“Detective Sergeant Lee.”

“Oscar,” I said.

“Hey, Walter Payton! How’s the body?”

“Hurts,” I said. “Like hell.”

His voice changed. “How’s that other thing?”

“Well, I got a question for you.”

“A rat-out-my-own-people sort of question?”

“Not necessarily.”

“Shoot. I’ll decide if I like it.”

“Broussard’s married, right?”

“To Rachel, yeah.”

“Tall brunette?” I said. “Very pretty?”

“That’s her.”

“And they have a kid?”

“’Scuse me?”

“Does Broussard have a son?”

“No.”

I felt a lightness eddy in my skull, and the throbbing aches from yesterday’s football game disappeared.

“You’re sure?”

“’Course I’m sure. He can’t.”

“He can’t or he decided not to?”

Oscar’s voice became slightly muffled, and I realized he’d cupped the phone with his hand. His voice was a whisper. “Rachel can’t conceive. It was a big problem for them. They wanted kids.”

“Why not adopt?”

“Who’s gonna let an ex-hooker adopt kids?”

“She was in the life?”

“Yeah, that’s how he met her. He was on Homicide track until then, man, just like me. It killed his career, got him buried in Narco until Doyle bailed him out. But he loves her. She’s a good woman, too. A great woman.”

“But no kid.”

His hand left the phone. “How many times I got to tell you, Kenzie? No friggin’ kid.”

I said thanks and goodbye, hung up, and handed the phone back to Ryerson.

“He doesn’t have a son,” Ryerson said. “Does he?”

“He has a son,” I said. “He definitely has a son.”

“Then where’d he get him?”

It all fell into place then, as I sat in Ryerson’s Suburban and looked out at Kenneally’s Antiques.

“How much you want to bet,” I said, “that whoever Nicholas Broussard’s natural parents are, they probably weren’t real good at the job?”

“Holy shit,” Angie said.

Ryerson leaned over the steering wheel, stared out through the windshield with a blank, stunned look on his lean face. “Holy shit.”

I saw the blond boy riding Rachel Broussard’s hip, the adoration she’d poured on his tiny face as she’d caressed it.

“Yeah,” I said. “Holy shit.”

32

At the end of an April day, after the sun has descended but before night has fallen, the city turns a hushed, unsettled gray. Another day has died, always more quickly than expected. Muted yellow or orange lights appear in window squares and shaft from car grilles, and the coming dark promises a deepening chill. Children have disappeared from the streets to wash up for dinner, to turn on TVs. The supermarkets and liquor stores are half empty and listless. The florists and banks are closed. The honk of horns is sporadic; a storefront grate rattles as it drops. And if you look closely in the faces of pedestrians and drivers stopped at lights, you can see the weight of the morning’s unfulfilled promise in the numb sag of their faces. Then they pass, trudging toward home, whatever its incarnation.

Lionel and Ted Kenneally had arrived back late, close to five, and something broke in Lionel’s face as he saw us approach. When Ryerson flashed his badge and said, “Like to ask you a couple of questions, Mr. McCready,” that broken thing in Lionel’s face broke even further.

He nodded several times, more to himself than to us, and said, “There’s a bar up the street. Why don’t we go there? I don’t want to do this at my home.”

The Edmund Fitzgerald was about as small as a bar could get without becoming a shoeshine stand. When we first walked in, a small area opened up on our left with a counter running along the only window and enough space for maybe four tables. Unfortunately they’d stuck a jukebox in there, too, so only two tables fit, and both were empty when the four of us entered. The bar itself could sit seven people, eight tops, and six tables took up the wall across from it. The room opened up a bit again in back, where two darts players tossed their missiles over a pool table wedged so close to the walls that from three of four possible sides, the shooter would have to use a short stick. Or a pencil.

As we sat down at a table in the center of the place, Lionel said, “Hurt your leg, Miss Gennaro?”

Angie said, “It’ll heal,” and fished in her bag for her cigarettes.

Lionel looked at me, and when I looked away, that constant sag in his shoulders deepened. The rocks that normally sat up there had been joined by cinder blocks.

Ryerson flipped a notepad open on the table, uncapped a pen. “I’m Special Agent Neal Ryerson, Mr. McCready. I’m with the Justice Department.”

Lionel said, “Sir?”

Ryerson gave him a quick flick of the eyes. “That’s right, Mr. McCready. Federal government. You have some explaining to do. Wouldn’t you say?”

“About what?” Lionel looked over his shoulder, then around the bar.

“Your niece,” I said. “Look, Lionel, bullshit time is over.”

He glanced to his right, toward the bar, as if someone there might be waiting to help him out.

“Mr. McCready,” Ryerson said, “we can spend half an hour playing No-I-Didn’t/Yes-You-Did, but that would be a waste of everyone’s time. We know you were involved in your niece’s disappearance and that you were working with Remy Broussard. He’s going to take a hard fall, by the way, hard as hard gets. You? I’m offering you a chance to clear the air, maybe get some leniency down the road.” He tapped the pen on the table to the cadence of a ticking clock. “But if you bullshit me, I’ll walk out of here and we’ll do it the rough way. And you’ll drop into prison for so long your grandkids will have driving licenses by the time you get out.”

The waitress approached and took our order of two Cokes, a mineral water for Ryerson, and a double scotch for Lionel.

While we waited for her return, no one spoke. Ryerson continued to use his pen like a metronome, tapping it steadily against the edge of the table, his level, dispassionate gaze locked on Lionel.

Lionel didn’t seem to notice. He looked at the coaster in front of him, but I don’t think he saw it; he was looking much deeper, much farther away than a table or this bar, his lips and chin picking up a sheen of sweat. I had the sense that what he saw at the end of his long inward gaze was the shoddy finale of his own unraveling, the waste of his life. He saw prison. He saw divorce papers delivered to his cell and letters to his son returned unopened. He saw decades stretching into decades in which he was alone with his shame, or his guilt, or merely the folly of a man who’d done a dumb thing society had stripped naked under klieg lights, exposed for public consumption. His picture would be in the paper, his name associated with kidnapping, his life the fodder for talk shows and tabloids and sneering jokes remembered long after the comics who’d told them were forgotten.

The waitress brought our drinks, and Lionel said, “Eleven years ago, I was in a bar downtown with some friends. A bachelor party came in. They were all real drunk. One of them was looking for a fight. He picked me. I hit him. Once. But he cracked his skull on the floor. Thing is, I didn’t hit him with my fist. I had a pool stick in my hand.”

“Assault with a deadly weapon,” Angie said.

He nodded. “Actually, it was worse than that. The guy had been shoving me, and I’d said-I don’t remember saying it, but I guess I did-I’d said, ‘Back off or I’ll kill you.’”

“Attempted murder,” I said.

Another nod. “I go to trial. And it’s my friends’ words against this guy’s friends’ words. And I know I’m going to jail, because the guy I hit, he was a college student, and after I hit him, he claims he can’t study anymore, can’t concentrate. He’s got doctors claiming brain damage. I can tell by the way the judge looks at me that I’m done. But a guy who was in the bar that night, a stranger to both parties, testifies that it was the guy I hit who said he was going to kill me, and that he’d thrown the first punch, et cetera. I walk, because the stranger was a cop.”