Page 106 of The Instruments of Darkness

“By the way, did you attend the burials of your wife and child?”

Sometimes, when you take a punch, you have to make it seem as though it doesn’t hurt. It can be hard, almost as hard as not throwing one in return.

“What do you think?” I replied.

“My wife and I don’t have children. We’re considering adopting. I asked because I can’t conceive of what you went through.”

“That’s not why you asked.”

“You’re right.”

Any semblance of bonhomie departed as Nowak steepled his fingers against his lips, like a man in prayer.

“In my experience,” he said, “which is wide, any crime against a cop’s family causes the ranks to close tight. Police look after their own. It’s a rule, but even rules need exceptions to prove them, and it turns out that you’re one. Oh, they stepped up for you, your colleagues, because they couldn’t do otherwise, but there was a marked slowness. You were not liked, even if none of them could have said why. It was as though you bore a mark only they could see, however faintly, or carried a contagion only they could detect, and they communicated the fact of it chemically to one another, like ants in a nest. What is that mark, Mr. Parker? What is the contagion? I doubt you even know yourself.”

I set aside my wine and prepared to leave. I didn’t want to drink any more, not in this company.

“I’ll relay your message to Moxie,” I said.

“Be sure you do. It’s the best deal he’ll be offered in his career—the best that you’ll be offered too, because if we don’t come up with a satisfactory conclusion to all this, there’ll be fallout, and I’ll be forced to examine why I don’t like you. That conversation at the AG bar I mentioned earlier? Some of those present felt that it was time to fight the squeeze where you’re concerned. Soon you’ll overstep the mark again, and your rabbis, whoever they are, won’t be able to save you. When that boat finally rocks, I won’t be on board. I’ll be watching from a deck chair on the shore, sipping a mint julep while you drown.”

It was obvious we were done. I stood. Nowak had soiled his side of the table with cherry juice and chocolate. The mess was making me nauseated.

“And there I was, thinking you were going to offer me a job on your security detail when you become governor.”

“If I’m ever in that much danger,” said Nowak, “I’ll kill myself.”

“I doubt that will be necessary,” I said. “I’m sure you’ll have no trouble finding someone to do it for you.”

CHAPTER LXVII

Passing on to Moxie the details of the conversation with Nowak could wait until morning; Moxie wasn’t going to take the bait anyway. Had Colleen Clark been a no-hope client, he might have advocated accepting the plea deal, although even then he would have proceeded cautiously. Nowak might have been promising an EPRD, but Moxie wouldn’t receive a signed agreement to that effect, and no one on the state’s side would be under any obligation to keep their side of the bargain. In addition, it would involve Colleen pleading guilty to a crime that neither Moxie nor I believed she had committed, and promising to deliver a body she couldn’t produce, which meant Nowak’s offer was a nonstarter. Nonetheless, Moxie might feel obliged to share the substance of it with Colleen: cop a plea, claim traumatic loss of memory regarding the whereabouts of the body, engage with psychiatric support while in prison, and by the time she got out, someone else would be the focus of the mob’s ire.

And Colleen might have considered accepting. Apart from the occasional moment of spiritedness, like the one displayed earlier in my kitchen, she was resigned to the machinery of the system mincing her up. It wasn’t unusual. It wasn’t even surprising. Her child was missing, she was estranged from her husband, and mired in a grief from which she could not even begin to free herself, however marginally, until Henry’s fate was established. Because of all this, there was a real risk that, if presented with the prosecution’s deal, she could be tempted to take it. She might even view the sentence as punishment for her perceived failure to protect her son. I’d seen stranger things happen in the course of criminal cases, and logic didn’t enter into proceedings when someone was in Colleen’s kind of pain. But should she show signs of wavering, her son’s fate remained the best card we could play. If she accepted the deal, any ongoing police investigation into Henry’s whereabouts would end, and she might never discover what had befallen him.

I checked my messages. Macy was at the Bar of Chocolate, a dessert-and-wine place in the Old Port that had never, to my knowledge, been troubled by police custom. When I got there, she was seated at a table away from the small bar, an old fashioned already in front of her, along with a slice of chocolate torte big and rich enough to make Nowak’s Bête Noire look abstemious by contrast. I hadn’t finished my glass of wine at the Grill—though I made sure it was added to Nowak’s bill—so I didn’t feel bad about ordering another. I joined Macy at the table, kissed her gently, thought about kissing her harder, felt her think about it too, and then put some distance between us before someone told us to get a room.

“So,” she said, once we’d recovered ourselves, “what did Nowak want from you?”

“He wanted to talk about Colleen Clark.”

Macy drank some of her old fashioned. As I said, we were trying to be careful about how we mixed the personal and the professional, but sometimes, as now, it was unavoidable.

“Did you want to talk about her—and do you?”

“Nowak didn’t give me much choice, and I thought I should hear what he had to say. As for you: Yes, I want to talk about her. I may even need to.”

“Go on. Nowak first.”

“He was spreading chum on the water, but with no expectation of catching anything, because he’s still sharpening the hook. He asked me to test Moxie for a plea deal, see if he’s open to discussions.”

“What kind of deal?”

“Moxie produces a range of expert witnesses on postpartum depression, Colleen pleads guilty to manslaughter, and Nowak talks to the judge,” I said. “Colleen serves a year plus, as long as she promises to act contrite after release. Whatever she might have done with her son’s body gets kicked down the road as being too traumatic for her to face right now.”

“That’s not a bad package.”

“Only if she harmed her child. That’s what I tried to explain to Nowak, but he has one eye on a new color scheme for the governor’s office.”

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