Gone, Baby, Gone (Kenzie & Gennaro #4)(27)

“She seems upset,” Gordon said. That Gordon, nothing slipped past him.

“Yes,” Tanya agreed.

“Since time is of the essence,” Gert said, “police are asking for any information, anyone who may have seen little Amanda—”

“Little Amanda?” Angie said, and shook her head. “What is she supposed to be at four, humongous Amanda? Mature Amanda?”

“—anyone who has any information on this little girl—”

Amanda’s photograph filled the screen.

“—please call the number listed below.”

The number for the Crimes Against Children squad flashed below Amanda’s photo for a few moments, and then they cut back to the studio. In place of MISSING CHILD in the pop-up box, they’d inserted the live feed, and a smaller Gert Broderick fondled her microphone and looked into the camera with a blank, vaguely confused look on her blank, vaguely confused face as Helene continued to go ballistic on the porch and Beatrice joined Lionel and tried to hold her in place.

“Gert,” Tanya said, “have you been able to talk to the mother at all?”

Gert’s sudden tight smile covered an annoyed spark that crossed her blank eyes like smoke. “No, Tanya. As of yet, the police have not allowed us past that caution tape you see behind me, so, again, we have yet to confirm if Helene McCready is in fact the hysterical woman you see on the porch behind me.”

“Tragic,” Gordon said, as Helene lunged into Lionel again and wailed so sharply that Gert’s shoulders tensed.

“Tragic,” Tanya agreed, as Amanda’s face and the phone number for Crimes Against Children filled the screen for another half second.

“In another breaking story,” Gordon said as they cut back to him, “a home invasion in Lowell has left at least two people dead and a third wounded by gunfire. For that story we go to Martha Torsney in Lowell. Martha?”

They cut to Martha, and a slash of snow burst across the screen for a split second before being replaced momentarily by a black screen and we settled in to watch the rest of the tape, confident Gordon and Tanya would be there to tell us how to feel about the events transpiring before us, fill in the emotional blanks.



Eight tapes and ninety minutes later, we’d come up with nothing except stiff bodies and an even more depressingly jaded view of broadcast journalism than we’d had before. Except for the camera angles, nothing distinguished one report from another. As the search for Amanda dragged on, the newscasts showed numbingly similar footage of Helene’s house, Helene herself being interviewed, Broussard or Poole giving statements, neighbors pounding the pavements with flyers, cops leaning over car hoods shining flashlights over maps of the neighborhood or reining in their search dogs. And all the reports were followed by the same pithy, rankly maudlin commentary, the same studied sadness and head-shaking morality in the eyes and jaws and foreheads of the newscasters. And now, back to our regularly scheduled program….

“Well,” Angie said, and stretched so hard I heard the vertebrae in her back crack like walnuts hit with a cleaver, “outside of seeing a bunch of people we know from the neighborhood on TV, what have we accomplished this morning?”

I sat forward, cracking my own neck. Pretty soon we’d have a band. “Not much. I did see Lauren Smythe. Always thought she’d moved.” I shrugged. “Guess she was just avoiding me.”

“Is that the one who attacked you with a knife?”

“Scissors,” I said. “And I prefer to think it was foreplay. She just wasn’t very good at it.”

She whacked my shoulder with the back of her hand. “Let’s see. I saw April Norton and Susan Siersma, who I haven’t seen since high school and Billy Boran and Mike O’Connor, who’s lost a lotta hair, don’t you think?”

I nodded. “Lost a lotta weight, too.”

“Who notices? He’s bald.”

“Sometimes I think you’re more shallow than I am.”

She shrugged and lit a cigarette. “Who else did we see?”

“Danielle Genter,” I said. “Babs Kerins. Friggin’ Chris Mullen was everywhere.”

“I noticed that too. In the early stuff.”

I sipped some cold coffee. “Huh?”

“In the early stuff. He was always hanging around the periphery in the early parts of every tape, never the later stuff.”

I yawned. “He’s a periphery guy, ol’ Chris.” I picked up her empty coffee cup, hung it off my finger beside my own. “More?”

She shook her head.

I went into the kitchen, put her cup in the sink, poured myself a fresh cup. Angie came in as I opened the refrigerator and removed the cream.

“When’s the last time you saw Chris Mullen in the neighborhood?”

I closed the door, looked at her. “When’s the last time you saw half the people we saw watching those tapes?”

She shook her head. “Forget about everyone else. I mean, they’ve been here. Chris? He moved uptown. Got himself a place in Devonshire Towers around, like, ’eighty-seven.”

I shrugged. “Again—so?”

“So what’s Chris Mullen do for work?”

I put the cream carton down on the counter beside my cup. “He works for Cheese Olamon.”