Now You See Her Read Free

with visibility of about four feet.” I say nothing about the
     slammed front door, which Meg and I murmured about in cryptic tones. “Every intersection was a war of nerves.”
    He can’t disagree. “No, nothing reported on Dartmouth last night I know of. Nothing in the Back Bay.” Momentary relief. Maybe
     I only imagined the worst.
    “You okay, Frank?”
    His thighs strain the weave of his trousers. “Let me tell you, Reggie, no police department in this country thinks there’s
     enough personnel to do the job A to Z. The public wants blood, the media and politicians hammer you. Add a high-profile crime,
     like the Dempsey case, and everyone’s on us like buzzards.”
    “Sylvia Dempsey.” The woman murdered by the river. Is this the case for my psychic sense? “Do you have leads?”
    He shoots me a look. “Not you too.”
    “A person ought to be able to walk by the Esplanade at twilight without being bludgeoned.”
    “Forget ought.” He puts his mug down, takes a notebook from an inside pocket, and lays it on the coffee table between us.
     “Did you visit Boston in the crack years, Reggie?” This is not chitchat.
    “Crack cocaine years? No.”
    “In those years, Reggie, you stepped on crack vials like they were seashells on the beach. People set their families on fire.
     Mothers threw babies off roofs. The homicide rate went sky-high. We had a hiring freeze. Openings in the division, we couldn’t
     fill them.”
    This is not about Sylvia Dempsey. This is something from the past.
    “It got to be a blur,” he says. “Lowlifes and snitches angled for their own deals with cops and the DA. Notes got sloppy,
     and witnesses ran together in your mind. It’s probably hard for you to imagine that.”
    Me? One autumn I served on three ball committees and mixed up the Baccarat and Tiffany and Waterford table favors. Tragic
     at the time.
    “Don’t get me wrong, we got some real good convictions. We put away scum. But then a few particular cases—” He twists his
     wedding band. “You think those cases are over and done with, past history, but then you find an old notebook in a drawer,
     open it up, and a detail comes back.”
    The notebook on the table—I know this now—is coming my way in minutes. It will be the psychic prompt. I’ll be expected to
     hold it and to feel the extrasensory vibes, though there are no guarantees. I say, “So you have doubts about some of those
     cases.”
    “Yeah, doubts. I checked old notes and files on a case about a man named Henry Faiser. He’s doing twenty to life in MCI Norfolk
     for shooting a man we thought was trying to buy drugs. Faiser was twenty-one years old at the time. The victim was a white
     college student named Peter Wald.”
    “Faiser’s black?” He nods. “This happened close by?”
    “About half a mile away on a block near the turnpike on Eldridge Street. It’s a fancy condo high-rise now, but then it was
     three shabby houses and a body shop, which Vehicle Theft was already watching because they suspected stolen cars stripped
     for parts.”
    “A chop shop.” Again, he nods. I get no points for knowing this lingo. The notebook lies untouched.
    “Homicide was watching the house next to the shop. A crack house, we thought. A woman had died there, and the cause of death
     was heart failure, inconclusive as a criminal case. So we kept an eye on the house. The DEA was in it too.”
    “The Drug Enforcement Agency?”
    “Feds, so there were turf issues.”
    “But Henry Faiser shot and killed Peter Wald. That’s a fact?”
    “Faiser was known to be living in the house, and also known to be at the scene of the murder. A gun was found in the weeds
     in a vacant lot alongside the house. Ballistics proved it was the murder weapon. We had information that Faiser shot Wald
     in a dispute over a drug buy.”
    “Faiser was a drug dealer?”
    “A sometime dealer. Now and then.”
    “So he had prior convictions?”
    “He had arrests.”
    “Not