He handed me an 8X11 map of the Edward Everett Square, Savin Hill, and Columbia Point neighborhoods. Someone had penned a circle around what constituted St. Bart’s parish—Edward Everett Square itself, the Blake Yard, JFK/UMass Station, a stretch of Dorchester Avenue beginning at the South Boston line and ending at St. William’s Church in Savin Hill. Within the circle, someone had also marked in five small black squares and two large blue dots.

“The squares are?” I looked at him.

“Approximate locations of the residences in 1974 of Jack Rouse, Stan and Diandra Timpson, Emma Hurlihy, Gerry Glynn, and Edgar Kenzie. The two blue dots are the murder sites of Cal Morrison and Charles Rugglestone. Both the squares and dots are within a quarter square mile of each other.”

I stared at the map. My neighborhood. A tiny, mostly forgotten, hardscrabble place of three-deckers and faded A-frames, cubbyhole taverns and corner stores. Outside of the occasional bar brawl, not the type of place that called much attention to itself. Yet here was the FBI shining a national spotlight down on it.

“What you’re looking at there,” Bolton said, “is a kill zone.”

I called Angie from an empty confeRenee room.

She answered on the fourth ring, out of breath. “Hey, I just came through the door.”

“Whatcha doing?”

“Talking to you, ya pinhead, and opening my mail. Bill, bill, bill, take-out menu, bill…”

“How was Mae?”

“Fine. I just dropped her off with Grace. How was your day?”

“The guy with the goatee’s name is Evandro Arujo. He was Alec Hardiman’s partner-in-life in the joint.”

“Bullshit.”

“Nope. Looks like he’s our guy.”

“But he doesn’t know you.”

“This is true.”

“So why would he leave your card in Kara’s hand?”

“Coincidence?”

“Fine. But Jason getting killed, too?”

“Really, really, big coincidence?”

She sighed and I could hear her rip into an envelope. “This doesn’t make total sense yet.”

“Agreed,” I said.

“Tell me about Hardiman.”

I did and then I took her through my day as she ripped open more envelopes and said, “Yeah, yeah,” in a distracted tone which would have annoyed me if I hadn’t known her well enough to know she could talk on the telephone, listen to the radio, watch TV, and cook pasta while carrying on a half-conversation with someone else in the room and she’d still hear every word I said.

But halfway through my story, the “yeahs” stopped and I got nothing but silence, and it wasn’t a rapt silence, it was a thick one.

“Ange?”

Nothing.

“Ange?” I said again.

“Patrick,” she said and her voice was so small, it seemed to have no body attached to it.

“What? What’s wrong?”

“I just got a photograph in the mail.”

I stood up from the chair so quickly I could see the lights of the city jerk and slant and spin around me. “Of who?”

“Of me,” she said. Then, “And Phil.”

25

“I’m supposed to be afraid of this guy?” Phil held up one of the photos Angie’d taken of Evandro.