Along Came a Spider - James Patterson [29]
“See what?” Sampson asked the FBI special agent. “You going to tell us what the hell is going on? Let’s cut down on the verbal diarrhea.”
Scorse signaled to one of the FBI agents, and spoke to him briefly. His name was McGoey, and he was from the director’s office in D.C. He’d been in and out of the Dunne house. We all thought that he was the replacement for Roger Graham, but that was never verified.
McGoey nodded at whatever Scorse had told him, then stepped forward. He was a solemn-looking fat man with big teeth and a short white crewcut. He looked like an old military man who was close to retirement.
“The local police out here found a child floating in the river around one o’clock today,” McGoey announced. “They have no way of knowing if it’s one of the two kidnapped children or not.”
Agent McGoey then walked all of us about seventy yards farther down the muddy riverbank. We stopped past a hump covered with moss and cattails. There wasn’t a sound from anyone, just the bitter wind whistling over the water.
We finally knew why we had been brought here. A small body had been covered over with gray wool blankets from one of the EMS wagons. It was the tiniest, loneliest bundle in the universe.
One of the local policemen was asked to give us the necessary details. When he began to speak, his voice was thick and unsteady.
“I’m Lieutenant Edward Mahoney. I’m with the force here in Salisbury. About an hour and twenty minutes ago, a security guard with Raser/Becton discovered the body of a child down here.”
We walked closer to the spread of blankets. The body was laid on a mound of grass that sloped into the brackish water. Beyond the grass, and to the left, was a black-looking tamarack swamp.
Lieutenant Mahoney knelt down beside the tiny body. His gray uniformed knee sank into the wet mud. Flecks of snow floated around his face, sticking to his hair and cheeks.
Almost reverently, he pulled back the wool blankets. It seemed as if he were a father, gently waking a child for some early-morning fishing trip.
Just a few hours ago, I had been looking at a photo of the two kidnapped children. I was the first to speak over the murdered child’s body.
“It’s Michael Goldberg,” I said in a soft but clear voice. “I’m sorry to say that it’s Michael. It’s poor little Shrimpie.”
CHAPTER 18
JEZZIE FLANAGAN didn’t get home until early Christmas morning. Her head was spinning, bursting with too many ideas about the kidnapping.
She had to stop the obsessive images for a while. She had to shut down her engines, or the plant would explode. She had to stop being a cop. The difference between her and some other cops, she knew, was that she could stop.
Jezzie was living in Arlington with her mother. They shared a small, cramped condo apartment near the Crystal City Underground. Jezzie thought of it as the “suicide flat.” The living arrangement was supposed to be temporary, except that she had been there close to a year now, ever since her divorce from Dennis Kelleher.
Dennis the Menace was up in northern Jersey these days, still trying to make it to the New York Times. He was never going to accomplish that feat, Jezzie knew in her heart. The only thing Dennis had ever been good at was trying to make Jezzie doubt herself. Dennis had been a real standout in that department. But in the end, she wouldn’t let him beat her down.
She had been working too hard at the Service to find time to move out of her mother’s condo. At least that was what she kept telling herself. There’d been no time to have a life. She was saving up—for something big, some kind of significant life change. She’d been calculating her net worth at least a couple of times a week, every week. She had all of twenty-four thousand dollars. That was everything. She was thirty-two now. She knew she was good-looking, almost beautiful—the way Dennis Kelleher was almost a good writer.
Jezzie could have been a contender, she often thought to herself. She almost had it made. All she needed was one decent break, and she’d finally realized she had to make that break for herself.