ANNABETH MARCUS, in Sean's opinion, was one tough goddamned woman. She sat in a cold, late-Sunday, municipal cafeteria with its warmed-over, cellophane-'n'-steam smell, seven stories above a morgue, talking about her stepdaughter with cold, municipal men, and Sean could tell it was killing her, yet she refused to crack. Her eyes were red, but Sean knew after a few minutes that she wouldn't weep. Not in front of them. No fucking way.
As they talked, she had to stop for breath a few times. Her throat would close up in midsentence, as if a fist wormed its way through her chest, pressing against her organs. She'd place a hand on her chest and open her mouth a little wider and wait until she'd gotten enough oxygen to continue.
"She came home from working at the store at four-thirty on Saturday."
"What store was that, Mrs. Marcus?"
She pointed at Jimmy. "My husband owns Cottage Market."
"On the corner of East Cottage and Bucky Ave.?" Whitey said. "Best damn coffee in the city."
Annabeth said, "She came in and hopped in the shower. She came out and we had dinner-wait, no, she didn't eat. She sat with us, talked to the girls, but she didn't eat. She said she was having dinner with Eve and Diane."
"The girls she went out with," Whitey said to Jimmy.
Jimmy nodded.
"So, she didn't eat..." Whitey said.
Annabeth said, "But she hung out with the girls, our girls, her sisters. And they talked about the parade next week and Nadine's First Communion. And then she was on the phone in her room for a bit, and then, about eight, she left."
"Do you know who she talked to on the phone?"
Annabeth shook her head.
"The phone in her room," Whitey said. "Private line?"
"Yes."
"Would you have any objections if we subpoenaed the phone company records to that line?"
Annabeth looked at Jimmy and Jimmy said, "No. No objections."
"So she left at eight. As far as you know to meet with her friends, Eve and Diane?"
"Yes."
"And you were still at the store at this time, Mr. Marcus?"
"Yeah. I did swing shift on Saturday. Twelve to eight."
Whitey flipped a page in his notebook and gave them both a small smile. "I know this is tough, but you're doing great."
Annabeth nodded and turned to her husband. "I called Kevin."
"Yeah? You talk to the girls?"
"I talked to Sara. I just told her we'd be home soon. I didn't tell her anything else."
"She ask about Katie?"
Annabeth nodded.
"What'd you tell her?"
"I just told her we'd be home soon," Annabeth said, and Sean heard a small crack in her voice on "soon."
She and Jimmy looked back at Whitey and he gave them another small, calming smile.
"I want to assure you-and this comes down all the way from the big office in City Hall-that this case is top priority. And we won't make mistakes. Trooper Devine here was assigned because he's a friend of the family and our boss knows that that'll make him work it that much harder. He's going to be with me every step of the way, and we will find the man responsible for harming your daughter."
Annabeth gave Sean a quizzical look. "Friend of the family? I don't know you."
Whitey scowled, thrown off his game.
Sean said, "Your husband and I were friends, Mrs. Marcus."
"Long time ago," Jimmy said.
"Our fathers worked together."
Annabeth nodded, still a bit confused.
Whitey said, "Mr. Marcus, you spent a good part of Saturday with your daughter at the store. Correct?"
"I did and I didn't," Jimmy said. "I was mostly in back. Katie worked the registers up front."
"But do you remember anything out of the ordinary? Was she acting odd? Tense? Fearful? Did she have a confrontation with a customer maybe?"
"Not while I was there. I'll give you the number of the guy who worked with her in the morning. Maybe something happened before I got in that he remembers."
"Appreciate that, sir. But while you were there?"
"She was herself. She was happy. Maybe a little..."
"What?"
"No, nothing."
"Sir, the littlest thing is something right now."
Annabeth leaned forward. "Jimmy?"
Jimmy gave them all an embarrassed grimace. "It's nothing. It was...I look up from my desk at one point and she's standing in the doorway. Just standing there, sipping a Coke through a straw, and looking at me."
"Looking at you."
"Yeah. And for a second, she looked like she did this one time when she was five and I was going to leave her in the car for just a sec while I ran into the drugstore. That time, right, she burst out crying because I'd just gotten back from prison and her mother had just died and I think, back then, she thought that every time you left her, even for a second, you weren't going to come back. So she'd get this look, right? I mean, whether she ended up crying or not, she'd get this look on her face like she was preparing herself to never see you again." Jimmy cleared his throat and let out a long sigh that widened his eyes. "Anyway, I hadn't seen that look in a few years, maybe seven or eight, but for a few seconds on Saturday, that's how she was looking at me."
"Like she was preparing herself to never see you again."
"Yeah." Jimmy watched Whitey write that in his report pad. "Hey, don't make too much of it. It was just a look."
"I'm not making anything out of it, Mr. Marcus, I promise. It's just info. That's what I do-I collect pieces of info until two or three pieces fit together. You say you were in prison?"
Annabeth said, "Jesus," very softly, and shook her head.
Jimmy leaned back in his chair. "Here we go."
"I'm just asking," Whitey said.
"You'd do the same if I'd said I worked at Sears fifteen years ago, right?" Jimmy chuckled. "I did time for a robbery. Two years at Deer Island. You write that in your notebook. That piece of information going to help you catch the guy who killed my daughter, Sergeant? I mean, I'm just asking."
Whitey shot a glance Sean's way.
Sean said, "Jim, no one means to offend anyone here. Let's just let it pass, get back to the point."
"The point," Jimmy said.
"Outside of that look Katie gave you," Sean said, "was there anything else out of the ordinary you can remember?"
Jimmy took his convict-in-the-yard stare off Whitey and drank some coffee. "No. Nothing. Wait-this kid, Brendan Harris-But, no, that was this morning."
"What about him?"
"He's just a kid from the neighborhood. He came in today and asked if Katie was around like he'd been expecting to see her. But they barely knew each other. It was just a little strange. It doesn't mean anything."
Whitey wrote the kid's name down anyway.
"Could she have been dating him maybe?" Sean said.
"No."
Annabeth said, "You never know, Jim..."
"I know," Jimmy said. "She wouldn't date that kid."
"No?" Sean said.
"No."
"Why you so sure?"
"Hey, Sean, what the fuck? You're going to grill me?"
"I'm not grilling you, Jim. I'm just asking how you could be so sure your daughter wasn't seeing this Brendan Harris kid."
Jimmy blew air out of his mouth and up at the ceiling. "A father knows. Okay?"
Sean decided to let it ride for now. He tossed it back to Whitey with a nod.
Whitey said, "Well, what about that? Who was she seeing?"
"No one at the moment," Annabeth said. "Far as we knew."
"How about ex-boyfriends? Anyone who might be holding a grudge? Guy she dumped or something?"
Annabeth and Jimmy looked at each other and Sean could feel it between them-a suspect.
"Bobby O'Donnell," Annabeth said eventually.
Whitey placed his pen on his report pad, stared across the table at them. "We talking about the same Bobby O'Donnell?"
Jimmy said, "I dunno. Coke dealer and pimp? About twenty-seven?"
"That's the guy," Whitey said. "We got him pegged for a lot of shit went down in your neighborhood the past two years."
"And yet you haven't charged him with anything."
"Well, first off, Mr. Marcus, I'm State Police. If this crime hadn't happened in Pen Park, I wouldn't even be here. East Bucky is, for the most part, under City jurisdiction, and I can't speak for the City cops."
Annabeth said, "I'll tell that to my friend Connie. Bobby and his friends blew up her flower shop."
"Why?" Sean asked.
"Because she wouldn't pay him," Annabeth said.
"Pay him to do what?"
"Not blow up her fucking flower shop," Annabeth said, and took another sip of coffee, Sean thinking it again-this woman was hard-core. Fuck with her at your peril.
"So your daughter," Whitey said, "was dating him."
Annabeth nodded. "Not for long. A few months, yeah, Jim? It ended back in November."
"How'd Bobby take it?" Whitey asked.
The Marcuses exchanged glances again, and then Jimmy said, "There was a beef one night. He came to the house with his guard dog, Roman Fallow."
"And?"
"And we made it clear they should leave."
"Who's we?"
Annabeth said, "Several of my brothers live in the apartment above us and the apartment below. They're protective of Katie."
"The Savages," Sean told Whitey.
Whitey placed his pen on the pad again and pressed his index and thumb tips against the skin at the corners of his eyes. "The Savage brothers."
"Yes. Why?"
"All due respect, ma'am, I'm a bit worried this could shape up into something ugly." Whitey kept his head down, kneading the back of his neck now. "I mean absolutely no offense here, but-"
"That's usually what someone says before they're about to say something offensive."
Whitey looked up at her with a surprised smile. "Your brothers, you must know, have some reputations themselves."
Annabeth met Whitey's smile with a hard one of her own. "I know what they are, Sergeant Powers. You don't have to dance around it."
"A friend of mine in Major Crimes told me a few months back that O'Donnell was making noise about moving into loan-sharking and heroin. Both of which, I'm told, are exclusively Savage territory."
"Not in the Flats."
"What's that, ma'am?"
"Not in the Flats," Jimmy said, his hand on his wife's. "Means they don't do that shit in their own neighborhood."
"Just someone else's," Whitey said, and let that lie on the table for a bit. "In either case, that would leave a vacuum in the Flats. Right? An exploitable vacuum. Which, if my info is correct, is what Bobby O'Donnell has been planning to exploit."
"And?" Jimmy said, rising up a bit in his seat.
"And?"
"And what does this have to do with my daughter, Sergeant?"
"Everything," Whitey said, his arms spreading wide. "Everything, Mr. Marcus, because all either side needed was one little excuse to go to war. And now they have it."
Jimmy shook his head, a bitter grin twitching at the edges of his mouth.
"Oh, you don't think so, Mr. Marcus?"
Jimmy raised his head. "I think my neighborhood, Sergeant, is going to disappear soon. And crime's going to go with it. And it won't be because of the Savages or the O'Donnells or you guys bucking up against them. It'll be because interest rates are low and property taxes are getting high and everyone wants to move back to the city because the restaurants in the suburbs suck. And these people moving in, they aren't the kind that need heroin or six bars per block or ten-dollar blow jobs. Their lives are fine. They like their jobs. They got futures and IRAs and nice German cars. So when they move in-and they're coming-crime and half the neighborhood will move out. So I wouldn't worry much about Bobby O'Donnell and my brothers-in-law going to war, Sergeant. War for what?"
"For the right now," Whitey said.
Jimmy said, "You honestly think O'Donnell killed my daughter?"
"I think the Savages might consider him a suspect. And I think someone needs to talk them out of that kind of thinking until we've had time to do our jobs."
Jimmy and Annabeth sat on the other side of the table, Sean trying to read their faces but getting nothing back.
"Jimmy," Sean said, "without distractions, we can close this case fast."
"Yeah?" Jimmy said. "I got your word on that, Sean?"
"You do. And close it clean, too, so nothing comes back on us in court."
"How long?"
"What?"
"How long would you say it'll take you to put her killer in jail?"
Whitey held up a hand. "Wait a second-are you bargaining with us, Mr. Marcus?"
"Bargaining?" Jimmy's face had that convict's deadness to it again.
"Yeah," Whitey said. "Because I'm perceiving-"
"You're perceiving?"
"-an aspect of threat to this conversation."
"Really?" All innocence now, but the eyes still dead.
"Like you're giving us a deadline," Whitey said.
"Trooper Devine pledged that he'd find my daughter's killer. I'm just asking in what sort of time frame he thinks this will happen."
"Trooper Devine," Whitey said, "is not in charge of this investigation. I am. And we will depth-charge whoever did this, Mr. and Mrs. Marcus. What I don't need is anyone getting it in their head that our fear of a war between the Savage and O'Donnell crews can be used as some sort of leverage against us. I think that, I'll arrest them all on public nuisance charges and lose the paperwork until this is over."
A couple of janitors walked past them, trays in hand, the soggy food on top letting off a gray steam. Sean felt the air in the place grow staler, the night close in around them.
"So, okay," Jimmy said with a bright smile.
"Okay, what?"
"Find her killer. I won't stand in your way." He turned to his wife as he stood and offered her his hand. "Honey?"
Whitey said, "Mr. Marcus."
Jimmy looked down at him as his wife took his hand and stood.
"There'll be a trooper downstairs to drive you home," Whitey said, and reached into his wallet. "If you think of anything, give us a call."
Jimmy took Whitey's card and placed it in his back pocket.
Now that she was standing, Annabeth looked a lot less steady, like her legs were filled with liquid. She squeezed her husband's hand and her own whitened.
"Thank you," she whispered to Sean and Whitey.
Sean could see the ravages of the day finding her face and body now, beginning to drape her. The harsh light above them caught her face, and Sean could see what she'd look like when she was much older-a handsome woman, scarred by wisdom she'd never asked for.
Sean had no idea where the words came from. He wasn't even aware he was speaking until he heard the sound of his voice enter the cold cafeteria:
"We'll speak for her, Mrs. Marcus. If that's okay, we'll do that."
Annabeth's face crinkled momentarily, and then she sucked at the air and nodded several times, wavering slightly against her husband.
"Yes, Mr. Devine, that's okay. That's fine."