Neither Joe nor Robbie got to thank the flashlight man, but he didn’t wait around anyway.
“Don’t run from me like that!” Robbie said. His face was very close to Joe’s. “You hear me?! Don’t ever!”
“Robbie, I swear, I saw her!” He was about to say more when Robbie did something that Joe didn’t expect. Robbie slapped him. Not hard, like their mother sometimes did, but firmly. It burned and hurt anyway, deep down.
“Stop saying that,” Robbie said. “Stop saying it, because it isn’t true! Stop it. Just stop it!” Robbie opened his mouth again, but then it was like he was about to hiccup or even throw up. Joe knew that look. Robbie was about to cry. Instead, he spun Joe around and pushed him forward. “Walk,” he said, a croak. Joe did as he was told, back toward the intersection with Broadway. He didn’t dare turn around.
CHAPTER 39
Thursday, August 3, 2017
Sixtieth Precinct
Coney Island, Brooklyn
6:13 p.m.
“How’s my suspect?” Mimi asked over the phone. Zochi had it pressed between her cheek and shoulder as she settled into her desk. She had just begun an evening tour, the so-called turnaround detectives did on revolving shifts, meaning that the evening tour “turned around” to a day tour the following morning.
“On ice,” Zochi said. “He resigned from the AG’s office yesterday.”
“I heard. Not surprised. Any travel?”
“He was in Staten Island today.” She pulled up the screen that allowed her to monitor license plate activity. “Went over the bridge around twelve forty. I’ll bet he went to see the brother.”
“Robbie,” Mimi said, as if confirming it to herself. “That guy’s alibis check out, though, right?”
“They do,” she said, sifting through reports. Len had written up a DD5 on both. “Len had a guy over there chase them down. Robbie wasn’t in Brooklyn either night.”
“Hmm. Okay, so not him. He’s kind of a creep, though, right?”
“A little yeah,” Zochi said. “Shady. He’s got a job, though, and an apartment over there.”
“If the alibis are tight, that’s all I’ll need,” Mimi said. “I don’t want a defense attorney playing a look-at-the-weirdo-brother angle to the jury.”
“Yeah, I get it. Don’t worry; we’ll lock it down.”
“You know I’ll want a motive,” Mimi said, “if it goes to the mats. I mean, why did he do these things?”
Zochi nodded as if Mimi could see it over the phone. She had been thinking about this also, and it was related to a couple of other things that had been nagging her where this case was concerned. “Something was bottled up, right?” she said. “Something he never let out, and then—bam!”
“Yeah, the backstory,” Mimi said. “That’s probably it. The blackout, their mother leaving them like that. It seems like he came out of it okay, but you never know. It’s got to be anger, right? Anger he could no longer control after all this time. But what released it?”
“Blackout,” Zochi said. While Mimi was speaking, she had been thinking, and she’d scribbled that word on a stickie pad and underlined it three times.
“What?”
“Blackout. That’s what happens to him when he binge drinks. He’s lost whole days. Maybe once he got far enough in the bottle, something took over. Something in his core. Something he doesn’t even know about.”
“I can see that,” Mimi said. Zochi could tell she was also taking notes.
“It’s just a hunch, but I get the feeling that he might come clean if the DNA comes back and it’s him. I didn’t get much when I interviewed him at the Six-One, but I didn’t get a lot of noise either. He just seemed confused. Kind of like he just wants to . . . know what happened. Does that make sense?”
“Sure,” Mimi said. She was silent for a few seconds. “The name thing with the girlfriend, Holly—that seemed odd to me.”
“I know. The spelling difference.”
“Yeah. The killer left ‘Holly’ on the wall. H-O-L-L-Y.”
“Right.”
“Joe doesn’t seem to have called her that, though. The mother says he used her real name or the short version, like H-A-L-L-Y but ending with an E.”
“I remember,” Zochi said. “Joe refers to her that way too. He says it like that. Hally.”
“That could be an issue. If my motive is that he snapped—blew like a volcano—and killed her out of rage, then why did he use a different spelling of her name on the wall? I mean, if it was coming from deep down, wouldn’t he have stayed consistent with how he usually acted, deep down?”