I pulled the shades.

Patrick, Gerry whispered from the center of my chest, I’m waiting for you.

When Angie, Oscar, Devin, Phil Dimassi, and I had gone head-to-head with Gerry Glynn, his partner, Evandro Arujo, and an imprisoned psychotic named Alec Hardiman, I doubt any of us had realized the toll it would take. Gerry and Evandro had been eviscerating people, decapitating and disemboweling and crucifying them, out of a sense of fun or spite, or because Gerry was mad at God, or just because. I never fully understood the reasons behind it. I’m not sure anyone could. Sooner or later motives pale in light of the actions they give birth to.

I had nightmares about Gerry often. Always Gerry. Never Evandro, never Alec Hardiman. Just Gerry. Probably because I’d known him my entire life. Back when he’d been a cop, walking the local beat, always with a smile and a friendly. ruffle of the hair for us kids. Then, after he’d retired, as owner and chief bartender of the Black Emerald. I drank with Gerry, had conversations long into the night with Gerry, felt at ease with him, trusted him. And all that time, over the course of three decades, he’d been killing runaway kids. A whole forgotten populace that nobody was looking for and nobody missed.

My nightmares varied, but usually Gerry killed Phil in them. In front of me. In reality, I hadn’t seen him slice Phil’s throat, even though I’d been only eight feet away. I’d been on the floor of Gerry’s bar, trying to keep his German shepherd from plunging its teeth into my eye, but I’d heard Phil scream; I’d heard him say, “No, Gerry. No.” And I’d held him while he died.

Phil Dimassi had been Angie’s husband for twelve years. Until their wedding, he’d also been my best friend. After Angie filed for divorce, Phil quit drinking, became gainfully employed again, was on the road to a kind of redemption, I think. But Gerry blew all that away.

Gerry fired a bullet into Angie’s abdomen. Gerry cut fissures into my jaw with a straight razor. Gerry helped end the relationship I had with a woman named Grace Cole and her daughter, Mae.

Gerry, the left side of his body on fire, had a shotgun pointed at my face when Oscar fired three bullets into him from behind.

Gerry damn near destroyed all of us.

And I wait for you down here, Patrick. I wait.

I had no logical reason to think that searching for Amanda McCready was going to lead to the sort of carnage my encounter with Gerry Glynn and his pals had created, no logical reason at all. It was this night, I reasoned, the first cool night in a few weeks, the dark-slate feel of it all. If it were last night, moist and balmy, I wouldn’t be feeling this way.

But then again…

What we’d learned, unequivocally, during our pursuit of Gerry Glynn was exactly what Angie had spoken of tonight-that people could rarely be understood. We were slippery creatures, our impulses ruled by a variety of forces, many of them incomprehensible even to ourselves.

Why would someone abduct Amanda McCready?

I had no idea.

Why would someone-several someones, actually-want to rape a woman?

Once again, I had no idea.

I sat for a while with my eyes closed, trying to see Amanda McCready, to conjure up a concrete inner sense of whether she was alive or not. But behind my eyelids, I saw only the dark.

I finished my beer and looked in on Angie.

She slept on her stomach in the middle of the bed, one arm splayed across the pillow on my side, the other clenched in a fist against her throat. I wanted to go to her and hold her until what happened in the Filmore stopped happening in her head, until her fear went away, until Gerry Glynn went away, until the world and everything ugly in it passed over our bodies and rode the night wind out of our lives.

I stood in the doorway a long time, watching her sleep, hoping my silly hopes.

8

After her estrangement from Phil and before she and I became lovers, Angie dated a producer with New England Cable News Network. I’d met the guy once and hadn’t been particularly impressed, though I do recall he had great taste in ties. Wore too much aftershave, though. And mousse. And dated Angie. So the chances of us getting together for late-night Nintendo games and Saturday softball were pretty slim from the get-go.

The guy proved useful after the fact, however, because Angie kept in touch and occasionally, when we needed them, scored us tapes of local news broadcasts. It’s always amazed me how she can do that-stay in touch, remain friends, get a guy she dumped two years ago to do her favors. I’d be lucky to call an ex-girlfriend and get my own toaster back. Maybe I need to work on my breakup technique.

The next morning, while Angie showered, I went downstairs and signed off with the FedEx guy for a box from Joel Calzada of NECN. This city has eight news channels: the major network affiliates, Four, Five, and Seven; the UPN, WB, and Fox channels; NECN; and finally a mom-and-pop independent at the top of the dial. Among these eight stations, all have noon and six P.M. broadcasts, three have five o’clocks, two have five-thirtys, four have ten in the evenings, and four wrap up at eleven. They broadcast at various times throughout the morning, beginning at five, and each has one-minute updates at several different times, during the day.

Joel had, at Angie’s request, gotten his hands on every broadcast by every station concerning Amanda’s disappearance since the night she’d vanished. Don’t ask me how he pulled this off. Maybe producers trade tapes all the time. Maybe Angie can sweet-talk with the best of them. Maybe it was Joel’s ties.

I’d spent a few hours last night rereading all the newspaper articles about Amanda, and I’d come up with nothing new except for hands stained so deeply with black ink I’d made a fingerprint collage on a sheet of legal paper before going to bed. When a case seems as dense and protective of its secrets as marble, sometimes the only thing to do is attempt a fresh approach, or at least an approach that feels fresh. That was the idea here-watch the tapes, see what jumped out at us.

I removed eight VHS tapes from the FedEx box, stacked them on the floor of the living room by the TV, and Angie and I ate breakfast at the coffee table and compared case notes and tried to come up with a plan of attack for the day. Short of trying to track down Skinny Ray Likanski and reinterviewing Helene, Beatrice, and Lionel McCready-in the desperate hope they’d remember something crucial they’d heretofore forgotten regarding the night Amanda disappeared-very little occurred to us.

Angie leaned back against the couch as I picked up her empty breakfast plate. “And then,” she said, “there are times you think, A job with the electric company-now why didn’t I take that?” She looked up at me as I placed her plate on top of my own. “Great benefits.”

“Excellent retirement plan.” I took the plates into the kitchen, placed them in the dishwasher.

“Regular hours.” Angie called from the living room, and I heard the snap of her Bic as she lit the morning’s first cigarette. “Stellar dental.”

I made us each a cup of coffee and returned to the living room. Angie’s thick hair was still damp from the shower, and the man’s sweatpants and T-shirt combination she usually wore in the morning made her seem smaller and less substantial than she really was.

“Thanks.” She took her coffee cup from my hand without looking up, turned a page of her notes.

“Those things’ll kill you,” I said.

She took her cigarette from the ashtray, eyes still on her notes. “I’ve been smoking since I was sixteen.”

“Long time.”

She turned another page. “And in all that time, you never gave me shit.”

“Your body, your mind,” I said.

She nodded. “But now that we’re sleeping together, it’s somehow partly your body, too. That it?”