Gregor, one of the crime tech guys, has a smoke with Bobby, and Bobby asks why they’re choosing to bring out the body with the soft cement and dirt still encasing it.
“Evidence,” Gregor says. “We don’t know what mighta leached in there.”
Guys with the ME’s office carry the body out in a black bag while they’re sitting there, and Bobby and Gregor step aside while the guys load it into the morgue van. Bobby catches Brian Shea watching from across the way. Brian’s a cold fish, a hell of a poker player, Bobby’s always heard, but he looks pretty sick right now, like his stomach is filling with acid.
Bobby shoots him a broad smile and a big salute.
Down at the morgue, they cut away the cement and dirt around the body and bag it all. Then they clean the corpse and straighten the legs and arms as best they can.
“Cause of death?” Bobby says.
Drew Curran, the medical examiner for this shift, grimaces at him. “This is my first look. Can you give me a second?”
Bobby sighs and reaches for a cigarette.
“You can’t smoke in here, Detective.”
A few minutes later, Drew says, “Oh, yeah, we got it.”
Bobby comes out of his seat.
Drew peels back a puckered hole just below the left rib cage. “Someone shoved a five-inch blade right under her ribs and straight into her heart. Could’ve been looking in her eyes when he did it.”
Bobby looks at her now, this child who came out of Mary Pat Fennessy’s womb less than eighteen years ago. Even with the early stages of decomposition settling in, he can see what a pretty girl she was. Not just pretty but... soft. The mother is all hard edges and angles, a jawline set in permanent opposition, thin lips usually one curl away from a sneer. The mother is built for battle. The daughter, on the other hand, seems, even in death, to have arrived from a fairy tale. As if she’s not dead but merely awaiting the restorative kiss of the prince, who, even as Bobby and Drew stand there, nears this building and the end of his quest.
We’re not built for princesses down here, Bobby thinks.
“What’d you say?” Drew asks.
“Nothing,” Bobby says. “Nothing.”
“You got what you need?”
“Yeah,” Bobby says, and leaves.
Next time she calls is halfway through his shift.
“We went by your place looking for you.”
“I’m not there right now,” she says.
“That’s probably a good thing.”
“I understand you may have taken a body out of a burned building recently.”
“We did, yes.”
“Has it been identified by next of kin?”
“We’re waiting on next of kin to arrive.”
“Would next of kin have to worry about arrest?”
“For what?”
“You tell me.”
Neither speaks for a bit.
“My dad,” Bobby tells her eventually, “was the best housepainter you ever saw. Inside, outside, didn’t matter. He was a magician with a brush or a roller. People would ask him questions, though, about wood rot and load-bearing walls, even the electrical. My father would say, ‘I do one thing better than anybody by not concerning myself with anything else.’”
“Sounds like a cool guy,” Mary Pat says.
“When he was sober, yeah, he was.” Bobby realizes how much he misses the old bastard in that moment. “I’m a homicide investigator. I don’t investigate arson. That’s what arson investigators are for. I don’t investigate assault and battery. I don’t concern myself with someone, say, who claims he was forced at gunpoint to shoot heroin into his veins.”
“Well, that’s a crazy tale,” Mary Pat says.
“Right?” Bobby chuckles. “You should hear the one about the kid who was threatened with castration.”
“Here?” Mary Pat says. “In the United States of America?”
“We suspect so, yes.”
“What is happening to this world, Detective?”
“I don’t know, Mrs. Fennessy. I really don’t.”
The silence on the line is comfortable until Bobby rips the Band-Aid.
“Can you meet me at the city morgue, 212 Hester Street, in two hours?”
Her tone darkens to pure black. “I’ll be there.”
He stands beside her in the corridor as Drew Curran wheels the gurney up to the viewing window, the sheet covering the body, head to toe. Drew comes around to the side of the gurney closest to the window and puts his finger on the corner of the sheet, looks through the glass at Bobby.
“You ready?” Bobby asks her.
“No one’s ready for this.” She sucks in some air. “Okay. Okay. Do it.”
He nods at Drew.
Drew pulls back the sheet, stopping at the shoulders.
“Oh,” Mary Pat says. “Ohhhhhhh. Ohhhhhhhh. Ohhhhhh.”
First her face crumbles, then her body, and Bobby catches her before she can hit the floor. She keeps saying that one plaintive “Oh” over and over.
She stares through the glass at her daughter’s corpse and then presses her face to the glass, the movement so fast and Mary Pat so strong that she drags Bobby to the glass with her in a single lurch. She shrugs him off her and places her palms to the glass and weeps and whispers her daughter’s name.
Bobby never sees her leave. She fills out the paperwork and excuses herself to the bathroom, and after a while, he realizes he hasn’t seen her come out. They send in a female lab tech, but she’s not there. Her car’s no longer in the back lot.
He can hear that “Oh” ringing in his head. Wonders if he’ll ever get it out.
Turns out the house behind the Fields of Athenry isn’t in Marty’s name. It’s in the name of a guy whose body was found in the trunk of a car in long-term parking at the Amtrak station in Pawtucket in 1969. The guy’s name was Lou Spiro, and he left no surviving relatives, so no one ever looked into his estate. But Lou was sitting on some gold mines — a Southie liquor store, a Medford car wash, a metal compacting company in Somerville, and two strip clubs in Revere — that everyone has long assumed belong to Marty Butler.
While the BPD can’t directly tie Marty or Frank Toomey to the body they found in the basement, they can freeze all the assets of the late Lou Spiro and begin taking steps to seize all his properties. That makes the burning of the home behind the Fields of Athenry the most disastrous calamity — by a huge fucking margin — to ever befall the Butler crew.
“You need to get out of town,” Bobby tells Mary Pat the next time she calls him. “Maybe the country.”
“But why?” she asks, all mock innocence.
“You’re a marked woman.”
“Eh.” She takes a drag on a cigarette.
“Rum and George confessed,” he tells her. “It’ll be in the papers tomorrow or the next day. We’re running around confirming all their details now. You won.”
That brings a wet, angry laugh over the line. “I didn’t win shit. They’re walking around free.”
“We have George Dunbar saying Frank and Marty hired him to repave the basement floor with Quikrete.”
“So?”
“So it puts them by the body.”
“They’ll have twenty fucking alibis — minimum — for the night she died. They’ll have witnesses placing them in Persia. You don’t have anything on them.”
“We got Frank giving an order on Auggie Williamson.”
“I heard about that ‘order,’” she says. “‘Finish the job’ could mean anything. That’s what they’ll say in court. You know that.”
He does.
“They’re gonna walk from this just like they walk from everything.”