Death, I thought, is not this. Death is directly behind us. Death is the grungy kitchen of Wee David and Kimmie. Death is black blood and disloyal cats who feed on anything.

“Helene,” I said.

“Yeah?”

“While you were in the room with Kimmie looking at pictures of Disney World, where were Wee David and Ray?”

Her mouth opened slightly.

“Quick,” I said. “Off the top of your head. Don’t think.”

“The backyard,” she said.

“The backyard.” Angie pointed at the ground. “Here.”

She nodded.

“Could you see the backyard from Kimmie’s bedroom?” I asked.

“No. The shades were drawn.”

“Then how’d you know they were out here?” I asked.

“Ray’s shoes were filthy when we left,” she said slowly. “Ray is a slob in a lot of ways.” She reached out and touched my arm as if she were about to share a deeply personal secret with me. “But, man, he takes care of his shoes.”

11

GTwo Hundred + Composure = Child

“Gee two hundred?” Angie said.

“Two hundred grand,” Broussard said quietly.

“Where’d you find that note?” I said.

He looked over his shoulder at the house. “Curled up tight and stuck in the waistband of Kimmie’s lacy Underalls. An attention grabber, I think.”

We stood in the backyard.

“It’s here,” Angie said, and pointed at a small mound by a dry and withered elm tree. The dirt was freshly turned there, the mound the only ridge in a plot of land that was otherwise as flat as a nickel.

“I believe you, Miss Gennaro,” Broussard said. “So now what do we do?”

“Dig it up,” I said.

“And impound it and make it public knowledge,” Poole said. “Tie it, through the press, to Amanda McCready’s disappearance.”

I looked around at the dead grass, the burgundy leaves curled atop the blades. “No one’s touched this place in a while.”

Poole nodded. “Your conclusion?”

“If it is buried there”-I pointed at the mound-“then Wee David kept it to himself even though they tortured Kimmie to death in front of him.”

“No one ever accused Wee Dave of being a candidate for the Peace Corps,” Broussard said.

Poole walked over to the tree, placed a foot on either side of the mound, stared down at it.

Inside the house, Helene sat in the living room, fifteen feet from two bloating corpses, and watched TV. Springer had given way to Geraldo or Sally or some other ringmaster sounding the cowbell for the latest cavalcade of carnival freaks. The public “therapy” of confession, the continued watering down of the meaning of the word “trauma,” a steady stream of morons shouting at the void from a raised dais.

Helene didn’t seem to mind. She only complained about the smell, asked if we could open a window. Nobody had a good enough reason why we couldn’t, and once we did, we left her there, her face bathed in flickers of silver light.

“So we’re out of this,” Angie said, a note of quiet, sad surprise in her voice, a sudden confronting of the anticlimax that comes when a case ends abruptly.

I thought about it. It was a kidnapping now, complete with a ransom note and logical suspects with a motive. The FBI would take over, and we could follow the case through the news like every other couch potato in the state, wait for Helene to show up on Springer Time with other parents who’d misplaced their kids.

I held out my hand to Broussard. “Angie’s right. It was nice working with you.”

Broussard shook the hand and nodded but didn’t say anything. He looked over at Poole.

Poole toed the small ridge of dirt with his shoe, his eyes on Angie.

“We are out of this,” Angie said to him, “aren’t we?”

Poole held her gaze for a bit, then looked back at the tiny mound.

No one spoke for a couple of minutes. I knew we should go. Angie knew we should go. Yet we stayed, planted, it seemed, in that tiny yard with the dead elm.

I turned my head toward the ugly house behind us, could see Wee David’s head from here, the top of the chair he’d been bound to. Had he been aware of the feel of his bare shoulder blades against the cheap wicker backing of the chair? Had that been the last sensation he’d acknowledged before the buckshot opened up his chest cavity as if the bone and flesh were made of tissue paper? Or was it the sensation of the blood draining to his bound wrists, the fingers turning blue and numb?

The people who’d entered this house that last day or night of his life had known they’d kill Kimmie and Wee David. That was a professional execution back in that kitchen. Kimmie’s throat had been sliced as a last-ditch effort to get Wee David to talk, but she’d also been killed with a knife, out of prudence.

Neighbors will almost always attribute one gunshot to something else-a car backfiring, maybe, or, in the case of a shotgun blast, an engine blowing or a china cabinet falling to the floor. Particularly when the sound may have come from the home of drug dealers or users, people who are known by their neighbors to make odd sounds at all times of night.

No one wants to think they actually heard a gunshot, were actually witness-if only aurally-to a murder.

So the killers had killed Kimmie quickly and silently, probably without warning. But Wee David-they’d been pointing that shotgun at him for a while. They’d wanted him to see the curl of the finger against the trigger, hear the hammer hit the shell, the explosive click of ignition.

And these were the people who held Amanda McCready.

“You want to trade the two hundred thousand for Amanda,” Angie said.

There it was. What I’d known for the last five minutes. What Poole and Broussard were unwilling to put into words. A cataclysmic breach of police protocol.

Poole studied the trunk of the dead tree. Broussard lifted a red leaf off the green grass with the toe of his shoe.

“Right?” Angie said.

Poole sighed. “I’d prefer that the kidnappers not open a suitcase full of newspaper or marked money and kill the child before we get to them.”

“That’s happened to you before?” Angie said.

“It’s happened to cases I’ve turned over to the FBI,” Poole said. “That’s what we’re dealing with here, Miss Gennaro. Kidnapping is federal.”

“We go federal,” Broussard said, “the money goes into an evidence locker, and the Feds do the negotiating, get a chance to show how clever they are.”

Angie looked out at the tiny yard, the dying violet petals growing through the chain-link fence from the other side. “You two want to negotiate with the kidnappers without the Feds.”

Poole dug his hands into his pockets. “I’ve found too many dead children in closets, Miss Gennaro.”

She looked at Broussard. “You?”

He smiled. “I hate Feds.”

I said, “This goes bad, you’ll lose your pensions, guys. Maybe worse.”

On the other side of the yard, a man hung a throw rug out his third-story window and started beating it with a hockey stick that was missing the blade. The dust rose in angry, ephemeral clouds, and the man kept whacking without seeming to notice us.

Poole lowered himself to his haunches, picked at a blade of grass by the mound. “You remember the Jeannie Minnelli case? Couple years back?”

Angie and I shrugged. It was sad how many horrible things you forgot.

“Nine-year-old girl,” Broussard said. “Disappeared riding her bike in Somerville.”

I nodded. It was coming back.

“We found her, Mr. Kenzie, Miss Gennaro.” Poole snapped the blade of grass between his fingers at both ends. “In a barrel. Soaked in cement. The cement hadn’t hardened yet because the geniuses who killed her had used the wrong ratio of water to cement in the mix.” He slapped his hands together, to clear them of dust or pollen or just because. “We found a nine-year-old’s corpse floating in a barrel of watery cement.” He stood. “Sound pleasant?”