Joe barely smiled. “Don’t I wish.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Sammie stopped what she was doing in the kitchen, hearing Emma squealing happily in the front room. She moved quietly down the hallway to watch Willy from the doorway. He was lying on his back, holding the tiny child overhead, cupped in his right hand-her chubby arms and legs thrashing like a turtle’s seeking traction. He was lowering her as he might an exercise weight, until they were touching nose to nose, and then catapulting her back up into the air, to her repeated delight.
Willy, his self-preservative instincts never at rest, addressed Sammie without looking at her, despite the fact that she’d not made a noise. “You laying bets she’s gonna throw up on me?”
Sammie laughed. “God, I hope not.” She entered the room and settled into a rocking chair as Willy continued his play. For her part, she hadn’t even heard him enter the house. Only Emma’s giggles had informed her. But that was nothing unusual. She was living with a ghost in some ways-a man so bolted down and private, half the time he seemed to wish he’d been born invisible.
He wasn’t entirely alone there. She’d known that feeling when she was younger, coming from a home with no love, functioning in a male-dominated profession, and having an attraction for losers when it came to past companionship. She’d had times when even her own company seemed too much to bear.
No longer, though. Of that, she was increasingly sure. Willy may have been everyone’s favorite choice for relational disaster of the year, but he’d proved her faith in him to be sound and justified. And Emma was Exhibit A.
Emma’s responses began to wane, so her father settled her onto his chest, where she happily lay drooling onto his shirt and playing with his chin.
“Just got back from the land of the one-string banjo players,” Willy announced.
“Interviewing more Rozanskis?” she asked.
“A couple,” he agreed. “I met two others, too, but I can’t say I interviewed ’em. They are a tight-lipped bunch.”
“You find out anything new?”
“Hardly. Confirmed that Bud and Dreama had three kids, Nate, Herb, and Eileen, and that Nate hasn’t been heard from in forever … and, of course, they all thought Herb was six feet under.”
“Where’s Eileen?”
From his position on the floor, his face appeared upside down to her, making his smile appear all the more clownish. “Ah!” he said. “Great minds think alike. Yeah, I’m guessing she’s my next stop. Not much to be gained messing around with the people she dumped-probably because of their crummy conversational skills. Stamford,” he added. “To answer your question.” He frowned. “Almost in Massachusetts and as isolated as what she left.”
Sam rose from the rocker and stretched out on the floor beside them, so that their three heads were less than a foot apart. Emma gurgled happily with her mother’s arrival.
“How ’bout you?” Willy asked, touching her hair with his fingertips. “What’ve you been up to?”
Her eyes widened slightly in alarm at that. “What time is it?”
He told her without checking his watch-another trick he’d perfected over the years.
“We have a staff meeting with Joe in thirty minutes,” she said, immediately interpreting his reaction. “And I asked if Emma could come along. No sweat.”
Willy smiled and addressed his daughter. “Hey, Junior G-girl. Wanna take a meeting with the big cheese?”
* * *
Joe smiled broadly as Sam, Willy, and Emma entered the office. Every time he saw them, this unlikeliest of families gave him pleasure, both because of how much he liked and admired the individuals within it, and because of how it contrasted with the domestic car crashes he and other cops witnessed every day.
“Hi, there,” he greeted them. “Sorry for the short notice, but happy it forced you to bring in the young inheritor.” He walked up to them and stuck his face into Emma’s, as most adults do, as if babies were the shortsighted geriatrics some of them resembled.
“How are you, sweetheart?” he asked in a near whisper.
Emma reached out and swiped at his nose, her expression serious with intent.
Despite his propensity for delivering acerbic one-liners, especially at sentimental moments, Willy merely looked on benignly.
Joe broke away so they could settle in, and resumed his greeting. “Anyhow, Lester’s wife was asking for photos of him, to remember what he looked like, so we came back for a quick visit. I thought it might be good to throw in a meeting, as well, to see where we all stood.”
“That’s why we have phones and e-mail, boss,” Willy told him.
Joe ignored him. “You getting anywhere on Rozanski?” he asked instead.
“Slowly,” Willy said. “It’s basically a double missing persons case, involving Herb and his brother, Nate. Next stop is to interview the sister in Stamford. How you doin’ with Barber?”
“About the same,” Joe admitted. “Only, when we went to interview Carolyn’s sister, she had Alzheimer’s and couldn’t talk to us. Her son didn’t have much, either, but at least he gave us an album with a newspaper clipping showing Carolyn with the same politician named Gorden Marshall that Sam discovered had died overnight.”
There was silence in the room for the couple of seconds that it took Willy to grasp that this was beyond a simple catch-up meeting. “Killed?” he asked, realizing he’d never gotten an answer from Sammie about what she’d been doing.
“They’re claiming natural causes,” Joe explained. “But we’ve sent him up for an autopsy with the local SA’s help.”
“I found out a little about Carolyn,” Sam volunteered. “According to what I could locate, she worked for the legislative counsel in the statehouse, I guess typing up bills. Wasn’t married, no kids, didn’t own a house, made probably five grand a year. There’s a ton that’s not on computers from back then, so that’s a disadvantage.”
Her expression showed how badly she felt that she couldn’t rattle off a detailed and revealing biography on command. Sammie openly regarded Joe as a quasi-father figure, since their history stretched back to when she was on patrol and he headed the detective squad downstairs. To have so little to report made her feel like a failure.
But Joe simply shrugged. “Just a twenty-something office girl,” he said. “Socially invisible. God only knows what kind of shark pool that was back then.”
Lester feigned surprise. “Really? In little old Vermont?”
Joe smiled at him. “Ancient history now, but the legislators and their hangers-on used to drink like fish and act like sailors on leave. If you were a girl and valued your job, you either joined them or got out of town after hours.”
“That what you think was behind the ‘Governor-for-a-Day’?” asked Sammie.
“I have nothing to go on,” Joe conceded. “I’m just saying that the culture was different and that young women like Carolyn Barber were advised to watch their backs.”
“‘Governor-for-a-Day’ seems to have been a flash in the pan,” Lester added. “You think that was because it was just a cover-up for a little hanky-panky?”
“Maybe,” Joe agreed. “The Republicans were on the verge of losing power. The plan was probably a way to make them look friendlier to the electorate. I think that was the rumor. But there’s no saying that something darker wasn’t also at work.”
“Does that make Marshall the guy who was doin’ her?” Willy asked. “Pretty convenient that he died now-if it was of natural causes.”
“Yeah,” Sammie chimed in. “And not so convenient if someone headed us off at the pass.”
“That scenario would mean,” Lester suggested, “that Marshall was not the guy doin’ her, but maybe the guy who knew that guy.”
“Eloquent,” Willy sneered.
“Duh…,” Lester responded.
Joe cut them off. “Which means we better put Marshall under the proverbial magnifying lens, starting with the contents of his apartment, which we left under guard and seal, thanks to the converted Sergeant Carrier. Carolyn may have been invisible, but Marshall sure as hell made a wake in those days. Pro tem in the senate, head of several key committees. We ought to be able to find someone willing and able to rat him out.”