I finally beached myself downtown, not far from the city’s government center, and entered the Boston Police Department’s main building on Stuart Street. I found Don Hebard as promised, loitering outside the records division, a plastic coffee mug in hand.
“Welcome to Beantown.”
“You people actually call it that?”
“Sure, sometimes. Especially to tourists.” He led me through a set of double doors and signed in. “How was the traffic?”
“Probably what you’d call normal.”
“Go on red, stop on green?”
“Yeah. Why don’t they do that in New York or anywhere else I’ve been?”
He continued down a hallway and ushered me into a large room jammed with floor-to-ceiling shelf units stuffed with cardboard boxes. There was a counter near the door with a computer monitor on it. “Ever been to Rome or Athens or Cairo?”
I shook my head.
“Well I have-once each. I was on one of those Mediterranean whirlwind tours-real waste of money. It’s my theory that when all of us came over to this great American melting pot, some of us opted to stay in Boston. Now the reason we did that was some cosmic genetic glitch we share with people who ended up in Rome and Athens and Cairo. It’s that gene that makes us all drive the same way.”
I nodded in silence. The less I said the better. I’d forgotten Hebard never took comments about the traffic or the weather as mere icebreakers. To him they were subjects of real merit, comparable to religion and sports.
“What’s the name?”
“Stark, Pamela.”
He entered it on the computer and watched a spume of green letters wash across the screen. “Shit.”
“What?”
He pointed to a seoinv height=ries of numbers. “That means it hasn’t been put in the data banks yet.” He waved at the room beyond the counter. “All that is going on computer, along with everything that comes in now, but we haven’t quite finished. I’m afraid your girl is buried in the stacks.”
He copied the reference number from the screen and led me behind the counter. We walked up and down looming, claustrophobic corridors, checking numbers, until he came to a halt and dropped to his knees. I joined him on the floor.
“I never find these things at waist level, you know? It’s started to make me wonder.”
I helped him pull the box off the bottom shelf. “You didn’t drop by the Cairo Police Department, did you?”
He looked serious and pursed his lips. I took the box from him and stood up, flipping it open. “What’s the last number?”
He rose slowly and gave it to me. I pulled out the appropriate folder and handed the box back. “You got some place I could read this?”
He led me to a table against the far wall and left to get some more coffee, still lost in thought. Hebard was no longer a street cop; he was in administration. It gave him lots of time to wonder about things.
Pamela Stark’s file consisted of some mug shots, a fingerprint card, and a badly typed arrest report, along with all the paperwork attending an overnight stay in the Boston jail.
I compared the picture I had of Kimberly Harris-taken the morning she was found with a belt around her neck-to the shot of a young and sulky Pamela Stark. It was a match. It made me feel odd, seeing her alive for the first time. I’d looked at the other picture so often it had become her real portrait, rather than the face of a muscleless corpse.
I stared at the mug shot for a long time. She wasn’t beautiful in the advertisement sense-no chiseled cheekbones or aristocratic brow. She had the look of an aging teenager whose choices now would determine her appearance. She could either carry her cheerleader softness into gentle maturity, or lose it to bitterness, hardship, and the grind of a hopeless life. From the little I knew of her, she’d opted for the former by dancing near the latter, obviously a shortcut that hadn’t worked out.
According to the report, she’d been busted virtually off the bus while selling her favors to an undercover cop. She claimed she’d been in the city less than twenty-four hours, had no pimp, no family or friends in the area, no lawyer, little money, and no remorse. It was the arresting officer’s opinion that this would not be the last time she and the police would do business. She gave her home address as 24 Stone Creek Road, Westpor t, Connecticut. She also gave her age as nineteen.
Hebard saw me writing down the address. “You know to take that with a grain of salt, I guess.”
“How big a grain?”
He looked at the arresting officer’s report. “She hardly sounds like the virgin-from-Peoria type; stupid maybe, but not impressed by authority. I’d say you could eat the whole salt-shaker. She was above the age of consent and pleaded guilty; there was no reason for us to check the address-or the name, for that matter. Still, you nevetilrleaderr know.”
He reached over my shoulder and picked up the photo. “Pretty girl. Very pretty, in fact.”
“Before and after.” I handed him the picture I’d been carrying around.
He looked at them both. “Kind of gives you a queer feeling, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah.”
22
I woke up in the middle of the night with a start. Gail’s arm, thrown across my chest, tensed instantly.
“What is it?” Her voice was a hard, urgent whisper.
I reached over and touched her cheek. “I’m sorry. It’s nothing. I just thought of something.”
She lifted her head and looked around, her face half covered with a cascade of hair. “God, you scared the hell out of me.”
“No, it’s all right. Go back to sleep.” I noticed the glowing red numbers of the digital clock beyond her; it was 2:43 A.M. She lowered her head back to the pillow.
I hadn’t really been asleep, at least not in a deep sleep. In fact, I’d only returned from Boston a half hour ago. I’d taken Gail at her word, albeit twenty-four hours later, and had slipped into her bed as quietly as possible, waking her just enough to say, “Hi.”
She moved closer, wrapping one leg around my own, a glutton for snuggles. “What woke you up?” Her voice had regained a sleepy fuzziness.
“Bill Davis said all along that the drugs we found at his place were planted there, something we never paid much attention to. But if he was telling the truth, then that means someone else bought them beforehand, probably the same guy who killed Kimberly-I mean, Pam Stark.”
“Who’s Pam Stark?”
The interruption surprised me, as if everyone should know what I knew. “That’s Kimberly’s real name; at least I think it is. It’s the name she used when she was busted for soliciting in Boston four years ago.”
Her eyes became more focused. “Hey, that’s right. You’re supposed to be in Boston now. What’re you doing here?”
“I thought I was going to go from there to wherever was listed on the arrest sheet, but the address was a phony, at least according to directory assistance, so I came back home. But that’s not important-”
“Right-now you’re sniffing after heroin. Isn’t that a little hopeless?”
“Not if we apply the same wishful thinking we’re using in the prednisone search. If we do that, it gives us a hunchback buying drugs in a back alley-something a local pusher is liable to remember for quite some time.”
“Find the pusher and you find the buyer?”
“If we’re lucky. If nothing else, the pusher might remember the hump, in whight="yer? ch case we know for sure the guy we’re after definitely had a long-term prescription, which would help cut down the search a lot. It also wouldn’t hurt as a piece of backup evidence.”