“What’s wrong?” she whispered, pulling the sleeves of her sweater down over her hands and shivering.
Someone would be inside. They’d been thumping around all night and all morning, but suddenly it was all quiet behind the steel door. I imagined a lot of not-it glances between the construction guys, everyone’s tools paused in the air to wait me out.
I banged with my fist until it hurt, then switched hands. All my fingers were numb from the cold and my breath came out as white puffs against the closed door. Nothing. “Okay,” I said.
Sicily followed me back inside the pub’s back door and through to the office. “Why are you mad at the people next door?”
In the office, I scrounged up the card Detective Aycock had left behind and picked up the phone.
“Who are you calling?” Sicily mouthed at me, but I shook my head.
It took awhile to be transferred out of Aycock’s voicemail to a real person and then back to his number to catch him. But when I reached him at last, he let me talk. He accepted the information—too calmly for my tastes—in his taking-notes voice while Sicily listened to my half of the conversation, eyes wide. She took the seat across from me again.
After I had unloaded to Aycock about the truck in the alley, trying to make him see what I meant—without, of course, the benefit of video footage that wasn’t supposed to exist—he thanked me in a respectful, distant tone that made me feel like a crank reporting a UFO sighting.
“Wehavea theory of how Mr. Hartnett died,” he said when I had talked myself out.
My stomach sank, thinking of Alex shoving Joey out of the alley. Had someone seen?
“You don’t want to know?” Aycock said.
“How—” I had to clear my throat. “How did he die?”
“Blood evidence in the alley and a contusion on the victim’s head—acontusionis just a bruise—”
“I’ve seen TV in mylifetime,” I said. “Just not the show you mentioned.”
“Uh-huh. Well, then I don’t need to explain lacerations and abrasions—cuts and scrapes? All of it together would suggest the victim clipped his head on that dumpster out there in your alley.”
“What?” Sicily whispered.
I must have been wincing into the phone. I ignored her. “So it could have been an accident,” I said, a flower of hope starting to bloom. Oh, God, yes. Anaccident.
“An accident,” Aycock said, “where a dead man tucked himself up snug as a bug into some long curtains.”
“Right,” I said. “Okay. I forgot about the curtains.”
“A motor vehicle like the one you describe could have been involved,” Aycock said. “There were some interesting patterns left in the ice I’d like to have explained.”
“Patterns?”
“Drag marks,” Aycock said. “From boot heels.”
I had lost the ability to speak.
“We’ll just have to keep working the case and see what turns up,” he said. It sounded less like a promise and more like a threat.
I reached for the handset to hang up the call, the phone still to my ear.Dragmarks.
Sicily shifted cautiously in the chair across from me. “Your boyfriend…died?” she said. “Don’t you think that’s weird?”
I hung up. “It’s certainly out of character,” I said.
“I mean, don’t you think it’s weird that he died the same week Mom went missing?”
I didn’t like this thing where Sicily had started referring to Marisa not ashermom, but asours.
“Oh! That’s why the police wanted to know when we were together yesterday,” Sicily said. “Oh, wow, you’re asuspect.” She looked sort of thrilled by it. “Did you tell the police about Mom?”
