a good life, and you don’t want to mess it up, yeah?”
Tripp kept his eyes on his shoes. “Yeah, okay. Yeah.” She thought he might cry.
“So who did you see with Tara?”
When Tripp was done talking, Alex leaned back. “Tripp?”
“Yeah?” He kept staring at his shoes—ridiculous plastic sandals, as if summer never stopped for Tripp Helmuth.
“Tripp,” she repeated, and waited for him to raise his head and meet her eyes. She smiled. “That’s it. We’re done. It’s over.” You don’t ever have to think about that girl again. How you fucked her and forgot her. How you thought she might give you a good deal if you made her come. How it got you off to be with someone who felt a little dangerous. “We good?” she asked. This was the language he understood.
“Yeah.”
“I’m not going to let this go any further, I promise.”
And then he said it and she knew he wouldn’t tell anyone about this conversation—not his friends, not the Bonesmen. “Thank you.”
That was the trick of it: to make him believe he had more to lose than she did.
“One last thing, Tripp,” she said as he made to scurry back toward the dining hall. “Do you have a bike?”
Alex pedaled across the green, past the three churches, then down to State Street and under the highway. She had about two hundred pages of reading to do if she didn’t want to fall behind this week, and possibly a monster hunting her, but right now she needed to talk to Detective Abel Turner.
Once you were off campus, New Haven lost its pretensions in fits and starts—dollar stores and grimy sports bars shared space with gourmet markets and sleek coffee spots; cheap nail salons and cell-phone hubs sat next to upscale noodle shops and boutiques selling small, useless soaps. It left Alex uneasy, as if the city’s identity kept shifting in front of her.
State Street was just a long stretch of nothing—parking lots, power lines, the train tracks to the east—and the police station was just as bad, an ugly, muscular building of oatmeal-colored slabs. There were dead spaces like this all over the city, entire blocks of massive concrete monoliths looming over empty plazas like a drawing of the future from the past.
“Brutalist,” Darlington had called them, and Alex had said, “It does sort of feel like the buildings are ganging up on you.”
“No,” he’d corrected. “It’s from the French, brut. As in raw, because they used bare concrete. But, yes, it does feel like that.”
There had been slums here before, and then money had poured into New Haven from the Model Cities program. “It was supposed to clean everything up, but they built places no one wanted to be. And then the money ran out and New Haven just has these … gaps.”
Wounds, Alex had thought at the time. He was about to say “wounds,” because the city is alive to him.
Alex looked down at her phone. Turner hadn’t replied to her texts. She hadn’t worked up the nerve to call, but now she was here and there was nothing else to do. When he didn’t answer, she hung up and dialed back again, and then again. Alex hadn’t been anywhere near a police station since after Hellie died. Not only Hellie died that night. But to think of it in any other terms, to think of the blood, the pale pudding of Len’s brain clinging to the lip of the kitchen counter, set her mind rabbiting around her skull in panic.
At last Turner answered.
“What can I do for you, Alex?” His voice was pleasant, solicitous, as if there were no one else he’d rather speak to.
Reply to my goddamn texts. She cleared her throat. “Hi, Detective Turner. I’d like to speak to you about Tara Hutchins.”
Turner chuckled—there was no other word for it; it was the indulgent laugh of a seventy-year-old grandfather, though Turner couldn’t have been much over thirty. Was he always like this at the office? “Alex, you know I can’t talk about an active investigation.”
“I’m outside the police station.”
A pause. Turner’s voice was different when he answered, a bit of that jolly warmth gone. “Where?”
“Right across the street.”
Another long pause. “Train station in five.”
Alex walked Tripp’s bike the rest of the way up the block to Union Station. The air was soft, moist with the promise of snow. She wasn’t sure if she was sweaty from the ride or because she was never going to get used to talking to cops.
She propped the