“Sometimes I think you’re more shallow than I am.”

She shrugged and lit a cigarette. “Who else did we see?”

“Danielle Genter,” I said. “Babs Kerins. Friggin’ Chris Mullen was everywhere.”

“I noticed that too. In the early stuff.”

I sipped some cold coffee. “Huh?”

“In the early stuff. He was always hanging around the periphery in the early parts of every tape, never the later stuff.”

I yawned. “He’s a periphery guy, ol’ Chris.” I picked up her empty coffee cup, hung it off my finger beside my own. “More?”

She shook her head.

I went into the kitchen, put her cup in the sink, poured myself a fresh cup. Angie came in as I opened the refrigerator and removed the cream.

“When’s the last time you saw Chris Mullen in the neighborhood?”

I closed the door, looked at her. “When’s the last time you saw half the people we saw watching those tapes?”

She shook her head. “Forget about everyone else. I mean, they’ve been here. Chris? He moved uptown. Got himself a place in Devonshire Towers around, like, ’eighty-seven.”

I shrugged. “Again-so?”

“So what’s Chris Mullen do for work?”

I put the cream carton down on the counter beside my cup. “He works for Cheese Olamon.”

“Who happens to be in prison.”

“Big surprise.”

“For?”

“What?”

“What is Cheese in prison for?”

I picked up the cream carton again. “What else?” I turned in the kitchen as I heard my words, let the carton dangle by my thigh. “Drug dealing,” I said slowly.

“You are so goddamned right.”

9

Amanda McCready wasn’t smiling. She stared at me with still, empty eyes, her ash-blond hair falling limply around her face, as if it had been plastered to the sides of her head with a wet palm. She had her mother’s tremulous chin, too square and too small for her oval face, and the sallow crevices under her cheeks hinted of questionable nutrition.

She wasn’t frowning, nor did she appear to be angry or sad. She was just there, as if she had no hierarchy of responses to stimuli. Getting her photograph taken had been no different from eating or dressing or watching TV or taking a walk with her mother. Every experience in her young life, it seemed, had existed along a flat line, no ups, no downs, no anythings.

Her photograph lay slightly off-center on a white sheet of legal-sized paper. Below the photograph were her vital statistics. Directly below those were the words-IF YOU SEE AMANDA, PLEASE CALL-and below that were Lionel and Beatrice’s names and their phone number. Following that was the number of the CAC squad, with Lieutenant Jack Doyle listed as the contact person. Under that number was 911. And at the bottom of the list was Helene’s name and number.

The stack of flyers sat on the kitchen counter in Lionel’s house, where he’d left them after he’d come home this morning. Lionel had been out all night plastering them to streetlight poles and subway station support beams, across temporary walls at construction sites and boarded-up buildings. He had covered downtown Boston and Cambridge, while Beatrice and three dozen neighbors had divided up the rest of the greater metro area. By dawn, they’d put Amanda’s face in every legal and illegal spot they could find in a twenty-mile radius of Boston.

Beatrice was in the living room when we entered, going through her morning routine of contacting all police and press assigned to the case and asking for progress reports. After that, she’d call the hospitals again. Next she’d call any businesses that had refused to put up a flyer of Amanda in their break rooms or cafeterias and ask them to explain why.

I had no idea when, or if, she’d sleep.

Helene was in the kitchen with us. She sat at the table and ate a bowl of Apple Jacks and nursed a hangover. Lionel and Beatrice, possibly sensing something in the simultaneous arrival of Angie and myself with Poole and Broussard, followed us into the kitchen, Lionel’s hair still wet from the shower, dots of moisture speckling his UPS uniform, Beatrice’s small face carrying a war refugee’s weariness.

“Cheese Olamon,” Helene said slowly.

“Cheese Olamon,” Angie said. “Yes.”

Helene scratched her neck where a small vein pulsed like a beetle trapped under the flesh. “I don’t know.”

“Don’t know what?” Broussard said.

“I mean, the name sounds sorta familiar.” Helene looked up at me and fingered a tear in the plastic tabletop.

“Sorta familiar?” Poole said. “Sorta familiar, Miss McCready? Can I quote you on that?”

“What?” Helene ran a hand through her thin hair. “What? I said it sounded familiar.”

“A name like Cheese Olamon,” Angie said, “doesn’t sound any kind of way. You’re either acquainted with it or you’re not.”

“I’m thinking.” Helene touched her nose lightly, then pulled back the hand and stared at the fingers.

A chair scraped as Poole dragged it across the floor, set it down in front of Helene, sat in it.

“Yes or no, Miss McCready. Yes or no.”

“Yes or no what?”

Broussard sighed loudly and fingered his wedding band, tapped his foot on the floor.

“Do you know Mr. Cheese Olamon?” Poole ’s whisper sounded drenched in gravel and glass.

“I don’t-”

“Helene!” Angie’s voice was so sharp even I started.

Helene looked up at her, and the beetle in her throat lapsed into a seizure under her skin. She tried to hold Angie’s gaze for about a tenth of a second, and then she dropped her head. Her hair fell over her face, and a tiny rasping noise came from behind it as she crossed one bare foot on top of the other and clenched the muscles in her calves.

“I knew Cheese,” she said. “A bit.”

“A little bit or a lot of bit?” Broussard pulled out a stick of gum, and the sound of the foil wrapper as he removed it was like teeth on my spine.

Helene shrugged. “I knew him.”

For the first time since we’d come into their kitchen, Beatrice and Lionel moved from their places against the wall, Beatrice over to the oven between Broussard and me, Lionel to a seat in the corner on the other side of the table from his sister. Beatrice lifted a cast-iron kettle off the burner and placed it under the faucet.

“Who’s Cheese Olamon?” Lionel reached out and took his sister’s right hand from her face. “Helene? Who’s Cheese Olamon?”

Beatrice turned her head to me. “He’s a drug dealer or something, isn’t he?”

She’d spoken so softly that over the running water no one but Broussard and I had heard her.

I held out my hands and shrugged.

Beatrice turned back to the faucet.

“Helene?” Lionel said again, and there was a high, uneven pitch to his voice.

“He’s just a guy, Lionel.” Helene’s voice was tired and flat and seemed to come from a million years away.

Lionel looked at the rest of us.

Both Angie and I looked away.

“Cheese Olamon,” Remy Broussard said, and cleared his throat, “is, among other things, a drug dealer, Mr. McCready.”

“What else is he?” Lionel had a child’s broken curiosity in his face.

“What?”

“You said ‘among other things.’ What other things?”

Beatrice turned from the faucet, placed the kettle on the burner, and ignited the flame underneath. “Helene, why don’t you answer your brother’s question?”

Helene’s hair remained in her face and her voice a million years away. “Why don’t you go suck a nigger’s dick, Bea?”

Lionel’s fist hit the table so hard, a fissure rippled through the cheap covering like a stream through a canyon.

Helene’s head snapped back and the hair flew off her face.

“You listen to me.” Lionel pointed a quaking finger an inch from his sister’s nose. “You don’t insult my wife, and you don’t make racist remarks in my kitchen.”

“Lionel-”

“In my kitchen!” He hit the table again. “Helene!”

It wasn’t a voice I’d heard before. Lionel had raised his voice that first time in our office, and that voice I was familiar with. But this was something else. Thunder. A thing that loosened cement and launched tremors through oak.