"She in there?" Jimmy could hear the tremor in his own voice.
"I don't know, Jim. We haven't found her. I can tell you that much."
"So let us in," Chuck said. "We can help look. See it all the time on the news, ordinary citizens searching for missing kids and shit."
Sean kept his eyes on Jimmy, as if Chuck wasn't even there. "It's a little more than that, Jimmy. We can't have any nonpolice personnel in there until we've gone over every inch of the scene."
"And what's the scene?" Jimmy asked.
"The whole damn park at the moment. Look"? Sean patted Jimmy's shoulder? "I came out here to tell you guys there's nothing you can do right now. I'm sorry. I really am. But there it is. We know anything? the first thing, Jimmy? We'll tell you immediately. No bullshit."
Jimmy nodded and touched Sean's elbow. "I talk to you a sec?"
"Sure."
They left Chuck Savage on the curb and walked a few yards down the street. Sean squared himself, getting ready for whatever he thought Jimmy was going to say, all business, cop's eyes staring back at Jimmy, no mercy in them.
"That's my daughter's car," Jimmy said.
"I know. I? "
Jimmy held up a hand. "Sean? That's my daughter's car. It's got blood in it. She don't show up for work this morning, don't show up for her little sister's First Communion. No one's seen her since last night. Okay? That's my daughter we're talking about, Sean. You don't have kids, I don't expect you to understand all the way, but come on, man. My daughter."
Sean's cop's eyes stayed cop's eyes, Jimmy not even making a dent.
"What do you want me to say here, Jimmy? If you want to tell me who she was out with last night, I'll send some officers to talk to them. She had enemies, I'll go round them up. You want? "
"They brought fucking dogs in, Sean. Dogs, for my daughter. Dogs and frogmen."
"Yeah, they did. And we got half the fucking force in there, Jimmy. State and BPD. And two helicopters, and two boats, and we're going to find her. But you, there's nothing you can do, man. Not right now. Nothing. We clear?"
Jimmy looked back at Chuck standing on the curb, eyes on the weeds leading into the park, body tilting forward, ready to rip through his own skin.
"Why you got frogmen looking for my daughter, Sean?"
"We're covering all bases, Jimmy. We got a body of water, that's how we search it."
"Is she in the water?"
"All she is is missing, Jimmy. That's it."
Jimmy turned away from him for a moment, his mind not working too well, getting black and gummy. He wanted in that park. He wanted to walk down the joggers' path and see Katie walking toward him. He couldn't think. He needed in.
"You want a public relations nightmare on your hands?" Jimmy asked. "You want to have to bust me and every single one of the Savage brothers trying to get in there and look for our loved one?"
Jimmy knew the moment he stopped speaking that it was a weak threat, a grasp, and he hated that Sean knew it, too.
Sean nodded. "I don't want to. Believe me. But if I have to, Jimmy, yeah. I will, man." Sean flipped open a notepad. "Look, just tell me who she was with last night, what she was doing, and I'll? "
Jimmy was already walking away when Sean's walkie-talkie went off, loud and shrill. He turned back as Sean put it to his lips, said, "Go."
"We got something, Trooper."
"Say again."
Jimmy stepped up to Sean, heard the barely suppressed emotion in the voice of the guy on the other end of the walkie-talkie.
"I said we got something. Sergeant Powers said you need to get in here. Uh, ASAP, Trooper. Like right now."
"Your location?"
"The drive-in screen, Trooper. And, man, it's a fucking mess."
10
EVIDENCE
CELESTE WATCHED the twelve o'clock news on the small TV they kept up on the kitchen counter. She ironed as she watched, aware at one point that she could be mistaken for a 1950s housewife, doing menial chores and tending to the child while her husband went off to work carrying his metal lunchpail, returned home expecting a drink in his hand and dinner on the table. But it wasn't like that, really. Dave, for all his faults, pitched in when it came to housework. He was a duster and vacuumer and dishwasher, whereas Celeste took pleasure in laundry, in the sorting and folding and ironing, in the warm smell of fabric that had been cleansed and smoothed of wrinkles.
She used her mother's iron, an artifact from the early sixties. It was as heavy as a brick, hissed constantly, and released sudden bursts of steam without warning, but it was twice as capable as any of the newer ones that Celeste, lured by sales and claims of space-age technology, had tried over the years. Her mother's iron left creases you could split a loaf of French bread on and erased thick wrinkles in one smooth swoop that a newer one with a plastic shell would have had to ride over half a dozen times.
It could piss Celeste off sometimes to think about the way everything these days seemed built to crumble? VCRs, cars, computers, cordless phones? where the tools of her parents' time had been built to last. She and Dave still used her mother's iron and her blender, and kept her squat, black rotary phone by their bed. And yet, over their years together, they'd thrown out several purchases that had quit long before one would have assumed logical? TVs with blown picture tubes, a vacuum that poured blue smoke, a coffeemaker that produced liquid only slightly warmer than bathwater. These and other appliances had ended up discarded with the trash because it was almost cheaper to buy a new one than repair the old. Almost. So of course you spent the extra money on the next-generation model, which is what the manufacturers, she was sure, counted on. Sometimes Celeste found herself consciously trying to ignore a notion that it wasn't only the things in her life but her life, itself, that was not meant to have any weight or lasting impact, but was, in fact, programmed to break down at the first available opportunity so that its few usable parts could be recycled for someone else while the rest of her vanished.
So there she was ironing and thinking about her own disposability when, ten minutes into the news, the newscaster looked gravely into the camera and announced that police were looking for the assailant in a vicious assault outside one of the city's neighborhood bars. Celeste moved toward the TV to turn it up, and the newscaster said, "That story, plus Harvey on the weather when we return." Next thing, Celeste was watching a woman's manicured hands scrub a baking dish that looked like it had been submerged in warm caramel, a voice hawking the benefits of an all-new-and-improved dishwashing detergent, and Celeste wanted to scream. The news was like those disposable appliances somehow? built to tease and leer, to chuckle out of earshot at your gullibility in believing, yet again, that it would deliver on its promises.