Gone, Baby, Gone (Kenzie & Gennaro #4)(28)

“Who happens to be in prison.”

“Big surprise.”

“For?”

“What?”

“What is Cheese in prison for?”

I picked up the cream carton again. “What else?” I turned in the kitchen as I heard my words, let the carton dangle by my thigh. “Drug dealing,” I said slowly.

“You are so goddamned right.”





9





Amanda McCready wasn’t smiling. She stared at me with still, empty eyes, her ash-blond hair falling limply around her face, as if it had been plastered to the sides of her head with a wet palm. She had her mother’s tremulous chin, too square and too small for her oval face, and the sallow crevices under her cheeks hinted of questionable nutrition.

She wasn’t frowning, nor did she appear to be angry or sad. She was just there, as if she had no hierarchy of responses to stimuli. Getting her photograph taken had been no different from eating or dressing or watching TV or taking a walk with her mother. Every experience in her young life, it seemed, had existed along a flat line, no ups, no downs, no anythings.

Her photograph lay slightly off-center on a white sheet of legal-sized paper. Below the photograph were her vital statistics. Directly below those were the words—IF YOU SEE AMANDA, PLEASE CALL—and below that were Lionel and Beatrice’s names and their phone number. Following that was the number of the CAC squad, with Lieutenant Jack Doyle listed as the contact person. Under that number was 911. And at the bottom of the list was Helene’s name and number.

The stack of flyers sat on the kitchen counter in Lionel’s house, where he’d left them after he’d come home this morning. Lionel had been out all night plastering them to streetlight poles and subway station support beams, across temporary walls at construction sites and boarded-up buildings. He had covered downtown Boston and Cambridge, while Beatrice and three dozen neighbors had divided up the rest of the greater metro area. By dawn, they’d put Amanda’s face in every legal and illegal spot they could find in a twenty-mile radius of Boston.

Beatrice was in the living room when we entered, going through her morning routine of contacting all police and press assigned to the case and asking for progress reports. After that, she’d call the hospitals again. Next she’d call any businesses that had refused to put up a flyer of Amanda in their break rooms or cafeterias and ask them to explain why.

I had no idea when, or if, she’d sleep.

Helene was in the kitchen with us. She sat at the table and ate a bowl of Apple Jacks and nursed a hangover. Lionel and Beatrice, possibly sensing something in the simultaneous arrival of Angie and myself with Poole and Broussard, followed us into the kitchen, Lionel’s hair still wet from the shower, dots of moisture speckling his UPS uniform, Beatrice’s small face carrying a war refugee’s weariness.

“Cheese Olamon,” Helene said slowly.

“Cheese Olamon,” Angie said. “Yes.”

Helene scratched her neck where a small vein pulsed like a beetle trapped under the flesh. “I don’t know.”

“Don’t know what?” Broussard said.

“I mean, the name sounds sorta familiar.” Helene looked up at me and fingered a tear in the plastic tabletop.

“Sorta familiar?” Poole said. “Sorta familiar, Miss McCready? Can I quote you on that?”

“What?” Helene ran a hand through her thin hair. “What? I said it sounded familiar.”

“A name like Cheese Olamon,” Angie said, “doesn’t sound any kind of way. You’re either acquainted with it or you’re not.”

“I’m thinking.” Helene touched her nose lightly, then pulled back the hand and stared at the fingers.

A chair scraped as Poole dragged it across the floor, set it down in front of Helene, sat in it.

“Yes or no, Miss McCready. Yes or no.”

“Yes or no what?”

Broussard sighed loudly and fingered his wedding band, tapped his foot on the floor.

“Do you know Mr. Cheese Olamon?” Poole’s whisper sounded drenched in gravel and glass.

“I don’t—”

“Helene!” Angie’s voice was so sharp even I started.

Helene looked up at her, and the beetle in her throat lapsed into a seizure under her skin. She tried to hold Angie’s gaze for about a tenth of a second, and then she dropped her head. Her hair fell over her face, and a tiny rasping noise came from behind it as she crossed one bare foot on top of the other and clenched the muscles in her calves.

“I knew Cheese,” she said. “A bit.”

“A little bit or a lot of bit?” Broussard pulled out a stick of gum, and the sound of the foil wrapper as he removed it was like teeth on my spine.

Helene shrugged. “I knew him.”

For the first time since we’d come into their kitchen, Beatrice and Lionel moved from their places against the wall, Beatrice over to the oven between Broussard and me, Lionel to a seat in the corner on the other side of the table from his sister. Beatrice lifted a cast-iron kettle off the burner and placed it under the faucet.

“Who’s Cheese Olamon?” Lionel reached out and took his sister’s right hand from her face. “Helene? Who’s Cheese Olamon?”

Beatrice turned her head to me. “He’s a drug dealer or something, isn’t he?”