Along Came a Spider

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. She was committed to it.
    She drank a Smithwich, really fine ale from the Old Sod. Smitty’s had been her father’s favorite brand of poison in the world. She nibbled a slice of fresh cheddar. Then she had a second ale in the shower, down dreary Hallway Number One at her mother’s. Michael Goldberg’s little face flashed at her again.
    She
wouldn’t allow
any more flash images of the Goldberg boy to come. She wouldn’t feel any guilt, even if she was bursting at the seams with it …
    The two children had been abducted during her watch. That was how everything had started… Stop the images! Stop everything for now
.
    Irene Flanagan was coughing in her sleep. Her mother had worked thirty-nine years for C&P Telephone. She owned the condo in Crystal City. She was a killer bridge player. That was it for Irene.
    Jezzie’s father had been a cop in D.C. for twenty-seven years. The end game came for Terry Flanagan, on his beloved job — a heart attack in crowded Union Station — with hundreds of complete strangers watching him die, nobody really caring. Anyway, that was the way Jezzie always told the story.
    Jezzie decided, again, for the thousandth time, that she had to move out of her mother’s place. No matter what. No more lame excuses. Move it or lose it, girl. Move on, move on, move on with your life.
    She had completely lost track of how long she’d been drowning in the shower, holding the empty beer bottle at her side, rubbing the cool glass against her thigh. “Despair junkie,” she muttered to herself. “That’s really pitiful.” She’d been in the shower long enough to finish the Smithwich, anyway, and get thirsty for another one. Thirsty for something.
    She’d successfully avoided thinking about the Goldberg boy for a while. But not really. How could she?