Gone, Baby, Gone (Kenzie & Gennaro #4)(93)

A child’s white cotton underwear lay soaked in blood in the sink.

I looked in the bathtub.

I’m not sure how long I stood there, head bent, mouth open. I felt a hot wetness on my cheeks, streams of it, and it was only after that double eternity of staring into the tub at the small, naked body curled up by the drain that I realized I was weeping.

I walked back out of the bathroom and saw Corwin Earle on his knees, his arms wrapped around his stomach, his back to me, as he tried to use his kneecaps to carry himself across the floor.

I stayed behind him and waited, my gun pointed down, his dark hair rising up from the other side of the black metal sight on the barrel.

He made a chugging sound as he crawled, a low yuh-yuh-yuh-yuh-yuh that reminded me of the chug of a portable generator.

When he reached the crossbow and got one hand on the stock, I said, “Corwin.”

He looked back over his shoulder at me, saw the gun pointed at him, and scrunched his eyes closed. He turned his head, gripping the crossbow tight with a bloody hand.

I fired a round into the back of his neck and kept walking, heard the shell skitter on wood and Corwin’s body thump against the floor as I turned left, back into the bedroom, and walked to the vault door. I unsnapped the locks one by one.

“Roberta,” I said. “You still out there? You hear me? I’m going to kill you now, Roberta.”

I unsnapped the last of the locks, threw the door open, and came face-to-face with a shotgun barrel.

Remy Broussard lowered the barrel. Between his legs, Roberta Trett lay facedown on the stairs, a dark red oval the size of a serving dish in the center of her back.

Broussard steadied himself against the railing as sweat poured like warm rain from his hairline.

“Had to blow the lock on the bulkhead and come up through the basement,” he said. “Sorry it took so long.”

I nodded.

“Clear in there?” He took a deep breath, watched me steadily with dark eyes.

“Yes.” I cleared my throat. “Corwin Earle is dead.”

“Samuel Pietro,” he said.

I nodded. “I think it’s Samuel Pietro.” I looked down at my gun, saw that it jumped from the tremors in my arm, the shakes wracking my body like a series of small strokes. I looked back at Broussard, felt the warm streams spring from my eyes again. “It’s hard to tell,” I said, and my voice cracked.

Broussard nodded. I noticed that he was weeping, too.

“In the basement,” he said.

“What?”

“Skeletons,” he said. “Two of them. Kids.”

My voice didn’t sound like my own as I said, “I don’t know how to respond to that.”

“I don’t either,” he said.

He looked down at Roberta Trett’s corpse. He lowered the shotgun and placed it against the back of her head, and his finger curled around the trigger.

I waited for him to blow her dead brains all over the staircase.

After a while, he removed the gun and sighed. He took his foot and brought it down gently on the top of her head, and then he pushed her down.

That’s what the Quincy police met as they reached the stairs: Roberta Trett’s large corpse sliding down the dark staircase toward them and two men standing up top, weeping like children because they’d somehow never known the world could get this bad.





26





It took twenty hours to confirm that the body in the bathtub had, in fact, been that of Samuel Pietro. The work the Tretts and Corwin Earle had done on his face with a knife had made dental records the only sure means of identification. Gabrielle Pietro had gone into shock after a reporter from the News, acting on a tip, called before the police contacted her to ask for a statement regarding her son’s death.

Samuel Pietro had been dead forty-five minutes by the time I found him. The medical examiner ascertained that in the two weeks since his disappearance he’d been sodomized repeatedly, flogged along his back, buttocks, and legs, and handcuffed so tightly that the flesh around his right wrist was worn down to the bone. He’d been fed nothing but potato chips, Fritos, and beer since he’d left his mother’s house.

Less than an hour before we’d entered the Trett house, either Corwin Earle, one or both of the Tretts, or maybe all three of them—who the hell knew and ultimately what difference did it make?—had stabbed the boy in the heart and then drawn the knife blade across his throat and severed his carotid artery.

I’d spent the morning and most of the afternoon up in our cramped office, tucked in the belfry of St. Bartholomew’s Church, feeling the weight of the great building around me, the spires reaching for heaven. I stared out the window. I tried not to think. I drank cold coffee and sat, felt a soft ticking in my chest, in my head.

Angie’s ankle had been set and plastered last night at the New England Med emergency room, and she’d left the apartment this morning as I was waking up, taken a taxi to her doctor’s office so he could check the ER resident’s work and tell her what to expect from time spent in a cast.

I left the belfry office, once I got the details regarding Samuel Pietro from Broussard, and descended the stairs into the chapel. I sat in the front pew in the still half-dark, smelled the remains of incense and the bloom of chrysanthemums, met the gem-shaped gaze of several stained-glass saints, and watched the lights of small votive candles flicker off the mahogany altar rail, wondered why an eight-year-old child had been allowed to live on this earth just long enough to experience everything horrific in it.