The van was a blue Ford Econoline with two hundred thousand miles on it, no windows behind the cab, and a driver’s seat set for a man five inches shorter. Thorsen ran the seat back as far as it would go and it still was not far enough. The cab smelled of Ray. Coffee, WD-40, the peppermints he ate to stay off cigarettes.
He drove it to Highland Park with his knees against the dash and parked it facing downhill, wheels to the kerb.
The house was open now. Blinds up, front door wedged with a brick, cars nose to tail on both sides of the street. People stood on the lawn with paper plates. It looked like any house on any Sunday, if you did not know.
There was no silver Tahoe. He checked both ends of the block before he went in.
Inside it was hot and loud and smelled of jollof rice and somebody’s lasagne. Denise’s sisters ran the kitchen like a field hospital. Cops stood in the hallway holding beers by the neck and telling stories with their free hands. Thorsen took a plate because a woman put one in his hand, and ate standing up, and let the room tell him what was ordinary.
The photographs were where they had always been, along the mantel in the front room. Ray and Denise in 1989, both thinner. Ray in uniform. Ray holding a fish.
At the end of the row was a young man in a patrol officer’s blues, academy portrait, flag behind him. He had his mother’s eyes and his father’s jaw and a smile that had not learned yet what the job was. There was a black ribbon across one corner of the frame. The ribbon was not new. It had faded to the colour of charcoal.
Marcus. Thorsen had taught him to throw a curveball in this yard when the boy was twelve. He had heard about it two years ago, third-hand, in a bar in Flagstaff. A single car, a bridge abutment on the 134, four in the morning. He had bought a card and carried it for a month and never found the words to put in it.
So Denise had buried a son and then a husband, and this was the house she would come home to tonight.
He put the plate down.
Nobody stopped him going through the kitchen. Denise was at the sink with her back to the room, rinsing serving spoons and laying them on a tea towel in a row, bowls up, handles level. She did not turn round. But she said, “The door’s unlocked, Danny,” in the voice you use to tell someone where the bathroom is.
The garage was cooler than the house. It smelled of bleach and, under the bleach, of what bleach is for.
He shut the door behind him and stood still.
From inside it was smaller. One bay, no car, the roll-up door closed. Fluorescent tube overhead. The workbench ran along the left wall with the pegboard above it, and every tool on the board sat inside its own black outline. Hammers by weight. Screwdrivers by length. Ray had done the outlines with a marker and a steel rule over one whole weekend in 2004 and had been insufferable about it for a year.
One outline was empty. Low on the right side of the board, a short flat shape with a hook at one end. A pry bar. Everything else was home.
Thorsen looked at the empty shape for a moment and then looked at the rest.
The folding chair was pushed in under the bench. The stain on the concrete was about the size of a serving dish, paler in the middle where they had worked hardest. Above it, on the ceiling, someone had rolled a square of fresh white paint. He made himself look at the square until it was only a square.
Then the bench. The mug, the reading glasses, the pen. Right-hand end, a hand’s width from the edge. The glasses were folded. The pen lay parallel to the front of the bench as if it had been set down with a ruler.
He did not touch anything. He put his hands in his pockets to make sure.
“Most people bring a casserole.”
The woman from the side aisle was standing in the doorway to the yard. She had the lanyard out now. She held the badge up long enough for him to read it and no longer.
“Detective Brooks. Northeast Homicide.”
“I know what you are.”
“And I know who you are, Mr. Thorsen. I had to ask three people. They all pulled the same face.” She came in and let the door close. She stood where she could see his hands and the house door at the same time, and she did it without making a point of it. “You were in this yard at eight this morning.”
“Was I?”
“The lady across the street has a doorbell camera and a lot of free time. She called it in as a prowler. Big white male, bad suit, carrying a bag.” Brooks looked at the suit. “I’d have said that was unkind, before I saw it.”
“It was eleven dollars.”
“You were robbed.”
He waited. She was good. She let the silence run the way you are supposed to, and when he did not fill it she nodded slightly, as if he had passed something.
“This was mine,” she said. “I caught it. I was here at one-forty in the morning with his wife sitting on that kitchen step in her nightgown. So I’ll tell you what I’ve got, once, as a courtesy to a man who used to do this. And then you can stop walking through my scene.”
“It’s not a scene. There’s no tape.”
“Because it’s closed.” She said it flat. “Single contact wound under the chin. Muzzle stamp, soot, the whole textbook. His own Beretta, his own ammunition, his prints on the magazine. Gunshot residue on his hand. No forced entry, nothing taken, no sign anyone else was in here. Wife asleep at the back of the house with a fan running. Coroner signed it in two days.”
“Which hand?”
She looked at him.
“The residue,” Thorsen said. “The gun. Which hand?”
“Left.” A beat. “He was left-handed. I checked. I’m not new.”
“No. I can see that.”
So the gun was in the correct hand. Thorsen turned that over and did not like either side of it. A man who shoots himself uses the hand he uses. And a man who wanted it to look that way would have needed to know which hand that was.
He did not look at the pen. It took some effort.
“Note?” he said.
“No.”
“Drinking?”
“Mr. Thorsen.”
“He mowed the lawn.”
“People do. They pay the gas bill and feed the cat and then they do it. You’ve seen it. You’ve probably seen it more than I have.” Her voice dropped a little, not unkindly. “He lost his boy two years ago. He’d been retired four. He stopped going to the breakfasts. His wife says he’d been quiet for a month, up at night, out in the van for hours and not saying where. I’m sorry. I am. But I’ve got fourteen open cases with people in them who didn’t choose it.”
“Out in the van where?”
“She didn’t know.”
“Did you ask the van?”
Brooks did not answer that. Something moved behind her eyes and was put away.
“What’s missing off the board?” he said.
She glanced at the pegboard, at the one empty outline, and back. It was quick. But she had not needed to search for it, and they both knew what that meant. She had seen it herself, that night, and had written it down, and had been told it was nothing.
“It’s a garage,” she said. “Things get left in vans.”
“Not his things.”
“Go home, Mr. Thorsen.”
“Haven’t got one.”
“Then go wherever it is you go.” She took a card from her jacket and set it on the corner of the bench, on the left, well away from the mug. “If you think of something that’s evidence, and I mean evidence, call me. If you come back here without the family, I’ll arrest you for it. I’d rather not. It’s a lot of paper.”
She went out through the yard. He heard the gate latch drop.
Thorsen stayed where he was. Through the wall came the sound of the house, plates and voices, somebody laughing too loudly and stopping.
He picked up the card. Det. Imani Brooks. A desk number and a mobile, and on the back, in pencil, a second mobile number that was not printed anywhere.
She had written that before she walked in.