Lying like this, so close, so warm with the other’s heat, so deeply, deeply enthralled with each other, it was easy to wish life was beginning at this moment in her womb. All that was sacred and mysterious about a woman’s body in general and Angie’s in particular seemed locked in this cocoon of sheets, this soft mattress and rickety bed. It all seemed so clear suddenly.

But the world was not this bed. The world was cement-cold and jaggedly sharp. The world was filled with monsters who’d once been babies, who’d started as zygotes in the womb, who’d emerged from woman in the only miracle the twentieth century has left, yet emerged angry or twisted or destined to be so. How many other lovers had lain in similar cocoons, similar beds, and felt what we felt now? How many monsters had they produced? And how many victims?

“Speak,” Angie said, and pushed the damp hair off my forehead.

“I’ve thought about it,” I said.

“And?”

“And it awes me.”

“Me too.”

“Scares me.”

“Me too.”

“A lot.”

Her eyes grew small. “How come?”

“Little kids found in cement barrels, the Amanda McCreadys who vanish like they’d never lived, pedophiles out there roaming the streets with electrical tape and nylon cord. This world is a shit hole, honey.”

She nodded. “And?”

“And what?”

“And it’s a shit hole. Okay. But then what? I mean, our parents probably knew it was a shit hole, but they had us.”

“Great childhoods we had, too.”

“Would you prefer never to have been born?”

I placed both hands on her lower back and she leaned back into them. Her body rose off mine and the sheet fell from her back and she settled on my lap and looked down at me, her hair falling from behind her ears, naked and beautiful and as close to sheer perfection as any thing or any person or any fantasy I’d ever known.

“Would I prefer never to have been born?”

“That’s the question,” she said softly.

“Of course not,” I said. “But would Amanda McCready?”

“Our child wouldn’t be Amanda McCready.”

“How do we know?”

“Because we wouldn’t rip off drug dealers who’d take our child to get the money back.”

“Kids disappear every day for a lot less reason than that, and you know it. Kids disappear because they were walking to school, on the wrong corner at the wrong time, got separated from their parents at a mall. And they die, Ange. They die.”

A single tear fell to her breast, and after a moment it slid over the nipple and fell to my chest, already cold by the time it hit my skin.

“I know that,” she said. “But be that as it may, I want your child. Not today, maybe not even next year. But I want it. I want to produce something beautiful from my body that is us and yet a person completely unlike us.”

“You want a baby.”

She shook her head. “I want your baby.”

At some point we dozed.

Or I did. I woke a few minutes later to find her gone from the bed, and I got up and walked through the dark apartment into the kitchen, found her sitting at the table by the window, her bare flesh paled by the fractured moonlight cutting through rips in the shade.

There was a notepad by her elbow, the case file in front of her, and she looked up as I came through the doorway and said, “They can’t let her live.”

“Cheese and Mullen?”

She nodded. “It’s a dumb tactical move. They have to kill her.”

“They’ve kept her alive so far.”

“How do we know? And even if they have, they’ll only do so, maybe, until they get the money. Just to be sure. But then they’ll have to kill her. She’s too much of a loose end.”

I nodded.

“You’ve already faced this,” she said.

“Yes.”

“So tomorrow night?”

“I expect to find a corpse.”

She lit a cigarette, and her skin was momentarily flushed by the lighter flame. “Can you live with that?”

“No.” I came over to the table by her, put my hand on her shoulder, was aware of our nakedness in the kitchen, and I found myself thinking again of the power we held in our bed and our bodies, that potential third life floating like a spirit between our bare skin.

“Bubba?” she said.

“Most certainly.”

“ Poole and Broussard won’t like it.”

“Which is why we won’t tell them he’s there.”

“If Amanda is still alive when we reach the quarries, and we can locate her, or at least pinpoint her location-”

“Then Bubba will drop anyone holding her. Drop ’em like a sack of shit and disappear back into the night.”

She smiled. “You want to call him?”

I slid the phone across the table. “Be my guest.”

She crossed her legs as she dialed, tilted her head into the receiver. “Hey, big boy,” she said, when he answered, “want to come out and play tomorrow night?”

She listened for a moment, and her smile widened.

“If you’re particularly blessed, Bubba, sure, you’ll get to shoot someone.”

17

Major John Dempsey of the Massachusetts State Police had a wide Irish face as flat as a pancake and the wary, bulging eyes of an owl. He even blinked like an owl; a sudden snap of the ocular muscles would clamp his thick lids down over his eyes, where they’d remain a tenth of a second longer than normal before they’d snap back up like window shades and disappear under the brows.

Like most state troopers I’ve encountered, his spine seemed forged of lead pipe and his lips were pale and too thin; in the flat whiteness of his face they appeared to have been etched into the flesh by a weak pencil. His hands were a creamy white, the fingers long and feminine, the nails manicured as smooth as the edge of a nickel. But those hands were the only softness in him. The rest of him was constructed of shale, his slim frame so hard and stripped of body fat that if he fell from the podium I was sure he’d break apart in chips.

The uniforms of our state troopers have always unsettled me, and none more so than that of the upper ranks. There’s something aggressively Teutonic in all that spit-polished black leather, those pronounced epaulets and shiny silver brass, the hard strap of the Sam Browne as it clamps across the chest from right shoulder to left hip, the extra quarter inch of height in the cap brim so that it settles over the forehead and shrouds the eyes.

City cops always remind me of the grunts in old war movies. No matter how nicely dressed, they seem one step away from crawling on their bellies up the beach at Normandy, wet cigar clenched between their teeth, dirt raining on their backs. But when I look at the average Statie-the clenched jaw and arrogant turn of chin, the sun glinting off all those uniform parts built to glint-I instantly picture them goose-stepping down the autumn streets of Poland circa 1939.

Major Dempsey had removed his large hat shortly after we were all assembled, to reveal an alarmingly orange tuft of hair underneath. It was shorn to bright stubbled pikes that rose from the scalp like Astroturf, and he seemed aware of the disconcerting effect it had on strangers. He smoothed the sides with his palms, lifted the pointer off his desk, and tapped it against his open palm as his owl eyes surveyed the room with a bemused contempt. To his left, in a small row of chairs under the seal of the Commonwealth, Lieutenant Doyle sat with the police chief of Quincy, both dressed in their funereal best, all three watching the room with imposing stares.

We’d convened in the briefing room of the State Police barracks in Milton, and the entire left side of the room was commandeered by the Staties themselves, all hawkeyed and smooth-skinned, hats tucked crisply under their arms, not so much as a hairline wrinkle in their trousers or shirts.

The left side of the room was made up of Quincy cops in the front rows and Boston in the rear. The Quincy cops seemed to be emulating the Staties, though I spotted a few wrinkles, a few hats cast to the floor by their feet. They were mostly young men and women, cheeks as smooth and shiny as striped bass, and I’d have bet hard cash none of them had ever fired their guns in the line of duty.