Eddie spread his jacket on the ground for her.
It was very dark there on the rock.
This was now maybe ten after twelve, around then.
Lying on her back, she could look up through the yellowing leaves of the trees and see millions and millions of stars. Eddie told her all those stars were suns, he was so smart, Eddie. He had his hand inside her sweater when he told her that all those suns up there maybe had planets rotating around them, that maybe they were solar systems like our own, that maybe there were people like us up there, millions of light years away, who were in a park just like this one, that maybe there was a green guy with lizard skin, trying to take off a green girl’s bra, which was what he was trying to do with Josie’s bra. She helped him unclasp it. Boys, even seventeen-year-old boys, could be very smart about a lot of things, but when it came to unhooking a bra they sometimes had trouble.
He started touching her breasts, and kissing them, and wondering out loud if the green girls up there had only two breasts—he called them ‘breasts,’ which she liked, and not ‘tits’—like the girls here on earth, or did they have four of them or however many—the mind boggled when you began thinking about alien life. He wondered, also, if the green guys up there on a planet millions and millions of light years away had a penis—he called it ‘penis’ and not ‘cock,’ which she also liked—same as the guys on earth, or did they maybe ask a girl to grab hold of their nose or their armpit or maybe one of their horns, if they had horns, maybe they found that thrilling, you know?
‘Would you like to grab hold of my penis?’ he asked.
Well, one thing led to another, you know—he was really very experienced, Eddie—and it must have been around one in the morning when he showed her how to take him in her mouth, which she much preferred to going all the way since she didn’t want to get pregnant and have to have an abortion, which her father said Ronald Reagan would do away with damn soon, you could bet on that, young lady. She had her head in his lap and was doing it the way he told her to do it when she heard the sound of an engine on the service road. She lifted her head to see if it was a parks department truck, but he whispered, ‘No, don’t stop,’ and so she kept doing it, not liking very much that he had his hand on the back of her head and was pushing down on it because, as much as she thought this was better than getting pregnant, she sure as hell didn’t want to choke. He had told her he wouldn’t come in her mouth, but of course he did, and she was trying to decide whether she should swallow it or spit it out when she saw the man on the path.
He was very tall and very blond.
He was carrying a naked woman.
The naked woman was draped over his shoulder, like a sack.
The naked woman looked very white in the moonlight.
The man walked right past the rock ledge they were sitting on, five feet below them, no more than that. As he carried the girl under the lamppost, Josie saw blood at the back of the girl’s head where her long blond hair was hanging downward.
Then the man moved past the lamppost and into the darkness, and all Josie could hear was the sound of leaves crunching under his feet as he disappeared.
‘Did you see that?’ she whispered.
In her excitement she had swallowed instead of spitting.
“That was terrific,’ Eddie said. ‘Where’d you learn to do that?’ He seemed to have forgotten that he had taught her how to do that.
‘Did you see that guy/ Josie said.
‘What guy?’ Eddie said.
‘That guy with the ... didn’t you see him?’
‘No, my eyes were closed,’ Eddie said.
‘Holy shit, he had a dead girl over his shoulder!’
‘Yeah?’ Eddie said.
‘You mean you didn’t see him?’
‘I saw stars,’ Eddie said, and grinned.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ she said, and got to her feet, and wiped the back of her hand across her mouth, and clasped her bra, and pulled down her sweater, and then whispered into the darkness, ‘Jessica?’
Before they left the park, she forced the others to walk up the service road with her to where a blue Buick was parked behind the parks department truck. She looked at the license plate and read the number on it again and again, repeating it out loud until she’d memorized it. That was when she still thought she might go to the police and tell them what she had seen. That was before she realized that if she went to the police, she would also have to tell them she’d been in the park at one in the morning, doing something she shouldn’t have been doing, which would have been bad enough even without swallowing it.
That was a month ago.
She hadn’t seen anything on television about the dead lady in the park.
Maybe she’d imagined it.
She did not think she’d imagined it.
Standing outside the police station now, looking at the green globes with the white numerals 87 on each of them, she thought, My father’ll kill me.
But the girl in the park was already dead.
She took a deep breath and climbed the precinct steps.
* * * *
CHAPTER SEVEN
Carella got to the squadroom forty minutes after Hawes called him. Officially the homicide in the park was his and Brown’s, and Hawes had called them both at home the moment Josie Sears came into the office with her story. She was only fourteen years old, and the law specified that juveniles could not be interviewed or interrogated anywhere in the proximity of adult offenders. Hawes had talked to her initially in Lieutenant Byrnes’s empty office. That was where Carella found them at ten minutes to four that Thanksgiving Day.
Hawes looked like a sunset against the gunmetal gray of the sky outside. He stood by the meshed window in the lieutenant’s corner office, his red hair streaked with white over the left temple, a purple tie hanging on what appeared to be a lavender shirt with a little polo pony over the left pectoral muscle. He was dressed for his date with Annie Rawles, for which he was already late. He had hoped to be out of here by a quarter to four, at which time the shift was relieved. Genero had shot out of the squadroom like a launch from Canaveral. Hawes was stuck with a fourteen-year-old girl who’d maybe witnessed a man carrying a body on the night of October 24.
‘So you got this now?’ he asked Carella.
‘I’ve got it.’
‘See you,’ Hawes said, and disappeared.
Carella looked at the young, dark-eyed, dark-haired girl sitting in the chair opposite the lieutenant’s desk. ‘I’m Detective Carella,’ he said. ‘Detective Hawes told me on the phone that you saw something happen in the park last month, I wonder if...’