The engines go silent, the blades whining quietly, winding down, then braking to a stop. She takes off her headset and shoulder harness and imagines Crawley’s smarmy, pious face looking into the camera and offering compassion from the people of Massachusetts to Monique Lamont. Victim Lamont.
Victim Lamont for governor. Any crime, any time, including mine.
Lamont opens the helicopter door herself before the officer can, climbs out herself before anybody can help her.
Any crime, any time, including mine Lamont.
“I want you to find Win Garano for me. Right now,” Lamont says to the officer. “Tell him to drop everything he’s doing and call me right now,” she orders.
“Yes, ma’am. I’m Sergeant Small.” The woman in blue offers a handshake, does everything but salute.
“An unfortunate name,” Lamont says, walking off toward a door that leads inside the hospital.
“You mean the investigator, right? The one they call Geronimo.” Sergeant Small catches up with her. “If I was fat it would be a really unfortunate name, ma’am. I get made fun of enough.” She removes her radio from her big black belt, opening the door. “I’ve got my car downstairs, hid out of view. You mind some stairs? Then where can I take you?”
“The Globe,” she says.
Jimmy Barber’s basement is dusty and mildewy with nothing but one low-wattage bare bulb to illuminate what must be a hundred cardboard cartons stacked to the rafters, some labeled, most not.
Sykes has spent the past four hours pushing aside boxes of miscellaneous crap — ancient tape recorders, scores of tapes, several empty flowerpots, fishing tackle, baseball caps, an old-style bulletproof vest, softball trophies, what must be thousands of photographs and letters and magazines, files, notepads, the handwriting horrible. Crap and more crap. The man was too lazy to organize his memorabilia so he just threw it into boxes, packed up everything short of fast-food wrappers and what was in his wastepaper basket.
So far, she’s been through plenty of cases, ones he probably thought were worth saving: a fugitive who hid in a chimney and got stuck, a deadly assault with a bowling pin, a man struck by lightning while sleeping in an iron bed, an intoxicated woman who stopped in the middle of a road to pee, forgot to put her car in gear, ran over herself. Cases and more cases that Barber shouldn’t have decided were his to carry home when he retired. But she has yet to find KPD893-85, not even in a box that contained a lot of papers, correspondence, and cases for 1985. She calls Win’s cell phone for the third time, leaves another message, knows he’s busy but takes it personally.
She can’t help thinking that if she were someone really important, maybe like that Harvard-educated woman DA he complains about so much, he’d call back promptly. Sykes went to a tiny Christian college in Bristol, Tennessee, flunked out her second year, hated school, didn’t see a practical reason in the world why she should learn French or calculus or go to chapel twice a week. She’s not the same caliber as Win and that DA and all those other people way up north who are part of his life. She’s practically old enough to be his mother.
Sykes sits on top of an overturned five-gallon plastic pickle bucket, staring at stacks of cardboard boxes, her throat scratchy, her eyes itchy, her lower back aching. For a moment she is overwhelmed, not merely by the task before her but by everything, sort of the way she felt when she began the Academy and on day two, the class was taken on a tour of that notorious University of Tennessee research facility known as The Body Farm, two wooded acres littered with stinking dead bodies in every condition imaginable, donated human remains rotting on the ground or under concrete slabs or in car trunks or in bodybags or out of bodybags, clothed or naked, anthropologists and entomologists wandering around day after day, taking notes.
Who could do this? I mean, what kind of person does something this disgusting for a living or graduate school or whatever? she asked Win as they crouched down, looking at maggots teeming over a partially skeletonized man whose hair had slid off his skull, looked like road-kill, about three feet away.
Better get used to it, he said as if the stench, the insects didn’t bother him at all, said it as if she didn’t know squat. Dead people aren’t nice to work with and they never say thanks. Maggots are good. Just little babies. See? He picked one up, put it on his fingertip, where it perched like a grain of rice, a wiggly one. Snitches. Our little friends. Tell us time of death, all kinds of things.
I can hate maggots all I want, Sykes said. And I don’t need you treating me like I just fell off the turnip truck.
She gets up from her pickle bucket, surveys layers of boxes, wondering which ones contain more old cases that walked out of the office with Detective Barber. Selfish, pinheaded idiot. She lifts a box four layers up, grunting under the weight of it, hoping she doesn’t pull something. Most of the boxes are open, probably because the old goat couldn’t bother re-taping them shut after going in and out of them over the years, and she starts rummaging through charge-card statements and phone and utility bills going back to the mid-eighties. It’s not what she’s looking for, but the funny thing about bills and receipts is that they often reveal more about a person than confessions and eyewitness accounts, and she entertains an idle curiosity as she imagines August 8 twenty years ago, the day Vivian Finlay was murdered.
She imagines Detective Barber going to work that day, probably as if it were any other day, and then getting called to Mrs. Finlay’s expensive riverfront home in Sequoyah Hills. Sykes tries to remember where she was twenty years ago in August. Getting divorced, that’s where. Twenty years ago she was a police dispatcher in Nashville and her husband worked for a recording company, exposing himself to new female talent in a way that turned out to be a little different from what Sykes thought was acceptable.
She pulls out files sloppily labeled by month and sits back down on the pickle bucket with credit-card receipts and utility and telephone bills. The address on the envelopes is the one for the house that belongs to this hellhole of a basement, and as she looks over MasterCard charges, she begins to suspect that Barber lived alone back then, most of his charges made at places like Home Depot, Wal-Mart, a liquor store, a sports bar. She notes that throughout the first half of 1985, he made very few long-distance calls, in some months no more than two or three. Then in August, that abruptly changed.
She shines the flashlight on a phone bill and recalls that twenty years ago cell phones were these big, cumbersome contraptions that looked like a Geiger counter. Nobody used them. Cops didn’t. When they were away from their desks and needed to make calls they asked the dispatcher to do it and relay the information over the radio. If the information the detective needed was confidential or involved, he returned to headquarters, and if he was on the road, he charged the calls to the department and then had to fill out forms for reimbursement.