She hated being called ma’am. “What do you see when you look at him?” she asked.

The young man shrugged. He clearly hadn’t expected to be challenged. “I don’t know. I see an asshole. I see a coward.”

“Look closer at the screen. Look at him. What do you see?”

Teadic leaned in toward the screen, squinting, almost as though he was looking for a hidden picture or taking a test. “I don’t get it. What am I looking for? He’s just sitting there.”

“He’s just sitting there,” Steele agreed. “He hasn’t moved in more than an hour. Not a muscle. I don’t even know if he’s blinked since I’ve been here. Do you see that? Do you see how still he is?”

“So what?”

“So, that’s what patience looks like, Officer Teadic. That is what hatred looks like. That is what determination looks like. As he sits there, he’s not spacing out or sleeping. His mind is formulating a plan. He’s honing it, finding all the flaws in it, and fixing those flaws. It’s fine to call him an asshole and a coward. It makes it easy to dismiss him, and it’s safe to do that in here with the cameras and the steel doors and a dozen armed men just a phone call away. But don’t ever underestimate him. He isn’t some street thug. And no matter what you see on that camera, he is very dangerous. Understood?”

It looked like he’d swallowed a bug. “OK, yeah, I understand.”

She went back to watching the screen.

Teadic cleared his throat several times, clearly trying to recapture the false confidence he’d displayed previously. “Speaking of street thugs, that’s some story about the Mariner down in Charlestown, isn’t it?”

He was back to making conversation, and it annoyed her. “What story?”

“Apparently there was some sort of gang war down at the old Mariner—that bar at the edge of the Charlestown piers. They burned the whole thing down. Heard it on my police scanner on the way in.”

She didn’t care about any gang war at the moment. Her mind had been too consumed with how to keep Carpio in prison. And yet, for some reason, perhaps habit, she asked the question. “Who burned it down?”

Teadic shrugged. “I don’t think they know. Gangs, I guess. They found a bunch of them dead inside. Spics mainly, I guess. And some Mick union guy they fished out of the harbor.”

Her intuition tingled. “What union guy?”

“I don’t know. Just some guy who ran one of the unions. ‘Mick’ something or ‘Mack’ something. It’s Boston. Who can keep that shit straight?”

“Cormack? Cormack O’Connell?”

“Yeah, that could be it.”

“Was he alive or dead when they fished him out?”