“What did you just say?” Lamont stares at him. “I’m going to pretend you didn’t.”
“Then what do we call it?”
“We don’t call it anything.”
“African-Italian? Well, I guess so,” he answers his own questions as he skips through the notebook. “Father was black, mother Italian. Apparently decided to give him his mother’s name, Garano, for obvious reasons. Both parents dead. Faulty heater. Some dump they lived in when he was a kid.”
Lamont fetches her coat from the back of the door.
“His upbringing’s a mystery. Got no idea who raised him, lists no closest next of kin, the person to contact in an emergency someone named Farouk, apparently his landlord.”
She digs her car keys out of her bag.
“Less about him, more about me,” she says. “His history isn’t important. Mine is. My accomplishments. My record. My stand on the issues that matter. Crime. Not just today’s crime. Not just yesterday’s crime.” She walks out the door. “Any crime, any time.”
“Yup,” Roy follows her. “Some campaign slogan you got there.”
2
Lamont snaps shut her umbrella and unbuttons her long, black raincoat as she notices Win on an antique sofa that’s about as comfortable as a wooden plank.
“Hope you haven’t been waiting long,” she apologizes.
If she cared about inconveniencing him, she wouldn’t have ordered him to fly all the way here for dinner, interrupted his training at the National Forensic Academy, interrupted his life, as usual. She’s carrying a plastic bag that has the name of a liquor store on it.
“Meetings, and the traffic was awful,” she says, forty-five minutes late.
“Actually, I just got here.” Win gets up, his suit covered with water spots that couldn’t possibly have dried if he’d only just come in out of the rain.
She slips off her coat and it’s hard not to notice what’s beneath it. Lamont wears a suit better than any woman he knows. It’s a shame Mother Nature wasted such good looks on her. Her name is French and she looks French, dark and exotic, sexy and seductive in a dangerous way. Had life turned out differently and Win had gone to Harvard and she wasn’t so driven and selfish, they would probably get along fine and end up in bed.
She eyes his gym bag, frowns a little, says, “Now that’s obsessive. You somehow fit in a workout between the airport and here?”
“Had to bring some stuff.” He self-consciously shifts the bag to his other hand, careful not to clank the glass items inside it, items a tough cop like him shouldn’t carry, especially not around a tough DA like Lamont.
“You can leave it in the cloakroom. Over there by the men’s room. You don’t have a gun in it, do you?”
“Just an Uzi. The only thing they’ll let you carry on planes anymore.”
“You can hang this up while you’re at it.” She hands him her coat. “And this is for you.”
She hands him the bag, he peeks inside, sees a bottle of Booker’s bourbon in its wooden crate, expensive stuff, his favorite.
“How did you know?”
“I know a lot about my staff, make that my mission.”
It rankles him to be referred to as staff. “Thanks,” he mutters.
Inside the cloakroom, he carefully tucks the bag out of sight on top of a shelf, then follows Lamont into a dining room with candles and white cloths and waiters in white jackets. He tries not to think about his spotted suit and soaked shoes as he and Lamont sit across from each other at a corner table. It is dark out, lamps along Quincy Street blurry through the rain and fog, and people heading into the club for dinner. They don’t have spots on their clothes, belong here, probably went to school here, maybe teach here, are the sort of people Monique Lamont dates or has as friends.
“At Risk,” she starts in. “Our governor’s new crime initiative, which he has handed off to me.” She shakes open a linen napkin and drapes it over her lap as the waiter appears. “A glass of sauvignon blanc. The one from South Africa I had last time. And sparkling water.”
“Iced tea,” Win says. “What crime initiative?”
“Indulge yourself,” she says with a smile. “We’re honest tonight.”
“Booker’s. On the rocks,” he tells the waiter.
“DNA is as old as time,” she starts in. “And ancestral DNA can take the John Doe out of John Doe cases. You familiar with the new technology they’re doing in some of these private labs?”
“Sure. DNAPrint Genomics in Sarasota. I’ve heard about a number of serial murder cases they’ve helped solve…”
She goes on without him: “Biological samples left in cases where we have no idea who the perpetrator is and come up with nothing in database searches. We retest using this cutting-edge technology. We find out, for example, the suspect turns out to be male, eighty-two percent European, eighteen percent Native American, so we know he looks white and quite possibly we even know his hair and eye color.”
“The At Risk part? Besides the fact the governor has to call some new initiative something, I suppose.”
“It’s obvious, Win. Every time we get another offender out of circulation, society is less at risk. The name is my idea, it’s my responsibility, my project, and I intend to give it my full attention.”
“With all due respect, Monique, couldn’t you have just e-mailed me all this? I had to fly up here in a rainstorm all the way from Tennessee so you could tell me about the governor’s latest publicity stunt?”
“I’ll be brutally candid,” she interrupts him, nothing new.
“You’re good at brutal.” He smiles at her, the waiter suddenly back with their drinks, treating Lamont like royalty.
“Let’s be frank,” she says. “You’re reasonably intelligent. And a media dream.”
It’s not the first time he’s thought about quitting the Massachusetts State Police. He picks up his bourbon, wishes he had ordered a double.
“There was a case in Knoxville twenty years ago….” she continues.
“Knoxville?”
The waiter hovers to take their order. Win hasn’t even looked at the menu.
“The bisque to start with.” Lamont orders. “Salmon. Another sauvignon blanc. Give him that nice Oregon pinot.”
“Whatever your steak is, rare,” Win says. “A salad with balsamic vinegar. No potato. Let me see. It’s just chance I happen to be sent down south to Knoxville, and suddenly you’ve decided to solve some cold case from down there.”
“An elderly woman beaten to death,” Lamont continues. “Apparently a burglary gone bad. Possible attempt at sexual assault, nude, her panties down around her knees.”
“Seminal fluid?” He can’t help himself. Politics or not, cases pull him in like black holes.
“I don’t know the details.” She reaches into her bag, pulls out a manila envelope, hands it to him.
“Why Knoxville?” He won’t let it go, his paranoia clutching him harder.
“Needed was a murder and someone special to work on it. You’re in Knoxville, why not see what unsolved cases they might have, and there we are. This one apparently sensational at the time, now as cold and forgotten as the victim.”
“There are plenty of unsolved cases in Massachusetts.” He looks at her, studies her, not sure what’s really going on.
“This one should be easy.”
“I wouldn’t count on that.”
“It works out well for a number of reasons. A failure down there won’t be as obvious as one up here,” she says. “The way we play it, while you were attending the Academy, you heard about the case and suggested Massachusetts could assist, try this new DNA analysis, help them out….”
“So you want me to lie,” he says.
“I want you to be diplomatic, smart,” she says.