“But it was probably someone white,” she says.
“Someone white was drinking beer inside the apartment, that much I can say with reasonable certainty.”
“Do you know who did it?” she asks.
“Because we would want them punished,” her husband says.
“I only know the type of people who likely did it. Cowardly people all about power and politics. And you should do what you feel, what’s in your heart.”
“Eddie, what do you think?”
“I’ll write a letter to Senator Chappel.”
“You know how much good that will do.”
“Then to Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden. I’ll write everyone,” he says.
“What will anybody do about it now?” Mrs. Pieste says to her husband. “I don’t know that I can live through it again, Eddie.”
“Well, I need to go clear the walk again,” he says. “Got to stay on top of the snow, and it’s really coming down. Thank you for your time and trouble, ma’am,” he says to me. “And for going ahead and telling us. I know that wasn’t an easy decision, and I’m sure my daughter would appreciate it if she was here to tell you herself.”
After I hang up, I sit on the bed for a while, the paperwork and photographs back in the gray accordion file they’ve been in for more than two decades. I’ll return the file to the safe in the basement, I decide. But not now. I don’t feel like going down into the basement and into that safe right now, and I think someone has just pulled into our driveway. I hear snow crunching, and I’m not in a good state of mind to see whoever it is. I’ll stay up here for a little while longer. Maybe make a grocery list or contemplate errands or just pet Sock for a minute or two.
“I can’t take you for a walk,” I tell him.
He is curled up next to me, his head on my thigh, unperturbed by the sad conversation he just overheard and having no idea what it says about the world he lives in. But then he knows cruelty, maybe knows it better than the rest of us.
“No walks without a coat,” I go on, petting him, and he yawns and licks my hand, and I hear the beeping of the alarm being disarmed, then the front door shuts. “I think we’re going to try boots,” I tell Sock as Marino’s and Benton’s voices drift up from the entryway. “You probably aren’t going to like these little shoes they make for dogs and are likely to get quite annoyed with me, but I promise it’s a good thing. Well, we have company.” I recognize Marino’s heavy footsteps on the stairs. “You remember him from yesterday, in the big truck. The big man in yellow who gets on my nerves most of the time. But for future reference, you have no reason to be afraid of him. He’s not a bad person, and as you may be aware, people who have known each other for a very long time tend to be ruder to each other than they are to people they don’t like half as much.”
“Anybody home?” Marino’s big voice precedes him into the bedroom as the doorknob turns, and then he knocks as he opens the door. “Benton said you was decent. Who were you talking to? You on the phone?”
“He’s clairvoyant, then,” I reply from the bed, where I’m under the covers, nothing but pajamas on. “And I’m not on the phone and wasn’t talking to anyone.”
“How’s Sock? How ya doing, boy?” he then says before I can answer. “How come he smells funny? What did you put on him, flea medicine? This time of year? You look okay. How are you feeling?”
“I cleaned his ears.”
“So how are you doing, Doc?”
Marino looms over me, and his presence seems larger than usual because he’s in a heavy parka and a baseball cap and hiking boots while I’m in nothing but flannel, modestly tucked under a blanket and a duvet. He has a small black case in his hands that I recognize as Lucy’s iPad, unless he’s managed to get one of his own, which I doubt.
“I didn’t get hurt. There’s nothing wrong with me. I’ve just been staying in this morning, taking care of a few things,” I say to him. “I’m assuming Dawn Kincaid is fine. Last I heard, she was stable.”
“Stable? You’re joking, right?”
“I’m talking about her physical condition. The reattachment of her finger and the damage to the rest of them, the other three that were cut so severely. It’s probably a good thing for her it was so cold in the garage. And, of course, we thought to pack her hand and her severed finger in ice. I’m hoping that helped. Do you know? I haven’t heard a word. What’s her status? I’ve not heard any reports since she was admitted last night.”
“You’re kidding, right?” Marino’s eyes look at me, and they’re just as bloodshot as they were yesterday in Salem.
“I’m not kidding. Nobody’s told me a word. Benton said earlier he would check, but I don’t think he has.”
“He’s been on the phone with us all morning.”
“Maybe you’d be so kind as to call the hospital and check.”
“Like I give a flying fuck if she loses a finger or all of her damn fingers,” Marino says. “Why would you give a fuck? You afraid she’ll sue you? That must be it, and wouldn’t that figure? She probably will. Will sue you for maybe losing the use of her hand so she can’t build nanobots or whatever anymore, a psycho like that. I guess psychopaths are stable in the mental-illness sense of the word. Can you be crazy and a psychopath? And still be put together well enough to work at a place like Otwahl? Her case is going to be one big damn problem. If she gets out, well, can you imagine?”
“Why would she get out?”
“I’m just telling you the case is going to be a problem. You won’t be safe if she’s on the loose again. None of us will be.”
He helps himself to the foot of the bed, and the bed sinks and it feels like I’m suddenly sitting uphill as he makes himself comfortable, petting Sock and informing me that the police and the FBI found the “rat hole” Dawn Kincaid had rented, a one-bedroom apartment in Revere, just outside of Boston, where she stayed when she wasn’t with Eli Goldman or with her biological father, Jack Fielding, or whoever else she had entangled in her web at any point in time. Marino slips the iPad out of its case and turns it on as he lets me know that he and Lucy and quite a number of other investigators have been searching the rat-hole apartment for hours, going through Dawn’s computer and everything she has, including everything she’s stolen.
“What about her mother?” I ask. “Has anybody talked to her?”
“Dawn’s been in contact with her for a number of years, visiting her in prison down there in Georgia now and then. Reconnected with her and with Fielding on and off over the years. Latches on when she wants something, a first-class manipulator and user.”
“But does the mother know what’s happened up here?”
“Why do you care what a fucking child molester thinks?”
“Her relationship with Jack wasn’t that simple. It’s not as easily explained as you so eloquently just put it. I’d hate for her to hear about him on the news.”
“Who gives a shit.”
“I never want anybody to find out that way,” I reply. “I don’t care who it is. Her relationship with him wasn’t simple,” I repeat. “Relationships like that never are.”
“Plain and simple to me. Black and white.”
“If she hears it on the news,” I reply, and I realize I’m perseverating. “I always hate for that to happen. Such an inhumane way for people to find out terrible things like this. That’s my concern.”
“A klepto,” Marino then says, because his only interest is the case and what the investigators have been discovering at Dawn Kincaid’s apartment.
Apparently, she is a bona fide klepto, to quote Marino. Someone who seemed to have taken souvenirs from all sorts of people, he goes on, including items stolen from people we have no idea about. But some of what investigators have found so far has been identified as jewelry and rare coins from the Donahue house, and also several rare autographed musical manuscripts that Mrs. Donahue had no idea were missing from the family library.