“Maybe if you and me are ever sitting down face-to- face, I’ll tell you the story,” he surprised himself by saying.

He’d never told anybody the story, except Nancy. He’d told her as much as he could remember, and she’d listened with that sincere look on her face that started to annoy the living shit out of him after a while.

“You don’t need to explain yourself to me,” Bacardi said. “I don’t know you, Pete. What I do know is people say all kinds of things, and you don’t know what’s true until you decide to make it your mission. It’s not my mission to know what’s true about your life, okay? Just what’s true about what happened to my lady, the kid in Greenwich, and now your lady in New York. I’ll send you my files electronically, what I’ve got, anyway. You ever want to dig through all of it, you’ll need a week locked up in a room with a case of Advil.”

“I’m told there’s no DNA in your case and the kid,” Marino said. “No sign of sexual assault.”

“That’s what’s called the nightmare of multiple choice.”

“Maybe we’ll have some crab cakes in Baltimore, and I’ll tell you,” he said. “Don’t draw conclusions from gossip. Or when you come here. You like steak houses?”

She didn’t answer.

It was as if someone had tethered his emotions to a cinder block, he felt so depressed. He was ruined. That Gotham Gotcha asshole had ruined him. He meets a nice woman named after his favorite rum, and now she’s acting as if he’s got smallpox and spits when he talks.

“These VICAP forms, shit like that?” Bacardi said. “Check the boxes, multiple choice like school when there’s more than one answer? Literally, no sign of sexual assault, except in both cases there was evidence of a lube job. Some Vaseline-type stuff that was negative for sperm. Vaginally in my lady. Anally in the Greenwich boy. A mixture of DNA, contaminated as hell. No hits in CODIS. We figure since they were found nude and dumped outdoors, all kinds of contaminants stuck to the petroleum jelly or whatever it was. Imagine how many people’s DNA would be in a Dumpster? Plus dog hairs, cat fur.”

“Kind of interesting,” Marino said. “Because the DNA’s messed up in this case, too. We got a hit on an old lady in a wheelchair who ran over some kid in Palm Beach.”

“She ran him over in her wheelchair? She was speeding, busted a red light in her wheelchair? I’m sorry. Did somebody put in a different movie and not tell me?”