Lisa Unger - Smoke

“That’s why we need you to make the positive ID, Baby Boy,” said Evelyn. “We could be wrong.”

Evelyn threw her a look and Jesamyn folded her arms. No one would ever ask a family member to ID a body as badly decomposed as Rosario Mendez’s and Jesamyn could see that Evelyn was sick over it. They could wind up getting sued, especially since this was technically no longer their case. It was a homicide case now.

“She never changed to go out to the clubs that night,” Jesamyn had said to Evelyn on the dock. “She stayed home.”

“Which contradicts what Baby Boy told us,” said Evelyn, watching the Medical Examiner’s van pull away.

“He pointedly told us that she had changed. That he saw what she’d been wearing when he left folded on her bed.”

Evelyn nodded.

“When Mount and I talked to him, he wavered back and forth between referring to her in the past and present tense,” Jesamyn went on when the other woman didn’t say anything.

“He did that with us, too. Wong thought it meant something.”

“I don’t think Alonzo cared enough about Rosario and their baby to bother killing them. I mean, what’s his motive? What does he have to gain?”

“He claimed the baby wasn’t his,” said Evelyn.

“So?” she said with a shrug. “That’s not a motive. She never asked him for anything, not even money, according to her friends.”

“So what are you suggesting?” Evelyn had asked, putting her hands in her pocket and shrugging against the cold.

“Let’s bring the brother in for the ID.”

Baby Boy started to sniffle as the three of them walked up the cold gray hallway. Until then, there had only been the sound of her and Evelyn’s heels, the squeaking of Baby Boy’s sneakers on the linoleum floors. The smell of death and chemicals was already strong and the morgue was still a few doors down. The fluorescent lights above buzzed.

“I don’t know if I can do this,” he said, coming to a stop. Jesamyn took a hard look at him. There was only fear there in his liquid brown eyes. He’d wrapped his arms around himself, was shifting from foot to foot.

“There’s no other way,” said Jesamyn. “I’m sorry.”

“One of her friends, maybe,” he suggested. “One of them could do it.”

Jesamyn shook her head. “You’re her next of kin, Baby Boy. It’s your job to do this for her. You’re all she has, now. The only one. She took care of you all your life; now you have to do this for her.” It was a bull’s-eye; she saw it as his face fell to pieces. His liquid brown eyes ran over and the tears started to fall. He doubled over, gripping his stomach as if he were in terrible pain.

“Oh, God,” he wailed. “I’m so sorry. Rosie, I’m so sorry. Oh, God. I miss her so much.” He dropped to his knees and Jesamyn was beside him.

“You were so jealous of that baby, weren’t you?” she whispered, putting her arm around him. He wailed harder. “You were so angry with her for betraying you, loving someone else as much as she loved you. More. He wasn’t even born yet and she already loved him more, didn’t she?”

He pushed Jesamyn away and leaned against the wall. “Get away from me,” he shrieked.

“There’s nothing like the love between a mother and her son,” said Jesamyn, standing, her voice low and sure now. “It can’t even compare to the love between a sister and her brother; it’s not the same.”

He released the most heartbreaking cry. “He was all she ever talked about,” he screamed. “The baby, the baby, her baby boy. I just wanted her to shut the fuck up about him. I was her baby boy. That’s my name.”

Jesamyn felt a stab of pity for him. Pity and disgust.

“She was in labor, wasn’t she, when you came home?” asked Evelyn, as if the thought had just occurred to her. “She needed you to take her to the hospital.”

Jesamyn shot her a look, afraid the shaking judgment in Evelyn’s voice would shut him down. Baby Boy was sobbing now, sliding down the wall until he was sitting on his haunches.

“She was in labor and you killed her,” said Evelyn with a shake of her head. “How did you do it?”

He stopped crying then. He wiped his eyes and his nose with the sleeve of his Rangers jersey. He issued a couple of shuddering breaths. Jesamyn was sure he had realized that he was on the brink of confessing, that he’d come back to himself.

“I hit her in the back of the head with a bat,” he said, quietly. “She never even saw it coming. She never knew.”

Evelyn let go of a sigh and bowed her head. Baby Boy’s face went blank then and he glanced up at the ceiling for a second.

When he looked down, he said quietly, “I want my lawyer.”

The homicide guys tried to take the collar but Evelyn fought them for it. It was her case from the beginning and she wanted the arrest. She wasn’t going to let someone stroll in during the last round and take the credit for all her weeks of late nights and dead ends. It didn’t give Jesamyn any satisfaction to put the cuffs on Baby Boy and bring him in with Evelyn. Jorge Alonzo she would have liked to see in a cage. But Mendez was this damaged kid, acting out of his own abused spirit. He’d live with the hell of what he had done every day for the rest of his life.

Jesamyn left the precinct a few hours later after helping Evelyn get started with the paperwork, then leaving her to finish it up. It was Evelyn’s collar, after all. She’d get the glory, which Jesamyn didn’t mind, as long as she didn’t have to do all the typing and waiting around that followed an arrest. Stepping onto the concrete, she saw Dylan across the street on the swing set in the park beside the lot. She crossed the street and laced her fingers through the chain-link fence.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

“I’ve been trying to call you,” he said, coming around the fence. “I have something to show you. You need to come with me.”

“What do you need to show me?” she asked, suspicious. She wondered if he was just dangling a line to get her to spend some time alone with him.

“I’ll tell you on the way,” he said, moving toward his GTO. She could see the fin and the white stripe that ran from the hood to the trunk just a few cars down. She didn’t follow him right away.

“Where are we going?” she asked again, but the wind took her words away. He didn’t appear to hear her question.

He turned around and extended a hand. “Come on. What are you waiting for?”

Though her feet felt like they were made out of lead all of a sudden, though something inside her resisted, she followed him. She always followed him.

The moon shone through his window and bathed his legs in its milky light. He was watching for her, the phone in his hand. He could hear the laugh track from whatever his brother was watching on the television downstairs; his family didn’t want to leave him alone now. All he wanted was to be alone and wait for Lily in peace. If it was Lily he had seen at all. If there had been anyone there on the street outside his house. He wondered absently if he was losing his mind. He didn’t think so; he still felt like himself, if a little numb, a little emptied out.

He’d tried to call Jesamyn but she hadn’t picked up the phone and he hadn’t left a message. He’d checked his messages and found three from Lydia Strong. The last one had been left just a few hours earlier.

“Don’t worry,” she’d said. “We’re in Florida. We’re going to find Lily and-” The cell phone connection had cut out before she’d finished her message. He wondered if she knew that he’d been accused of murder and arrested. He thought about calling her back but he didn’t know what to say. The phone had sat limp in his hand for the better part of an hour while he scrolled through all his options, rejected each, and eventually wound up doing nothing except sitting by the window, waiting.