Gone, Baby, Gone (Kenzie & Gennaro #4)(126)

Devin got up from the couch, removed a Sinatra CD from the tray, and replaced it with Dean Martin’s Greatest Hits.

“Worst part of all this,” Oscar said, “is not that I might be helping bring down a cop. It’s that I might be helping bring down a cop while listening to this shit.” He looked over his shoulder at Devin as Devin slid the Sinatra CD back into the rack. “Man, play some Luther Allison, the Taj Mahal I gave you last Christmas, anything but this. Shit, I’d rather hear that crap Kenzie listens to, all those skinny suicidal white boys. Least they got some heart.”

“Where’s Doyle live?” Devin came over to the coffee table and lifted his mug of tea, having passed on the Jack Daniel’s shortly after he’d called Oscar.

Oscar frowned as Dino warbled “You’re Nobody Till Somebody Loves You.”

“Doyle?” Oscar said. “Has a house in Neponset. ’Bout half a mile from here. Though once I went to a surprise sixtieth birthday party for him at a second house in a little town called West Beckett.” He looked at me. “Kenzie, you really think he has that girl?”

I shook my head. “Not sure. But if he’s in on this, I bet he has someone’s kid up there.”



Angie was released at two in the afternoon, and I met her at the rear door and we skirted the mob of press out front, drove up onto Broadway, and pulled behind Devin and Oscar as they turned off their hazards and rolled across the bridge toward the Mass Pike.

“Ryerson’s going to pull through,” I said. “They’re still not sure if they can save his arm.”

She lit a cigarette, nodded. “Lionel?”

“Lost his right eye,” I said. “Still under sedation. And that teamster Broussard hit suffered a severe concussion, but he’ll recover.”

She cracked her window. “I liked him,” she said softly.

“Who?”

“Broussard,” she said. “I really liked him. I know he came to that bar to kill Lionel, and maybe us, too, and he had that shotgun swung my way when I fired….” She raised her hands but then dropped them back in her lap.

“You did the right thing.”

She nodded. “I know. I know I did.” She stared down at the cigarette shaking in her hand. “But I just…I wish it hadn’t gone down that way. I liked him. That’s all.”

I turned onto the Mass Pike. “I liked him, too.”



West Beckett was a Rockwell painting in the heart of the Berkshire Mountains. White steeples formed bookends to the town itself, and Main Street was bordered by red pine boardwalks and delicate antiques and quilt shops. The town lay in a small valley like a piece of china in a cupped hand, the dark green hills rising up around it, pocked with remnants of snow that hovered in all that green like clouds.

Jack Doyle’s house was, like Broussard’s, set back off the road and up on a slope, obscured by trees. His, however, was far deeper in the woods, at the end of a drive a quarter mile long, the nearest house a good five acres to the west and shuttered tight, its chimney cold.

We buried the cars twenty yards off the main road, about halfway up, and walked the rest of the way through the woods, slow and cautious, not only because we were neophytes in nature but because Angie’s crutches didn’t find purchase as easily as they would on level ground. We stopped about ten yards short of the clearing that circled Doyle’s lodge-style one-story and peered at the wraparound porch, the logs stacked under the kitchen window.

The driveway was empty, and the house appeared to be as well. We watched for fifteen minutes, and nothing moved past the windows. No smoke flowed from the chimney.

“I’ll go,” I said eventually.

“He’s in there,” Oscar said, “he’ll have the legal right to shoot you as soon as you step on his porch.”

I reached for my gun and remembered that it was in the custody of the police at the same moment my fingers touched an empty holster.

I turned to Devin and Oscar.

“No way,” Devin said. “Nobody’s shooting any more cops. Even in self-defense.”

“And if he draws on me?”

“Find the power of prayer,” Oscar said.

I shook my head, parted the small saplings in front of me, raised my knee to step forward, and Angie said, “Wait.”

I stopped and we listened, heard the engine as it purred toward us. We looked to our right in time to see an ancient Mercedes-Benz jeep with a small snowplow blade still attached to the front grille as it bumped up the road and pulled into the clearing. It parked by the steps, the driver’s side facing us, and the door opened and a round woman with a kind, open face stepped out. She took a sniff of the air and stared through the trees, seemed to be looking right at us. She had marvelous eyes—the clearest blue I’ve ever seen—and her face was strong and bright from mountain living.

“The wife,” Oscar whispered. “Tricia.”

She turned from the trees and reached back into the car, and at first I thought she’d come back with a bag of groceries, but then something leapt and died at the same time in my chest.

Amanda McCready’s chin fell to the woman’s shoulder, and she stared through the trees at me with sleepy eyes, one thumb in her mouth, a red and black hat with ear flaps covering her head.