there?" He took a deep breath, watched me steadily with dark eyes.
"Yes." I cleared my throat. "Corwin Earle is dead."
"Samuel Pietro," he said.
I nodded. "I think it's Samuel Pietro." I looked down at my gun, saw that it jumped from the tremors in my arm, the shakes wracking my body like a series of small strokes. I looked back at Broussard, felt the warm streams spring from my eyes again. "It's hard to tell," I said, and my voice cracked.
Broussard nodded. I noticed that he was weeping, too.
"In the basement," he said.
"What?"
"Skeletons," he said. "Two of them. Kids."
My voice didn't sound like my own as I said, "I don't know how to respond to that."
"I don't either," he said.
He looked down at Roberta Trett's corpse. He lowered the shotgun and placed it against the back of her head, and his finger curled around the trigger.
I waited for him to blow her dead brains all over the staircase.
After a while, he removed the gun and sighed. He took his foot and brought it down gently on the top of her head, and then he pushed her down.
That's what the Quincy police met as they reached the stairs: Roberta Trett's large corpse sliding down the dark staircase toward them and two men standing up top, weeping like children because they'd somehow never known the world could get this bad.
Chapter 26
It took twenty hours to confirm that the body in the bathtub had, in fact, been that of Samuel Pietro. The work the Tretts and Corwin Earle had done on his face with a knife had made dental records the only sure means of identification. Gabrielle Pietro had gone into shock after a reporter from the News, acting on a tip, called before the police contacted her to ask for a statement regarding her son's death.
Samuel Pietro had been dead forty-five minutes by the time I found him. The medical examiner ascertained that in the two weeks since his disappearance he'd been sodomized repeatedly, flogged along his back, buttocks, and legs, and handcuffed so tightly that the flesh around his right wrist was worn down to the bone. He'd been fed nothing but potato chips, Fritos, and beer since he'd left his mother's house.
Less than an hour before we'd entered the Trett house, either Corwin Earle, one or both of the Tretts, or maybe all three of them-who the hell knew and ultimately what difference did it make?-had stabbed the boy in the heart and then drawn the knife blade across his throat and severed his carotid artery.
I'd spent the morning and most of the afternoon up in our cramped office, tucked in the belfry of St. Bartholomew's Church, feeling the weight of the great building around me, the spires reaching for heaven. I stared out the window. I tried not to think. I drank cold coffee and sat, felt a soft ticking in my chest, in my head.
Angie's ankle had been set and plastered last night at the New England Med emergency room, and she'd left the apartment this morning as I was waking up, taken a taxi to her doctor's office so he could check the ER resident's work and tell her what to expect from time spent in a cast.
I left the belfry office, once I got the details regarding Samuel Pietro from Broussard, and descended the stairs into the chapel. I sat in the front pew in the still half-dark, smelled the remains of incense and the bloom of chrysanthemums, met the gem-shaped gaze of several stained-glass saints, and watched the lights of small votive candles flicker off the mahogany altar rail, wondered why an eight-year-old child had been allowed to live on this earth just long enough to experience everything horrific in it.
I looked up at the stained-glass Jesus, his arms held open above the gold tabernacle.
"Eight years old," I whispered. "Explain that."
I can't.
Can't or won't?
No answer. God can calm up with the best of them.
You put a child on this earth, give him eight years of life. You allow him to be kidnapped, tortured, starved, and raped for fourteen days-over three hundred and thirty hours, nineteen thousand eight hundred long minutes-and then as a final image You provide him with the faces of monsters who shove steel into his heart, cleave the flesh from his face, and open his throat on a bathroom floor.
What's your point?
"What's Yours?" I said loudly, heard my voice echo off stone.