“Critical mass,” I said.

“Huh?”

“Critical mass,” I repeated. I took another swig of rum. It wasn’t going down easy yet, but it was close. “You see this horrible thing, that one, but they’re spaced out. Yesterday, we saw all sorts of evil shit and it all reached critical mass at once.”

He nodded. “I’ve never seen anything as bad as that basement,” he said. “And then that kid in the tub?” He shook his head. “A few months shy of my twenty, and I’ve never…” He took another swig and shuddered against the burn of alcohol. He gave me a slight smile. “You know what Roberta was doing when I shot her?”

I shook my head.

“Pawing at the door like a dog. Swear to God. Pawing and mewing and crying about her Leon. I’d just climbed out of that cellar, found those two little kid skeletons sunk in limestone and gravel, the whole fucking place something out of a spook show, and I see Roberta at the top of the stairs? Man, I didn’t even look for her gun. I just unloaded mine.” He spit into the sand. “Fuck her. Hell’s too good a place for that bitch.”

For a while we sat in silence, listening to the creak of the swings’ chains, the cars passing along the avenue, the slap and scrape of some kids playing street hockey in the parking lot of the electronics plant across the street.

“The skeletons,” I said to Broussard after a bit.

“Unidentified. Closest the ME can tell me is that one’s male, one’s female, and he thinks neither is older than nine or younger than four. A week before he knows shit.”

“Dentals?”

“The Tretts took care of that. Both skeletons showed traces of hydrochloric acid. The ME thinks the Tretts marinated them in the shit, pulled out the teeth while they were soft, dumped the bones in boxes of limestone in the cellar.”

“Why leave them in the cellar?”

“So they could look at them?” Broussard shrugged. “Who the fuck knows?”

“So one could be Amanda McCready.”

“Most definitely. Either that or she’s in the quarry.”

I thought about the cellar and Amanda for a bit. Amanda McCready and her flat eyes, her lowered expectations for all the things that kids should have the highest expectations for, her lifeless corpse being dropped in a bathtub filled with acid, her hair stripping away from her head like papier-mâché.

“Hell of a world,” Broussard whispered.

“It’s a fucking awful world, Remy. You know?”

“Two days ago I would have argued with you. I’m a cop, okay, but I’m lucky, too. Got a great wife, nice house, invested well over the years. I’ll leave all this shit soon as I hit my twenty and a wake-up call.” He shrugged. “But then something like-Jesus-that carved-up kid in that fucking bathroom and you start thinking, ‘Well, fine, my life’s okay, but the world’s still a pile of shit for most people. Even if my world is okay, the world is still a pile of evil shit.’ You know?”

“Oh,” I said, “I know. Exactly.”

“Nothing works.”

“What’s that?”

“Nothing works,” he said. “Don’t you get it? The cars, the washing machines, the refrigerators and ‘starter’ houses, the fucking shoes and clothes and…nothing works. Schools don’t work.”

“Not public ones,” I said.

“Public? Look at the morons coming out of private schools these days. You ever talked to one of those disaffected prep-school fucks? You ask ’em what morality is, they say a concept. You ask ’em what decency is, they say a word. Look at these rich kids whacking winos in Central Park over drug deals or just because. Schools don’t work because parents don’t work because their parents didn’t work because nothing works, so why invest energy or love or anything into it if it’s just going to let you down? Jesus, Patrick, we don’t work. That kid was out there for two weeks; no one could find him. He was in that house, we suspected it hours before he was killed, we’re sitting in a doughnut shop talking about it. That kid got his throat cut when we should have been kicking in the door.”

“We’re the richest, most advanced society in the history of civilization,” I said, “and we can’t keep a kid from getting carved up in a bathtub by three freaks? Why?”

“I don’t know.” He shook his head and kicked at the sand by his feet. “I just don’t know. Every time you come up with a solution, there’s a faction ready to tell you you’re wrong. You believe in the death penalty?”

I held out my cup. “No.”

He stopped pouring. “Excuse me?”

I shrugged. “I don’t. Sorry. Keep pouring, will you?”

He filled my cup and sucked back on the bottle for a moment. “You capped Corwin Earle in the back of the head, you’re telling me you don’t believe in capital punishment?”

“I don’t think society has the right or the intelligence. Let society prove to me they can pave roads efficiently; then I’ll let them decide life and death.”

“Yet, again: you executed someone yesterday.”

“Technically he had his hand on a weapon. And besides, I’m not society.”

“What the fuck’s that mean?”

I shrugged. “I trust myself. I can live with my actions. I don’t trust society.”

“That why you’re a PI, Patrick? The lone knight and all that?”

I shook my head. “Piss on that.”

Another laugh.

“I’m a PI, because-I dunno, maybe I’m addicted to the great What Comes Next. Maybe I like tearing down facades. That doesn’t make me a good guy. It just makes me a guy who hates people who hide, pretend to be what they’re not.”

He raised the bottle, and I tapped my plastic glass into the side.

“What if someone pretends to be one thing because society deems he must, but in reality he’s something else because he deems he must?”

I shook my head against the booze. “Run that one by me again.” I stood up, and my feet felt unsteady in the sand. I crossed to the jungle gym opposite the swings and perched myself on a rung.

“If society doesn’t work, how do we, as allegedly honorable men, live?”

“On the fringes,” I said.

He nodded. “Exactly. Yet we must coexist within society or otherwise we’re-what, we’re fucking militia, guys who wear camouflage pants and bitch about taxes while they drive on roads paved by the government. Right?”

“I guess.”

He stood and wavered, grasped the swing chain, and tilted back into the pools of dark behind the swing-set arch. “I planted evidence on a guy once.”

“You what?”

He tilted back into the light. “True. Scumbag named Carlton Volk. He was raping hookers for months. Months. A couple pimps tried to stop him, he fucked them up. Carlton was a psycho, black-belt, prison-weight-room kind of guy. Couldn’t be reasoned with. And our buddy Ray Likanski gives me a phone call, lets me in on all the details. Skinny Ray, I guess, had a soft spot for one of the hookers. Whatever. Anyway, I know Carlton Volk is raping hookers, but who’s going to convict him? Even if the girls had wanted to testify-which they didn’t-who would believe them? A hooker saying she was raped is a joke to most people. Like killing a corpse; supposedly it ain’t possible. So I know Carlton’s a two-time loser, out on probation; I plant an ounce of heroin and two unlicensed firearms in his trunk, way back under the spare where he’ll never find ’em. Then I put an expired inspection sticker over the up-to-date one on his license plate. Who looks at their own plate until it’s near renewal time?” He floated back into the dark again for a moment. “Two weeks later, Carlton gets stopped on the inspection sticker, cops an attitude, et cetera, et cetera. Long story short, he gets dropped as a three-time felon for twenty years hard, no parole possibility.”

I waited until he’d swung back into the light again before I spoke.

“You think you did the right thing?”

He shrugged. “For those hookers, yes.”

“But-”

“Always a ‘but’ when you tell a story like that, ain’t there?” He sighed. “But a guy like Carlton, he thrives in prison. Probably goes through more young kids sent up for burglary and minor dope-dealing than he ever would have raped in hookers. So did I do right for the general population? Probably not. Did I do right for some hookers no one else gave a shit about? Maybe.”