The Red Hunter(52)

“Did they work for Malone?”

“I didn’t find any connections, no.”

I heard a chair groan as one of them shifted his weight.

“You’ve got fibers, the boot print,” said Paul.

“There’s no definitive match on any of it,” he said. “This guy, Beckham, has a size ten boot, but so do a lot of guys. We haven’t found any guns with a ballistics match in their possession. We brought this guy, Didion, in on gun charges; found a cache of illegal weapons—not the ones stolen from Chad’s locker. None of which were used in the commission of the Drake murders. Didion will go back to jail anyway. This other one looks like he’s been trying to go straight, has a job at the gas station. Hasn’t been in any trouble”

More silence.

“So what are you saying, Boz?” said Paul. What was it? Was it menace? Anger? There was something sizzling between them. What?

“Hey, I’m not saying anything,” said Boz gently. “I got to look at everything, for my notes, every single angle. You know that. This is a cop killing. All eyes are on me.”

There was a hard thump on the kitchen table. I couldn’t see what.

“They’re going to get away with it, aren’t they?” said Paul. His voice didn’t even sound like his; it was small now and tight with anger. “The men who did this to Chad and Heather, to Zoey. They’re out there.”

“I swear to you, Paul, and to Zoey,” Boz said, “I’ll never rest until we find who did this.”

Paul made some kind of strangled noise. It took me a second to realize that he was crying.

? ? ?

BOZ WAS ALMOST AN OLD man now, but he never got the memo. Retirement had agreed with him. He’d grown leaner, had lost the purple gullies under his eyes. We’d stayed in touch over the years, so I knew he’d married late to a much younger woman, drove a white Corvette that he pampered like a baby, took up golf. He still lived in the town where I grew up. I brought my theories to him. He called me sometimes when the odd thought occurred to him.

The lights were burning inside his tidy Victorian when I pulled up in the old truck that Paul kept in a garage uptown.

I walked up the flower-lined path and knocked at the door, heard the television go off inside. In spite of the hour, he didn’t seem that surprised to see me when he opened the door.

“Zoey,” he said. He wore a tattered old John Jay College sweatshirt. They all went there, Boz, Paul, my dad, even Mike. “Come in.”

He held the door open for me, and I walked into the foyer.

There was a mirror there and before I could look away, I caught sight of myself, someone narrow with shoulders hiked high, pale with dark circles under her eyes, hair pulled back tight. Jeans, black hoodie. Not someone who belonged in this carefully decorated home of older people. An interloper, an unwelcome guest. What’s with the getup? that doorman had asked.

“Mike called you,” I guessed.

“Said Paul’s in a bad way, that you might be stopping by.”

“I want to go over it again.”

Even though the people who killed my parents were never caught, Boz has never stopped working the case, even after he retired. He has an office toward the back of the house, where he still pores over cold cases. Lately, he’s closed a couple. The new DNA technology and evolving federal and state requirements that mandate DNA samples be taken from anyone arrested have led to new evidence on cases that might have forever remained unsolved.

“Where’s Miranda?” I asked. Funny name for a cop’s wife.

“She’s visiting her sister,” he said, motioning that I follow him into the kitchen. He put on the kettle, pulled out a chair for me. I sat at the table, looked around—lots of flowers and ducks, pictures of kids on the refrigerator, a standing mixer, a rack of copper pots. Homey.

“John Didion is dead,” he said, leaning against the counter.

“I heard that, too.”

“They say it was a hunting knife,” he said, putting tea bags in a white porcelain pot. “Through the heart.”

“Oh?”

I flashed on it again, that moment where I came in close, one step, one thrust. My strength, his weakness. A pop. A sigh. He let go of life, as if it were a burden he was glad to unload. His eyes went blank; he almost smiled. Or maybe that’s what I tell myself. I felt nothing. But there’s something that came after, a kind of howl in the back of my brain. I’ve dreamt about it twice, waking to hope it never happened. But it did.

“All we have are theories, you know,” said Boz.

“We have more than that,” I said. “I was there.”

No one was ever arrested for the murder of my parents. The money those men were looking for was never recovered. A few months into the investigation, a cloud of suspicion fell over my father. According to Boz, there was a months-long sideline inquiry being conducted by Internal Affairs into the idea that a group of cops had robbed a local drug dealer, and that the men who killed my father and mother were looking for that money. That investigation, too, died on the vine. There was no evidence tying my father to the robbery.

“There’s word that Rhett Beckham is back in town,” said Boz. The kettle whistled, and he poured the not-quite-boiling water into the pot. It was slow and careful; he liked the ritual. I could tell.