something and stall out at one-forty-five A.M., roughly a half an hour before T.O.D.”

  “What sort of physical evidence do we have?” Friel asked.

  “Well, the rain kinda fucked us there, sir. We got some pretty shitty footprint casts that may belong to the perp, definitely a couple belong to the victim. We pulled about twenty-five separate latents off that door behind the screen. Again, could be the victim’s, the perp’s, or just twenty-five people who have nothing to do with this and come down here at night to drink or take a breather during a jog. We got blood by the door and inside—again, some of it might be the perp’s, might not. A lot of it definitely came from the victim. We got several distinct prints off the victim’s car door. That’s about it for physical right now.”

  Friel nodded. “Anything in particular I can report to the DA when he calls me in ten or twenty minutes?”

  Powers shrugged. “Tell him the rain fucked my crime scene, sir, and we’re doing the best we can.”

  Friel yawned into his fist. “Anything else I should know?”

  Whitey looked back over his shoulder at the trail leading down to the door behind the screen, the last ground Katie Marcus’s feet had touched.

  “The lack of footprints pisses me off.”

 
; “You mentioned the rain…”

  Whitey nodded. “But she left a couple. I’m willing to bet the house they were hers, anyway, because they were recent and she was digging her heels some places and springing off the balls of her feet in others. We found three, maybe four like that, and I’m pretty sure they belonged to Katherine Marcus. But the perp? Nothing.”

  “Again,” Sean said, “the rain.”

  “Accounts for why we found only three of hers, I’ll grant you. But not one of this guy’s far as we can see?” Whitey looked at Sean and then Friel and then he shrugged. “Whatever. Pisses me off is all.”

  Friel pushed himself off the stage and clapped some grit off his hands. “All right, guys: You have a six-man task force of detectives at your disposal. All your lab work has been bumped to the head of the line and given priority status. You’ll have as many troopers as you need for the grunt work. So, Sergeant, tell me how you plan to utilize all this manpower we’ve gotten for you in our wisdom.”

  “I suppose we’ll talk to the victim’s father now and find out what he knows about her movements last night, who she was with, who might’ve had a beef with her. Then we’ll talk to those people, reinterview this woman said she heard the car stall out on Sydney. We’ll Q-and-A all the winos they pulled out of the park and off Sydney, hope the tech support teams give us solid latents or hair fibers to work with. Maybe his skin is under the Marcus girl’s nails. Maybe his prints are on that door. Or maybe he was the boyfriend and they had a spat.” Whitey gave another of his patented shrugs and kicked at some dirt. “That’s about it.”

  Friel looked at Sean.

  “We’ll get the guy, sir.”

  Friel looked like he’d been expecting something better, but he nodded once and patted Sean’s elbow before walking away from the stage and down into the bowl of seats where Lieutenant Krauser of the BPD stood talking with his boss, Captain Gillis of the D-6, everyone giving Sean and Whitey their best “Don’t fuck up” stares.

  “‘We’ll get the guy’?” Whitey said. “Four years of college, that’s the best line you can come up with?”

  Sean’s eyes met Friel’s again for a moment and he gave him a nod that he hoped exuded competence and confidence. “It’s in the manual,” he said to Whitey. “Right after ‘We’ll nail the bastard’ and before ‘Praise the Lord.’ You read it?”

  Whitey shook his head. “Sick that day.”

  They turned as the coroner’s assistant shut the back doors to the van and came around the driver’s side.

  “You got any theories?” Sean said.

  “Ten years ago,” Whitey said, “I’d be liking gang initiation rite. Now, though? Shit. Crime goes down, things get a lot less predictable. You?”

  “Jealous boyfriend, but that’s just by-the-numbers.”

  “Beats her with a bat? I’d say the boyfriend better have a history of anger-management problems.”

  “They always do.”

  The coroner’s assistant opened the driver’s door and looked over at Whitey and Sean. “Heard someone wanted to lead us out.”

  “That’s us,” Whitey said. “You pull ahead of us once we leave the park, but, hey, we’re transporting next of kin, so don’t leave her in the corridor when you get downtown. You know?”

  The guy nodded and got in the van.

  Whitey and Sean climbed in a cruiser and Whitey pulled it in front of the van. They headed down the slope between streams of yellow crime scene tape, and Sean watched the sun begin its descent through the trees, turning the Pen a rusty gold, adding a red glow to the treetops, Sean thinking if he were dead that’s one of the things he’d probably miss most, the colors, the way they could come out of nowhere and surprise you, even though they could make you feel slightly sad, too, small, like you didn’t belong here.

  THE FIRST NIGHT Jimmy spent at Deer Island Correctional, he’d sat up all night, from nine to six, wondering if his cellmate would come for him.

  The guy had been a New Hampshire biker named Woodrell Daniels who’d crossed into Massachusetts one night on a methamphetamine deal, stopped in a bar for several whiskey nightcaps, and ended up blinding a guy with a pool stick. Woodrell Daniels was a big meat slab of a man covered in tattoos and knife scars, and he’d looked at Jimmy and let loose this dry whisper of a chuckle that went through Jimmy’s heart like a length of pipe.

  “We’ll see you later,” Woodrell said at lights-out. “We’ll see you later,” he repeated, and let loose another of those whispery chuckles.

  So Jimmy stayed up all night, listening for sudden creaks in the bunk above him, knowing he’d have to go for Woodrell’s trachea if it came down to it, and wondering if he’d be capable of getting one good punch through Woodrell’s massive arms. Hit the throat, he told himself. Hit the throat, hit the throat, hit the throat, oh Jesus, here he comes…

  But it was just Woodrell rolling over in his sleep, creaking those springs, the weight of his body bulging down through the mattress until it hung over Jimmy like the belly of an elephant.

  Jimmy heard the prison as a living creature that night. A breathing engine. He heard rats fighting and chewing and screeching with a mad, high-pitched desperation. He heard whispers and moans and the seesaw creak of bedsprings going up and down, up and down. Water dripped and men talked in their sleep and a guard’s shoes echoed from a distant hall. At four, he heard a scream—just one—that died so fast it lived longer in echo and memory than it ever had in reality, and Jimmy, at that moment, considered taking the pillow out from behind his head and climbing up behind Woodrell Daniels and smothering him with it. But his hands were too slick and clammy and who knew if Woodrell was really sleeping or just faking it, and maybe Jimmy didn’t have the physical strength in the first place to hold that pillow in place while the huge man’s huge arms swung back at his head, scratched his face, gouged chunks of flesh from his wrists, shattered his ear cartilage with hammer fists.

  It was the last hour that was the worst. A gray light rose through the thick, high windows and filled the place with metallic cold. Jimmy heard men wake and pad around their cells. He heard raspy, dry coughs. He had a sense that the machine was revving up, cold and eager to consume, the machine knowing it would die without violence, without the taste of human skin.

  Woodrell jumped down onto the floor, the move so sudden Jimmy couldn’t react. He closed his eyes to slits and deepened the rhythm of his breathing and waited for Woodrell to come close enough for him to hit his throat.

  Woodrell Daniels didn’t even look at him, though. He took a book from the shelf above the sink and opened it as he lowered himself to his knees, and then the man began to pray.

  He prayed and read passages from Paul’s letters and he prayed some more, and every now and then that whispery chuckle would escape from him but never interrupt the flow of words until Jimmy realized that the chuckling was some kind of uncontrollable emanation, like the sighs Jimmy’s mother had let loose when he was younger. Woodrell probably didn’t even notice that he made the sounds anymore.

  By the time Woodrell turned and asked Jimmy if he’d consider accepting Christ as his personal savior, Jimmy knew the longest night of his life was over. He could see in Woodrell’s face the light of the damned trying to navigate his way to salvation, and it was so apparent a glow that Jimmy couldn’t understand how he’d failed to see it as soon as he’d met the man.

  Jimmy couldn’t believe his dumb, beautiful luck—he’d ended up in the lion’s den, only his lion was a Christian, and Jimmy would accept Jesus, Bob Hope, Doris Day, or whoever the hell else Woodrell adored in his fevered Holy Roller mind as long as it meant this bulked-up freak would keep to his bed at night and sit beside Jimmy during meals.

  “I was once lost,” Woodrell Daniels said to Jimmy. “But now, praise the Lord, I am found.”

  Jimmy almost said it aloud: You got that fucking right, Woodrell.

  Until today, Jimmy would judge all patience tests against that first night at Deer Island. He would tell
himself that he could stand in place for as long as necessary—a day or two—to get what he wanted because nothing could rival that long first night with the living machine of a prison rumbling and gasping all around him as the rats screeched and bedsprings creaked and screams died as soon as they were born.

  Until today.

  Standing at the Roseclair Street entrance to Pen Park, Jimmy and Annabeth waited. They stood inside the first barrier the Staties had erected on the entrance road, but outside the second one. They were given cups of coffee and folding chairs to sit on, and the troopers were kind to them. But still, they had to wait, and when they asked for information, the troopers’ faces turned a bit stony and a bit sad and they apologized but said they knew nothing more than anyone else on the outside of the park.

  Kevin Savage had taken Nadine and Sara back to the house, but Annabeth had stayed. She sat with Jimmy in the lavender dress she’d worn to Nadine’s First Communion, an event that already seemed as if it had happened weeks before, and she was silent and tight within the desperation of her hope. Hope that what Jimmy had seen on Sean Devine’s face was a misinterpretation. Hope that Katie’s abandoned car and her all-day absence and the cops in Pen Park were magically unrelated. Hope that what she probably knew as truth was somehow, somehow, somehow a lie.

  Jimmy said, “I get you another coffee?”

  She gave him a raw, distant smile. “No. I’m okay.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yeah.”

  If you don’t see the body, Jimmy knew, she’s not really dead. That’s how he’d been rationalizing his own hope in the few hours since he and Chuck Savage had been dragged away from the hill above the bowl. Could be a girl who looked like her. Or it could be she was in a coma. Or maybe she was crammed back in the space behind the screen and they couldn’t get her out. She was in pain, maybe deep pain, but alive. That was the hope—a sliver of it the width of a baby hair—that flickered in the lack of an absolute confirmation.

  And even as he knew it was bullshit, some part of Jimmy couldn’t let it go.