Blue Smoke

We’ll get him, maybe not in time to stop whatever he has planned for tonight or tomorrow. But we’ll get him.”
    “Confidence is good.”
    “I believe good overcomes evil, especially if good works its ass off. Just like I believe in the sacrament of marriage, and the poetry of baseball. These are constants for me, Bo. Unassailable.”
    She looked away, felt steadier. “He knows me better than I know him, and that’s his advantage. He’s had years to study me, to explore my weaknesses. But I’m learning. I want to know why now, why he feels he can or must show me who he is, what he’s done. He’s got cops up and down the eastern seaboard on his tail. He could have taken me out, or tried, without anyone knowing who or why.”
    “It wouldn’t be as important? He wouldn’t be as important?”
    “Yes, that’s part of it. This is the big bang, what he’s been building up to for twenty years. God, what kind of person obsesses over a woman for twenty years? I can’t understand it.”
    “I can.” He stayed where he was when she turned back to him. “It’s not the same, but I know what it is to have someone get inside you, against all reason, and just get stuck in there. For me, it was magic. For him it’s a sickness. But in a way, for both of us it was a kind of fantasy. It just grew in different directions.”
    She considered, studied the board. “His was rooted in childhood. His and mine. Rape isn’t sexual, it’s violence. It’s power and control. The fact that he earmarked me, focused on me, tried to rape me wasn’t so much about me but about who I was. The youngest daughter—and likely pretty pampered—of the Hale family.”
    She walked around the board as if to study it from different angles. “Holy family, that’s what he said. We were happy, respected, crowded with friends. His family was violent, isolated, and he was the only child. There were others like ours in the neighborhood, but we were more in the forefront because of Sirico’s. Everyone knew us. No one really knew them. And I was the closest to his age. His father abused his mother—hein turn learns abuse, directed at women. But his attempt to take power over me, to do violence to me, wasn’t just thwarted—and by my younger brother, at that—but its consequences affected the rest of his life. My fault, as he sees it.”
    She circled the board once more. “But it still doesn’t speak to why now, and what next. He’s a sociopath. No conscience, no remorse, but he’s also self-serving. When something kicks him, he doesn’t just kick back, he burns. Something kicked him. Something triggered this. Something pushed him into coming back here and letting me know who he is.”
    He’d stopped listening. Bo had risen, stepped to the board, and her last few words were just buzzes in his head. “This is him? This is Pastorelli?”
    “Junior, yeah.”
    “I saw him. Twice. I’ve seen him twice. The first time he was as close as you are.”
    “When?” she snapped. “Where?”
    “The first time it was the Saturday before I had the family dinner deal. I went into the grocery store near a client’s to pick up the flowers for your mother. He stood right beside me. Goddamn, I’m stupid!”
    “No. Stop. Just tell me what happened. Did he talk to you?”
    “Yeah.” His hands had balled into fists, but he released them now, went back in his head and told her about the incident as best he remembered.
    “Son of a bitch bought red roses.”
    “He’s followed you. Taking the time to surveil. Client’s house, grocery store. He’d have gotten a thrill out of talking to you. Made him feel superior, powerful. I need a chalkboard in here. Why didn’t I think to buy a chalkboard?”
    Instead she dug out a map, pinned it to the back of her corkboard. “Show me the client’s house, the store.”
    She grabbed pushpins, stuck red ones in the two locations he pointed out. “Good. Let me mark where else we know he’s been seen.” She stuck another red pin into the map on Tony Borelli’s street. “Where did you see him the second time?”
    “About twenty minutes ago,” Bo told her. “Diagonal from Sirico’s.”

    She nearly fumbled the box of pins. “Was he going there?”
    “No.” He clamped a hand on her shoulder. “He drove off. He was across the street, few houses up the block. When he saw I’d seen him, recognized him from before, he got in his car.”
    “Make, model.”
    “Ah . . .” He had to close his eyes,