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  For Maura

  Brother, I come o’er many seas and lands

  To the sad rite which pious love ordains,

  To pay thee the last gift that death demands;

  And oft, though vain, invoke thy mute remains:

  Since death has ravish’d half myself in thee,

  Oh wretched brother, sadly torn from me!

  And now ere fate our souls shall re-unite,

  To give me back all it hath snatch’d away,

  Receive the gifts, our fathers’ ancient rite

  To shades departed still was wont to pay;

  Gifts wet with tears of heartfelt grief that tell,

  And ever, brother, bless thee, and farewell!

  —Catullus, translated by George Lamb

  The cold was different here.

  It got inside you, the raw knife edge of it slipping beneath your clothes at your collar and your cuffs, taking your breath and setting your nerves to alarm. The skin on his face and neck stung; his hands and feet were going about the business of going numb, but until they did, they were going to do their best to warn him.

  He turned his face away from the wind coming off the water, rubbed his upper arms and hopped in place to try to generate a little body heat. If she didn’t appear soon, he’d have to go back and wait in the car; otherwise he was going to get frostbite. For the third time, he pulled up the sleeve of his blazer and checked his watch. He’d been waiting thirty minutes now. He’d give it another ten and then he’d have to assume she was standing him up.

  Cursing, he jogged from one end of the narrow little strip of sand and rocks to the other, then stopped to watch the streetlights from the marina play on the surface of the water. Behind him, the masts and hulls of sailboats wrapped in white plastic for the winter rose like mountains. Ahead of him, the expanse of the Great South Bay lapped the rocks. Beyond it were the barrier beaches. Yesterday, he’d driven over the two long bridges to the west to stand on the sand at the edge of the Atlantic and listen to the roar and rush of the waves coming in. He’d felt a moment of awe, as he always did standing at the edge of the sea. He had grown up deep inside his own country, near lakes and rivers and water that played at the shore, rather than raged at it. The sea represented freedom to him, joyous movement, a bridge between places, something that couldn’t be contained. The countries where he’d worked, so many of them already in his life, were mostly dry and barren places, deserts, plains, or humid jungles, far from the ocean. When he got home, he always went for a walk by the sea first thing, to remind himself that he was free.

  Where was she? He hopped around some more.

  Suddenly, it seemed obvious she wasn’t coming. The disappointment felt like a blow. He wanted this, wanted to see her, wanted to tell the story, wanted it over with so he could be free of it. He searched for an out. Maybe there’d been some sort of delay—traffic, a late train. Ten more minutes. He could wait that long.

  Jesus, the cold. It reminded him of the cold in the blue house, the way it came through the concrete and seeped through your skin and into your bones, the way you could never get on top of it. He had always thought of warmth as an intangible, a state of being, but he had learned the truth: that it was something that could be taken away, then given back; something that could be handed to you, like a blanket.

  Or a story.

  He hadn’t understood, before the blue house, that a story could be a gift, too. When you told someone your story, you were sharing a piece of yourself. That was why there was also a cost to telling your story. Once it had been heard, it couldn’t be unheard. You took on the burden of the story when you heard it. He knew what he was asking of her, to listen to his story, to have to take it in and reckon with what it meant.

  He turned back toward the parking lot, the water at his back, and felt the shimmer of awareness he had become used to over the years, the animal sense that someone was there and meant him harm.

  No face appeared, but he was sent back to the blue house, to the cold and the darkness and the voices coming through it, those gifts of the inner thoughts and histories of other human beings. He had told his story. They had all told their stories, made offerings of them. He had wanted to tell this story, but when he heard the voice, saying his name, he knew he never would.

  Of course. Of course death would look like this. It made perfect sense, as logical as the conclusion of a well-told tale. Of course this was it.

  The end.

  And it was then that the bullet found him, so quickly that when he died, he was still thinking of stories, and endings, and of the sea, the sound of it, how it filled your head so you couldn’t think of any other thing.

  1

  FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 17, 2017

  Marty is waiting for me in the parking lot. I know he’s nervous because he can’t keep his hands off the buttons of his coat and from across the parking lot I can see that his forehead is creased with worry. He’s wearing one of his beige suits that looks like it time-traveled from 1972, and he’s even got a tie on, brown, with rust-colored flowers, ugly as sin.

  Martin Cascic is the commander of the Suffolk County Homicide Squad, and my boss. He’s also my friend and I feel a little guilty prick of conscience that he has to take this meeting because of me. I’ve brought him a danish to make up for it. “Here you go,” I say handing it over. “It’s pineapple.”

  He nods. Pineapple danish from a deli on New York Avenue is his favorite, for some reason I can’t even begin to fathom, and he takes a giant greedy bite of it, knocks a few crumbs off his chin, then opens his car door and puts the rest of the pastry on the dash. “Ready?” he asks me.

  “As I’ll ever be.” We look up at the front of the county building. The district attorney’s office is in the Suffolk County office building complex in Hauppauge. The building looks like a concrete egg carton; it’s hard to believe anyone ever thought people would want to work in a building like that.

  We do the ID-and-metal-detector routine, check our service weapons, and head to the second floor. District Attorney John J. “Jay” Cooney Jr. steps out to greet us, a big smile on his face. He’s an objectively nice-looking man, no way around it, with a squared-off head; full, thick hair that’s still mostly light brown though he’s past fifty now; a narrow, aristocratic nose; and eyes a startling shade of blue. If his mouth were a different shape, he’d look like a Kennedy, and he’s got a little of that charisma. There’s something robust yet elegant about him; his suits fit perfectly, his shoes are perpetually shiny, and he always looks like he’s just had a fresh shave. I once saw him running an electric razor over his face in the back of a car just before a press conference. I’ve never been inside his house, but I suspect the décor involves a lot of whales. He’s a Republican, but a moderate one, and before this past November, he usually got a lot of Democrats to vote for him, too. It’s dicier now. But the fact that his father, John J. Cooney Sr., known as Jack, wa
s a longtime Suffolk County judge and then DA before him doesn’t hurt; voting Cooney for DA is a habit around here.

  “Please sit down,” Cooney says. “Do you want coffee?”

  Marty does, but he shakes his head. I shake my head, too, because I’ve had the coffee here before and know it’s bad. Cooney even once told me he knows it’s bad, which made me like him a tiny bit more than I did before, which still wasn’t much.

  He doesn’t say anything else, so Marty gets us going. “Jay, thanks for agreeing to meet with us. As you know, Maggie has some questions about your decision not to charge Frank Lombardi. Maggie, do you want to explain the new information you have?”

  I’ve been practicing all morning. I know I need to keep my voice even, my emotions in check. But the office is too warm, the old furnace chugging away in the basement of the building.

  I fix my gaze on the family photo behind Cooney’s desk to try to keep myself calm. It shows Cooney and his wife with their three children, two teenage girls and a boy of about ten, all wearing matching white outfits on a beach somewhere. Right in the middle are an older couple, also wearing white. I focus on the black Lab sitting in front of them, its tongue lolling. The frame around the picture is polished sterling silver, simple, masculine. Cooney’s office is drab, painted beige, standard-issue desk and chair from the ’90s, and the frame and the picture clash with their surroundings. Jay Cooney’s not your average civil servant, I think they’re meant to convey.

  “I know the statute of limitations on the rape charge is up,” I say. “But I’ve been thinking about something. I think we might have a good case against Frank for impeding a criminal investigation. Even though the case was being investigated in Ireland, there was an initial report made by my uncle to the Suffolk County P.D. and later to the FBI. The Garda told him to do it. Now, that case was never closed and so any actions by Frank over the past twenty years would be within the scope of what we could charge.” I hand him a folder filled with typed notes. “I had a conversation with someone who is willing to testify that Frank asked someone who had been at the party to keep quiet about it as recently as five years ago, and I can—”

  Cooney’s been sitting on his desk, leaning back and pretending to listen, but now he stands and says, “Maggie, let me just stop you there. I know this has been a hard time for your family, and I know you want to see justice, but we made the decision not to pursue any charges against your ex-brother-in-law here and I don’t want to waste your time. It’s not here. The evidence, the legal basis, none of it.” He waves the folder in the air. “Too much time has passed, and pursuing something so … uncertain takes resources away from the cases we can win.”

  I try to keep my voice upbeat, collaborative, as they say. “But if you’ll just read what I have. I talked to one of Erin’s classmates, who was at the—”

  He smiles sadly. “Maggie. Please. We have limited resources, limited manpower. We need to focus it on more recent crimes. The MS13 threat is growing in Suffolk County. You know that better than anyone. And there are bad people out there, people who are committing crimes now. Let’s work together to direct our resources toward getting those people.”

  Marty clears his throat next to me.

  “You don’t think people are in danger?” I ask Cooney. “You have no idea whether Frank Lombardi is a danger to anyone right now or not. He’s a sociopath, Jay. I found diaries in my basement, in Brian’s things. Frank was awful to him when they were kids. He was controlling and abusive. And what’s the message to the women of Suffolk County here? Are we telling them we couldn’t give two shits about them, about what happens to them?”

  Marty puts a hand on my arm and says in a low voice, “Maggie.”

  But Cooney rises to the bait. His face is red now, his upper lip curling in anger. If I’m honest, I get a thrill of satisfaction when I see how rattled he is, when he gathers up all of his six feet one inch and looms over me, trying to scare me, trying to make me shut up.

  “Maggie, we don’t have a legal basis to charge. We just don’t. There’s not enough here and it’s been too long to go out on a limb on this. And your connection to the case—you know this, I don’t need to tell you—it taints everything. It just does. I told Marty this. I don’t know why—” He looks at Marty, whose discomfort radiates from him like a fever.

  “You have everything you need,” I say. “You know you do. I saw Marty’s wrap-up. The interview with Devin O’Brien. It was corroborating. It was!” Marty’s grip on my arm is firmer now, telling me stop.

  Cooney says, “It was twenty-seven years ago! I’m not going to risk the good reputation of this office in order to satisfy some personal grudge. I know this has been an incredibly difficult time for your family, but I’m done. I’m done talking about this. Marty, take care of it.”

  The air in the room feels thick and hot, crackling with tension.

  Marty looks right at Cooney and says, “She’s not a child to be managed, Jay. She’s a lieutenant on the homicide squad and she has every right to lodge a complaint about a case. But I think she’s done that, so we’ll be going now. Thank you for your time. We appreciate you being willing to hear us out.”

  The us makes my throat seize up. Marty didn’t want to do this. I had to convince him to ask for the meeting. He must have known it was going to go like this. But he did it for me.

  “Okay. Goodbye.” Cooney’s hands are in fists at his sides, and as we leave the room, I can feel him waiting to release all his anger. Something’s going to get knocked over or thrown once we’re out.

  Marty’s silent all the way back through security and out to the cars. I try to break the awful quiet by saying, “That went well.”

  Marty looks at me, doesn’t smile. He’s sixty-two, wiry and compact. He looks more like a high school wrestling coach than a cop. He’s a small guy, only five feet seven or so, with a gray buzz cut and a slightly elfin face that’s usually set in a judgmental frown. But he and I are close now, and I get to see his truly face-transforming smile more than a lot of the other detectives on the squad. He was right there with me after my ex-husband Brian’s suicide. And Marty was the first person I told about Brian’s brother Frank and his friends raping my cousin Erin when she was in high school and about what actually happened all those years ago in Ireland.

  Marty took statements from my ex-brother-in-law, Frank, from Frank’s friends. He gathered all the evidence to present to Cooney’s office, even though he must have known they weren’t going to do anything with it. Marty sat in my living room with me and my daughter, Lilly, for hours in the days afterward, as the whole thing unspooled here and over in Ireland. I shiver, remembering.

  But his smile isn’t there right now.

  “Listen, Mags. I’ve got something to tell you,” he says. He’s worried, chewing at his lip as he fiddles with his key fob.

  “You firing me?”

  The edges of his mouth turn up, just a little. “Nah, not today. No, it’s about, uh, Anthony Pugh.”

  Adrenaline surges through my veins. My vision goes starry. Anthony Pugh is a suspect in the killing of at least four women on Long Island’s South Shore between 2011 and 2014. Three years ago, I tracked him down, and we arrested him as he was driving toward the beach with a woman named Andrea Delaurio in the back of his car. He’d been assaulting her for days. I believed with every fiber of my being that he was taking her to the beach to kill her. So did she. We saved her life, but, tormented by what Pugh had done to her, she killed herself before we could charge him. We weren’t able to get him on the murders, for lack of evidence, and he only served a year in prison on related charges. He lives in Northport now, about ten miles from my house.

  “What?”

  “The guys from the Second Precinct who we have checking in on him once in a while called me up just as I was leaving. A couple times, last month or so, they followed him into Alexandria. Seemed like he was just cruising, you know, maybe nothing to it. Then, last Thursday, he drove by your house.
” He reaches up to scratch his forehead. He’s nervous.

  “What the fuck? Why didn’t they tell me?”

  “They weren’t sure he meant to drive by. He didn’t stop, didn’t look at your house.” He pushes the unlock button. We both hear the beep. But he waits. There’s something else. He doesn’t want to say it. “This morning, five a.m., he did it again. Except this time he slowed and looked up at your house, sat there ten or fifteen seconds, then drove away.”

  I look out across the parking lot, toward Veterans Memorial Highway. It’s one of those February days where you might be fooled into thinking spring is on its way. The sun is down low in the sky, shining up a scrubby, empty field across the way. “What should I do?” I ask Marty.

  “You don’t have to do anything. We can have someone on the house, if you want. We’ll definitely keep an eye on him. You’ll know if he’s coming your way, if he’s anywhere near the high school. You and Lilly are heading over to Ireland soon for vacation, right?”

  “Sunday. But, what the fuck, Marty?” An image of Anthony Pugh’s face when I arrested him flashes into my head. Pale gray eyes, grayish-blond hair; the kind of guy you’d never notice, the kind of guy who looks completely harmless. Even then, when I had him down on the pavement on a shoulder of the LIE, my handcuffs around his wrists, he looked so innocent, so normal, like the battered, drugged-up woman in the back of his car was there by accident. He should be in jail. I shouldn’t have to think about him at all.

  Marty opens the passenger door for me. “I know. You going on vacation is good, buys us some time. We can try to figure out if he has anything up his sleeve.”

  “Okay,” I say, but I’m still agitated, angry at Cooney.

  Marty knows it. “You did your best,” he says. “We need to let it go. Let’s get back.”

  I nod, get into my car, tell him I’ll see him back at headquarters. I have a ton of paperwork to do today and then I have to go get Lilly from school. I’m exhausted from working and managing her grief over her father’s death. The sun goes behind a cloud and once more, it looks like what it really is: a dreary mid-February day, with many more dreary winter days to come. I crank the heater, not sure if I’m cold because of the chill or the idea of Anthony Pugh, out there waiting for something, waiting for me.