Gone, Baby, Gone (Kenzie & Gennaro 4)

“You two are friggin’ chuckleheads,” she said, when we finished. “Like little psycho boys going out to play with the psycho family.”

“Fine, fine,” I said. “Ange, what was Samuel Pietro wearing when he disappeared?”

She leaned back in her chair. “Jeans, a red sweatshirt over a white T-shirt, a blue and red parka, black mittens, and hi-top sneakers.” She narrowed her eyes at me. “So what?”

“That’s it?” Bubba said.

She shrugged. “Yeah. That and a Red Sox baseball cap.”

I looked at Bubba and he nodded, then held up his hands.

“I can’t go anywhere near this. Those are my guns in that house.”

“No problem,” I said. “We’ll call Poole and Broussard.”

“Call Poole and Broussard for what?” Angie said.

“You saw Trett wearing a Red Sox baseball hat?” Poole said, sitting across from us in a Wollaston coffee shop.

I nodded. “Which was three or four sizes too small for him.”

“And this leads you to believe said hat belonged to Samuel Pietro.”

I nodded again.

Broussard looked at Angie. “You going along with this?”

She lit a cigarette. “Circumstantially, it fits. The Tretts are in Germantown, directly across from Weymouth, a couple of miles from the Nantasket Beach playground where Pietro was just before he disappeared. And the quarries, the quarries aren’t too far from Germantown, and—”

“Oh, please!” Broussard crumpled an empty cigarette pack, tossed it to the table. “Amanda McCready again? You think just because Trett lives within five miles of the quarries, then of course he must have killed her? You serious?”

He looked at Poole, and they both shook their heads.

“You showed us the pictures of the Tretts and Corwin Earle,” Angie said. “You remember that? You told us Corwin Earle liked to pick up kids for the Tretts. You told us to keep our eyes peeled for him,” Angie said. “That was you, Detective Broussard, wasn’t it?”

“Patrol officer,” Broussard reminded her. “I’m not a detective anymore.”

“Well, maybe,” Angie said, “If we drop by the Tretts and poke around a bit, you will be again.”

Leon Trett’s house was set off the road about ten yards in a field of overgrown grass. Behind the amber sheets of rain, the small white house looked grainy and smeared by large swirling fingers of grime. Near the foundation, however, someone had planted a small garden, and the flowers had begun to bud or bloom. It should have been beautiful, but it was unsettling to see such a tenderly cared for array of purple crocus, white snowdrops, bright red tulips, and soft yellow forsythia burgeoning in the shadows cast by such a greasy, decrepit house.

Roberta Trett, I remembered, had been a florist, a gifted one apparently, if she’d been able to coax color from the hard earth and long winter. I couldn’t picture it—the same lumbering woman who’d held the gun to Bubba’s head last night, thumbed back the hammer on her .38, had a gift for delicacy, for softness, for drawing growth from dirt and producing soft petals and fragile beauty.

The house was a small two-story, and the upper windows fronting the road were boarded up with black wood. Below those windows, the shingles were cracked or missing in several places, so that the upper third of the house resembled a triangular face with blackened eyes and a ragged smile of shattered teeth.

Just as I’d felt when I approached the house in the dark, decay permeated it like an odor, garden or no garden.

A tall fence with cyclone wire stretched on top divided the back of Trett’s property line from his neighbor’s. The sides of the house looked out on a half acre of weeds, those two condemned and abandoned homes, and nothing else.

“No way to approach but through that front door,” Angie said.

“Seems to be the case,” Poole said.

The screen door Bubba had destroyed last night lay in a tangle on the lawn, but the main door, a white wooden one with cracks in the center, had replaced it. This end of the street was still and had the empty feeling of a place few in the neighborhood ventured. In the time we’d been here, only one car had passed us.

The back door of the Crown Victoria opened and Broussard climbed in beside Poole, shaking rain from his hair, splattering drops on Poole’s chin and temples.

Poole wiped at his face. “You’re a dog now?”

Broussard grinned. “Wet out.”

“I noticed.” Poole pulled a handkerchief from his breast pocket. “I repeat: You’re a dog now?”

“Ruff.” Broussard gave his head another shake. “The back door’s where Kenzie said it was. Same approximate location as the front door. One upper window on the east side, one on the west, one in back. All boarded up. Heavy curtains over all the lower windows. A locked bulkhead by the rear corner, about ten feet to the right of the back door.”

“Any signs of life in there?” Angie asked.

“Impossible to tell with the curtains.”

“So what do we do?” I said.

Broussard took the handkerchief from Poole and wiped his face, tossed it back on Poole’s lap. Poole looked down at it with a mixture of amazement and disgust.

“Do?” Broussard said. “You two?” He raised his eyebrows. “Nothing. You’re civilians. You go through that door or tip Trett’s hand, I’ll arrest you. My once and future partner and I are going to walk up to that house in a minute and knock on the door, see if Mr. Trett or his wife wants to chat. When they tell us to fuck off, we’ll walk back out and call Quincy P.D. for backup.”

“Why not just call for backup now?” Angie said.

Broussard looked at Poole. They both glanced at her and shook their heads.

“Excuse me for being retarded,” Angie said.

Broussard smiled. “Can’t call for backup without probable cause, Miss Gennaro.”

“But you’ll have probable cause once you knock on the door?”

“If one of them’s stupid enough to open it,” Poole said.

“Why?” I said. “You think you’re just going to look in through a crack and see Samuel Pietro standing there holding a HELP ME sign?”

Poole shrugged. “It’s amazing what you can hear through the crack of a partially opened door, Mr. Kenzie. Why, I’ve known cops have mistaken the whistling of a kettle for a child’s screams. Now it’s a shame when doors have to be kicked in and furniture destroyed and inhabitants manhandled over such a mistake, but it’s still within the purview of probable cause.”