The Hennessy children refused all comment, with Campion acting as a family spokesman, however terse. I called Marlinchen several times in those stressful first weeks. She assured me everything was under control, and I believed her, mostly because although she sounded sober and occasionally tired, her voice lacked that sharp, tense note that I remembered from the worst of times. The continued presence of J. D. Campion might have something to do with that, I thought. He apparently had no plans to leave the Cities, and I was glad. He wasn’t the guardian that Family Services would have chosen for the Hennessys, but he was perhaps uniquely suited to this brainy, idiosyncratic little family.
In August, my work took me to the University of Minnesota campus to conduct a short interview. It was a hot day, humid but not unpleasant, and considering that it was only summer session, there were quite a few young people out on the great quadrangle overlooked by Northrop Auditorium. I was crossing along a path ground down in the grass when a male voice called after me. “Detective Pribek!”
It took me a moment to recognize the student who had called my name. Of course, Liam Hennessy hadn’t changed that much in the eight or so weeks since I’d last seen him, but somehow he looked older, much like a college student- ironically, largely because he was dressed so casually, in a pale-red T-shirt and cargo shorts and sandals. His hair, never short, had continued to grow out, and exposure to the sun was bringing out its lighter tones at the tips. At Liam’s neck hung a familiar leather cord strung with three tigereyes. Only the wire-rim glasses were exactly the same.
“Hey,” I said, quite pleased to see him. “Did you skip your senior year of high school?” I moved closer, into the shade of an overhanging tree.
“No,” Liam said, quickly shaking his head. “I’m just here for a seminar on the Greek and Roman tragedies.”
“A little light reading,” I said.
“Yeah.”
We were silent a moment. Then I said, “I like the necklace. It suits you, like it did him.” It was oddly true, despite how different Liam Hennessy and his cousin had seemed on the surface.
“Thanks,” Liam said. He paused. “We debated whether it was right to bury him and Aidan next to Dad, but we thought they should be with Mother,” he told me. “Jacob really loved her.”
“I know,” I said. “How is Donal?”
A shadow crossed Liam’s narrow face. “He’s getting help,” he said. “The fire was an accident. Donal knows that, but it’s going to take time for him to come to grips with what happened.”
“I wish more than anything it could have worked out another way,” I said.
It was an inadequate way of phrasing it. The deaths of earlier this year were terrible, but the pain that Jacob and Hugh had felt had quickly been over. It’s the living who hurt, and dealing with the open-ended question What if I’d done things differently? hurts most of all.
“J. D.’s still in town; you knew that, right?” Liam changed the subject. “He’s helping us sell the property. The house is going to be razed, but the land’s still going to bring a decent sum. And we’re selling the cabin in Tait Lake, too.”
“So you shouldn’t have financial worries for a while,” I said.
“No,” Liam said. “J. D. and I are trying to convince Marlinchen to apply to colleges. She’s been saying she has too many responsibilities right now, but we’re telling her she can go someplace local, and we’ll all still be together. I think we’ll wear her down.”
“I hope so,” I said.
“Hey, Liam.” The girl who interrupted us was about Marlinchen’s age, with long blond hair and long legs exposed by a pair of cutoff shorts. She was standing closer to Liam than to me, and her expression indicated that she was politely hoping that our conversation was wrapping itself up. I took the hint.
“It was good seeing you,” I said.
“You, too,” Liam said. And just as I moved off, he said, “Detective Pribek?”
I turned back.
“If I ever want to write a cop story, can I talk to you for research?”
I smiled. “I look forward to it.”
In the end, Aidan Hennessy and Jacob Candeleur, cousins in life and brothers in death, would lie under the same marker, in the shaded, elegant graveyard where I’d met Campion.
For Cicero Ruiz, it was a little different. Minneapolis has no city cemetery for the indigent, but several graveyards reserve space for such burials, and Cicero is buried in one of them, beyond the northern treeline, in a section where handmade wooden crosses and even paper signs mark the graves.
Several days after his burial, Soleil and I cleaned out his apartment. With no inheritors, we sorted everything according to the charity it was going to. The contents of the kitchen shelves went to a local food bank, the furniture to a Goodwill store, the medical texts to the library. Late in the afternoon, a tall, graying woman came to the door. She identified herself as with the Public Housing Authority and gave us the key to Cicero ’s mailbox, asking us to clean it out. We said we would.
Soleil and I worked late into the evening; neither of us wanted to put an extra day into our grim task. The last thing I did was go downstairs to the mailbox.
Not surprisingly, it was packed to capacity, and little of it was personal. I pitched most of the items into a green plastic trash bag Soleil and I had been steadily filling as the day wore on.
Only one slender envelope, address neatly typed, looked out of place. It was from a law firm in Colorado.
The brief letter inside informed Cicero Ruiz that the miners of Painted Lady #5 had won their claim against their former employer in the matter of the mine collapse. As a member of the affected class, Cicero ’s share of the judgment was $820,000.
I laughed until I cried. Soleil just cried.
Kilander, who had sources for everything, gave me the inside information about Gray Diaz and the results of the tests on the Nova. It was true that the crime-lab technicians found blood in the carpet, but it was too degraded from the passage of time and exposure to heat and light for extensive analysis. The tests confirmed that it was blood and it was human, but beyond that, nothing could be concluded. That was the truth behind Diaz’s last effort to get me to confess.
As an investigator, I should have seen it. In our last interview, Diaz had created an atmosphere of intimacy, calling me by my first name. He’d insinuated that he had more evidence than he really did. Then he’d stressed our commonalities as law-enforcement professionals and said that he wanted to help me. He’d been holding useless cards all along, but it was a damn good try.
I admired Diaz. Like he’d said, under other circumstances, we might have been friends.
I was sorry, too, that his last words to me had been so bitter. The implication had been clear: Diaz believed that he had lost, and I had won. There’d been no way to tell him that we’d both lost. For, not long afterward, at the shooting range, Jason Stone had pointed me out to a rookie with a knowing lift of his chin. I knew what bit of department gossip Stone was about to relate to his friend.
Labor Day came with its promise of fall, and the summer ended more or less the way it had begun, with me taking on extra shifts, getting overtime, staying occupied. One early-September afternoon, Prewitt stopped by my desk and told me that the young mother I’d saved in the liquor-store shootout, Ghislaine Morris, had made a full recovery, and he was putting a commendation in my file because of the action I had taken to save her. Thank you, sir, I said, and when he was gone I put my head down and went back to what I was doing.