Free Prayers for Rain by Dennis Lehane Page A

“Uh-huh.”
    “Really.”
    She nodded to herself. “The answer is no. She wasn’t raped or assaulted, to the best of my knowledge.”
    “Okay.”
    “But, Mr. Kenzie?”
    “Yeah.”
    “And if what I’m about to tell you leaks to the press, I’ll destroy you.”
    “Understood.”
    “I mean, annihilate you.”
    “Got it.”
    She stuffed her hands in her pockets, leaned her tall frame back against a lamppost. “So you don’t think I’m just a chummy cop, blabs away to every PI in the city, that guy you took down on the force last year?”
    I waited.
    “He didn’t like women cops and he sure as hell didn’t like black women cops, and if you did stand up for yourself, he told everyone you were a lesbian. When you took him down, there was a lot of reshuffling in the department and I got transferred out of his department and into Homicide.”
    “Where you belonged.”
    “Which I deserved . So, let’s just say what I’m about to pass on to you is a little payback. Okay?”
    “Okay.”
    “Your dead friend was picked up twice for solicitation in Springfield.”
    “She was hooking?”
    She nodded. “She was a prostitute, Mr. Kenzie, yeah.”

8
     
    Karen Nichols’s mother and stepfather, Carrie and Christopher Dawe, lived in Weston in a sprawling colonial replica of Jefferson’s Monticello. It sat on a street of similarly sprawling homes with lawns the size of Vancouver that glistened with dew from gently hissing sprinklers. I’d taken the Porsche and had it waxed and washed before I arrived, and I’d dressed in the sort of casual summer attire the kids on 90210 seemed to favor—a light cashmere vest over a spanking new white T-shirt, Ralph Lauren khakis, and tan loafers. The getup would have gotten my ass kicked in maybe three or four seconds if I’d walked down Dorchester Ave., but out here, it seemed to be de rigueur. If I’d only had the five-hundred-dollar shades and wasn’t Irish, someone probably would have invited me to play golf. But that’s Weston for you—it didn’t get to be the priciest suburb of a pricey city without having some standards.
    As I walked up the slate path that led to the Dawes’ front door, they opened it wide, stood with arms slung around each other’s lower backs and waved to me like Robert Young and Jane Wyatt on a nineteen-inch black-and-white.
    “Mr. Kenzie?” Dr. Dawe said.
    “Yes sir. Good to meet you.” I reached the doorway and received two firm handshakes.
    “How was the drive?” Mrs. Dawe said. “You took the Pike, I hope?”
    “Yes, ma’am. It was fine. No traffic.”
    “Terrific,” Dr. Dawe said. “Come on in, Mr. Kenzie. Come on in.”
    He wore a faded T-shirt over rumpled khakis. His dark hair and trim goatee were flecked with distinguished gray and he had a giving smile. He didn’t fit my image of the mercurial Mass General surgeon type with the bulging stock portfolio and a God complex. He looked more like he should be giving a poetry reading in Inman Square, sipping herbal tea and quoting Ferlinghetti.
    She wore a black-and-gray-checkered oxford over black stretch pants and black sandals, and her hair was a lustrous dark cranberry. She was at least fifty, or so I assumed given what I knew about Karen Nichols, but she looked ten years younger and in her casual clothes made me think of a college girl at her first sorority sleepover, drinking wine from the bottle and sitting cross-legged on the floor.
    They whisked me through a marble foyer bathed in amber light, past a white staircase that curved gracefully up and to the left like a swan craning its head, and into a cozy dual office space with exposed cherry beams on the ceiling, muted Orientals on the floor, and a sense of aged plumpness in the leather captain’s chairs and matching sofa and armchairs. The room was large, but it seemed small at first, because it was painted a dark salmon and precisely stuffed with books and CDs and a triumphantly kitschy half canoe that had been stood