Point Of Departure

“How the hell do you propose I do that? Call Abrams up and tell her I forgot one tiny detail? That’ll go over big.”

“Abrams won’t be happy no matter how she hears it. But if she has to find out from someone else, it’ll make you look as if you’re trying to hide something. And they’ll waste precious time trying to prove that you had something to do with Kaye’s disappearance. Time they could spend on finding out what really happened. We don’t know who this dead man is. Or where Kaye is. If somebody’s taken her…” Mia paused, her own words sounding implausible “…there might not be much time.”

Gracie Lee Winslow was fat.

Kaye kept telling her it was all in her head, but Gracie knew the truth. She saw it every time she looked in the mirror. She was chunky. Hideous. In response to this catastrophe, Gracie had tried every diet under creation: Atkins, South Beach, low-fat, low-carb, grapefruit, watermelon, vegetarian and plain old starvation. She’d even tried that crazy Bible diet, the one where you only ate foods that were mentioned in the Bible. She’d joined an online chapter of Weight Watchers, had bought a totally gay workout video and exercised until she grew so weak she nearly passed out. She’d even given laxatives a try. But nothing she’d attempted had managed to change the reflection gazing back at her from the mirror. All she could see were her chipmunk cheeks, her pudgy belly that curved out instead of in, and the thunder thighs that rubbed together when she walked. Gracie hated her oversize nose, hated her frizzy hair, hated her snooty private school with its cliques of skinny girls with their perfect hair and their perfect faces and their perfect bodies and their perfect lives. She hated that her mom was dead, hated that her dad barely noticed she was alive. Hated everything about her wretched life.

Most of all, she hated her stepmother.

If Kaye had been a nicer person, Gracie might have been willing to tolerate her. But there was something about the woman that set her teeth on edge. Not that she didn’t understand why her dad had married Kaye. Like those perfect girls at school, her stepmother was drop-dead gorgeous. The woman exuded sex like a cloud of perfume. Pheromones. What man could resist? Even though it was beyond gross to imagine her dad having sex with Kaye, Gracie understood that he was a man, and men were all alike. They all wanted the same thing, and any woman who looked like Kaye Winslow would always have men groveling at her feet.

It made Gracie want to hurl.

For the last two years and seven months, her stepmother had been destroying her life. Like Casper the Friendly Ghost, Kaye tiptoed around the house, silently following Gracie from room to room, spying on her. Watching. Listening. Judging. Kaye had snooped in her bedroom while she was at school; she’d pawed through Gracie’s backpack, looking for God only knew what. She’d even gone through the call list on Gracie’s cell phone to find out who she’d been talking to. The bitch undoubtedly would have read all her e-mails, too, if Gracie hadn’t password protected her computer.

It was infuriating. At fifteen, she was entitled to her privacy. But Kaye was determined to know every move her stepdaughter made. Determined to turn over every rock and uncover every last one of Gracie’s secrets.

But if Kaye thought she held the upper hand, she had another thing coming, because Gracie wasn’t the only one with secrets. Her darling stepmother had more than her share, and the secrets Kaye held would blow her marriage right out of the water if Dad ever found out about them. Thanks to the floor register in her bedroom, Gracie had a front-row seat to everything that went on downstairs. All she had to do was roll back the Oriental carpet and lie on the floor, and she could see and hear everything through that register. Kaye was so damn stupid she didn’t even notice. Which meant that Gracie had accumulated a lot of dirt on her stepmother. A lot of dirt.

None of which meant diddly-squat compared to what she’d just heard. This was some serious shit.

When the cops had first come to the door, she’d freaked, afraid they were here about her. Afraid they knew what she’d done. But that hadn’t been it at all. Something had happened today, something bad. Kaye was missing, and a man was dead. There was talk of a gun. Murder. And Gracie had the sick feeling that she might have been the one to set all this in motion.

He was only supposed to follow Kaye. Find out where she went, who she saw, what she did when she was away from the house. Gracie’s directions to him had been very clear: Be discreet. Whatever you do, don’t let her know you’re following her.

Something had gone horribly wrong. Dad was downstairs right now, pacing the floor and drinking Glenlivet straight from the bottle. That wasn’t a good sign; Dad wasn’t much of a drinker, and that stuff tasted like crap. She knew how awful it was because she’d been taking the occasional nip since she was thirteen, since the day Dad first brought Kaye to the house and he’d looked at the woman that way. Like she was some piece of meat on a stick. That was the night Gracie’s life had started its downhill slide. It was also the first time she’d ever gotten shit-faced drunk. She’d woken up the next day with the mother of all hangovers, but at least she’d remembered to refill the bottle with water so nobody would notice how low the level of the liquid inside had dropped.

She flipped the carpet back over the floor register, went to her desk and logged on to her laptop. Please let him be online, she thought as she signed into AIM. Please, please, PLEASE let him be online. She typed in his screen name, then checked his availability.

AIM told her: Magnum357 is not currently signed on.

Gracie let out a hard breath as dread bottled up inside her chest. She swallowed a couple of times, just to make sure her throat still worked. She didn’t know any other way to reach him. They’d only started hanging out together a couple of months ago. She didn’t know where he lived, didn’t have his cell phone number. All she knew was his screen name—Magnum357—and his real name—Carlos—which, for all she knew, might not even be the real deal.

This was bad. This was really bad. If Dad found out she’d been seeing Carlos, who was definitely on the wrong side of twenty, not to mention dangerous, she’d be grounded for the next thirty years. And if the cops thought she knew something about Kaye’s disappearance—not that she did, but if they found out what she’d done it would make her look pretty damn guilty—she could go to jail. For a really long time.

This was a lose-lose situation, and guess who the loser would turn out to be? Sooner or later the truth would come out about what she’d asked Carlos to do. When it did, the shit would hit the fan.

And at that point, no matter how you looked at it, she was toast.

Four

“You got in late last night.”

Doug Policzki stood in a square of morning sunlight, his gaze focused intently on the shiny stainless toaster as he awaited the arrival of two perfectly browned squares of whole wheat bread. “New case,” he said. The toaster popped. He pulled out his toast, tossed his necktie over his shoulder to keep it clean, and picked up the butter knife.

“When you gonna get a chance to mow the lawn? It’s starting to look like Wild Kingdom.”

Policzki opened the dishwasher and dropped the butter knife into the basket. “I don’t know,” he said. “This is a complicated case. It’ll probably suck up a lot of my time.”

“They’re all complicated.”

He felt a twinge of guilt. His mother was right. From earliest childhood, he’d been made to understand that his primary obligation was to the people who’d raised and nurtured him and tried to mold him into a civilized and decent human being. And he’d been a dutiful son; after his dad died, he’d moved back home to take care of his mother. But over the last year or two, he’d been increasingly remiss in those duties. The truth was that homicide took up most of his waking hours. And it was hardly fair to his mother that he always seemed to place her lower on his list of priorities than the dead bodies of strangers.

“Maybe Bernie could do it,” he suggested. “Or one of the boys.” His oldest sister, Debbie, and her husband, Bernie, lived three houses down and had a new lawnmower and two strapping teenage sons, neither of whom ever lifted a finger to help out their grandmother. Under the circumstances, one of them should jump into the breach before the lawn reached shoulder height.

Sounding exasperated, Linda Policzki said, “Doesn’t it ever bother you?”

Policzki shot her a quizzical glance before he sliced the toast in half with a quick incision from corner to corner. “You mean Wild Kingdom?”

“Oh, for the love of all that’s holy. I’m not talking about the lawn!” His mother’s strong and capable hands momentarily stopped kneading the meat loaf she was preparing for dinner, and she gave him the evil eye. Which wasn’t good news. Strong men had been known to weep when Linda Policzki turned the evil eye on them. “I’m talking,” she said, “about the fact that all the people you meet are dead.”

“Oh.” He relaxed a little and leaned against the counter. “I meet live people all the time.” He punctuated his sentence with a bite of toast.

His mother snorted. “Right,” she said. “Cops and murderers.”

“And lawyers, and judges, and—” he took another bite of toast, briefly considered the lovely and sophisticated Mia DeLucca, who’d looked at him last night as if he were the lowest form of pond scum “—other people.”

“All that talk of autopsies must make for scintillating dinner conversation.”

“They’re my colleagues, Ma. These are professional relationships. We don’t do dinner.”

Linda went back to kneading, pouring all her energies into a meal he likely wouldn’t be here to eat. Guilt gnawed at him. That was probably why she did it. She wanted him to feel guilty. It was what kept her going. His mother needed something to complain about, and she’d been blessed with a son who always managed to excel at filling that need.

It was nice to know that he excelled at something, but he wished fervently that she’d find somebody else to focus on. Anybody else. He had three sisters. Why couldn’t she meddle in their lives for a change? All of them were married and, between them, they’d given her seven grandchildren. Managing the lives of seven kids should be more than enough to keep her busy. Especially Jake and Jesse, who could definitely use a little more management. Deb and Bernie were both lawyers, which meant that the boys had been raised by a series of housekeepers. Which was pretty much the equivalent of being raised by a pack of wolves. There’d been little structure and less discipline. Jake and Jesse could undoubtedly benefit from a little of Gram’s influence.

But no dice. Linda Policzki had apparently decided her mission in life was to focus all her attention, all her energy, on her youngest child and only son.

A few months ago, he’d tried to convince his mother to take a cruise. Fantasies of a shipboard romance had played in his head like an old-fashioned movie reel: Linda meeting up with some lonely widower and being swept off her feet. Then traipsing around the world on a once-in-a-lifetime honeymoon. He could picture his mother backpacking through the rugged terrain of the Himalayas or riding a camel across the desert. The woman was as solid and invincible as concrete.

He’d brought home a stack of brochures. He’d even gone so far as to offer to pay for her ticket. But she’d laughed at him. He needed her here, she’d said, and that had been that.

Policzki had a suspicion that somebody had gotten a raw deal. He’d moved back home to take care of his widowed mother, but it seemed that more and more, it was his mother who was taking care of him. Whether he wanted her to or not. He wasn’t sure which of them had gotten the short end of that stick. But one of them surely had. And he’d begun to wonder if, when his sisters had ganged up on him and practically begged him to move back home, that had been their intent all along.

Without looking up from the meat loaf she was spooning into a baking pan, his mother said, “I need a favor.”

Policzki froze, his morning cup of coffee halfway to his mouth. This could mean only one thing. He could feel it coming, could feel the change in the air, like the stillness before a storm. An electrical charge that hadn’t been there a moment ago. No, he screamed silently. Please. Don’t say the words. Don’t do this to me.

But it was too late. “Brenda Petrucci’s niece is visiting,” she said. “Melissa. She’s never been to Boston before. Brenda says she’s a nice girl, maybe a little backward socially, considering that she was raised on a farm in Iowa. She just graduated from veterinary school, and since Brenda doesn’t know anybody else who’s Melissa’s age, I told her you’d be happy to show her the town.”

He closed his eyes. Sighed. “Ma,” he said.

“What?” She carried her mixing bowl to the sink and filled it with hot water. “You’re too good now to do a favor for my oldest and dearest friend?”

“You know it’s not that.”

“Then what is it?”

“You have to stop playing matchmaker. I’m fully capable of finding my own women.”