Gone, Baby, Gone (Kenzie & Gennaro 4)

His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed. Then he sucked a wet breath down into his lungs, but he didn’t say anything more.

Angie and I took other cases throughout the winter, though none that had anything to do with missing children. Not that many distraught parents would have hired us in the first place. We’d failed to find Amanda McCready, after all, and the acrid odor of that failure seemed to follow us when we were out at night in the neighborhood or shopping in the supermarket on Saturday afternoons.

Ray Likanski stayed gone as well, something that bothered me more than anything else in the case. As far as he knew, the heat was off him; there was no reason for him to stay gone. For a few months, Angie and I would, on a whim, stake out his father’s house for a day and a night and get nothing for our efforts but the taste of cold coffee, our bones and muscles drawn stiff by a car seat. In January, Angie bugged Lenny Likanski’s phone, and for two weeks we listened to tapes of him calling 900 numbers and ordering Chia pets off the Home Shopping Network, but never once did he call or hear from his son.

One day we’d had enough and drove all night to Allegheny, Pennsylvania. We located the Likanski brood from the phone book and staked them out for a weekend. There was Yardack and Leslie and Stanley, three brothers and first cousins to Ray. All three worked at a paper plant that filled the air with fumes that smelled like toner in a Xerox machine, and all three drank every night at the same bar, flirted with the same women, and went back alone to the house they shared.

The fourth night, Angie and I followed Stanley into an alley, where he scored some coke from a woman who rode a dirt bike. As soon as the dirt bike left the alley, while Stanley spread a rough line on the back of his hand and snorted it, I stepped up behind him, tickled his earlobe with my .45, and asked him where Cousin Ray was.

Stanley urinated in place; steam rose off the frozen ground between his shoes. “I don’t know. I haven’t seen Ray since two summers ago.”

I cocked the gun and dug it into his temple.

Stanley said, “Oh, Jesus God, no.”

“You’re lying, Stanley, so I’m going to shoot you now. Okay?”

“Don’t! I don’t know! I swear to God! Ray, Ray, I ain’t seen Ray in almost two years. Please, Christ’s sake, believe me!”

I looked over his shoulder at Angie, who stared up into his face. She met my eyes and nodded. Stanley was telling the truth.

“Coke makes your dick soft,” Angie told him, and we walked up the alley, got in our car, and left Pennsylvania.

Once a week, we visited Beatrice and Lionel. The four of us would hash over everything we knew and then everything we didn’t, and the latter always seemed much larger and deeper than the former.

One night in late February as we left their home and they stood shivering on the porch to make sure, as they always did, that we reached our car without incident, Beatrice said, “I wonder about headstones.”

We stopped as we reached the sidewalk and looked back at her.

Lionel said, “What?”

“At night,” Beatrice said, “when I can’t sleep, I wonder what we’d put on her headstone. I wonder if we should get her one.”

“Honey, don’t—”

She waved him away, tightened her cardigan around her. “I know, I know. It seems like giving up, like saying she’s dead when we want to believe she’s alive. I know. But…see—you know?—nothing says she ever lived.” She pointed down at the porch. “Nothing marks her as having been here. Our memories aren’t good enough, you know? They’ll fade.” She nodded to herself. “They’ll fade,” she said again, and turned back into the house.

I saw Helene once in late March when I was shooting darts with Bubba down at Kelly’s Tavern, but she didn’t see me—or pretended not to. She sat at the corner of the bar, alone, and nursed a drink for a full hour, staring into the glass as if Amanda were waiting at the bottom.

Bubba and I had arrived late, and after we finished with darts we moved on to pool as the last-call crowd poured in and filled the place three-deep within about ten minutes. Then last call had passed, and Bubba and I finished our game, finished our beers, and placed the empties on the bar as we headed for the door.

“Thank you.”

I turned and looked down the bar, saw Helene sitting in the corner, surrounded by stools the bartender had already propped up on the mahogany around her. I’d thought for some reason that she’d left.

Or maybe I’d just hoped she had.

“Thank you,” she said again, very softly, “for trying.”

I stood there on the rubber tile and was aware that I didn’t know what to do with my hands. Or my arms. Or any of my limbs, for that matter. My entire body felt awkward and clumsy.

Helene kept her eyes on her drink, her unwashed hair falling in her face, tiny among all those overturned stools, the dim lights that had fallen on the bar at closing time.

I didn’t know what to say. I wasn’t even sure I could speak. I wanted to go to her and hold her and apologize for not saving her daughter, for not finding Amanda, for failing, for everything. I wanted to weep.

Instead, I turned and headed for the door.

“Mr. Kenzie.”

I stopped, my back to her.

“I’d do it all differently,” she said, “if I could. I’d…I’d never let her out of my sight.”

I don’t know if I nodded or not, gave any indication that I’d heard her. I know that I didn’t look back. I got the hell out of there.

The next morning, I woke before Angie and brewed coffee in the kitchen, tried to shake Helene McCready from my head, those horrible words of hers:

“Thank you.”

I went downstairs for the paper, tucked it under my arm, and came back up. I made my cup of coffee and took it into the dining room with me as I opened the paper and discovered that another child had disappeared.

His name was Samuel Pietro, and he was eight.

He’d last been seen leaving his friends in a Weymouth playground and walking back toward home Saturday afternoon. It was now Monday morning. His mother hadn’t reported him missing until yesterday.

He was a handsome kid with large dark eyes that reminded me of Angie’s, and a friendly, crooked smile in the photo they’d cropped from his third-grade class picture. He looked hopeful. He looked young. He looked confident.

I considered hiding the paper from Angie. Ever since Allegheny, when we’d left that alley and all the steam had run out of us, all the determination, she’d become even more deeply obsessed with Amanda McCready. But it wasn’t an obsession that found an outlet in action, since there was very little action to take. Instead, Angie pored over all our case notes, drew Time Line and Major Figures charts on poster board, and talked for hours with Broussard or Poole, always rehashing, always circling the same ground.