Jane muttered to Maura: “I’ll apologize later.”
“For what?”
“For being drafted into the Angela Rizzoli Detective Agency.”
“I meant to tell you, I saw Mike Antrim last night at rehearsal. He’s worried, Jane. Their whole family is.”
“Yeah, I imagine they would be.”
“He wants to know if there’s anything on that guy at the cemetery.”
Jane sighed. “I wish I had something to report, but I don’t.”
“What about that burner phone? Have there been any other calls made from it lately?”
“None. That phone’s gone silent.”
“Okay, tell me what you all see,” said Angela, still focused on the house across the street. She handed Frost a pair of binoculars.
“What am I supposed to see?” he asked.
“Tell us if anything about that house bothers you.”
Frost peered through the binoculars. “I can’t see anything. All the blinds are down.”
“Exactly,” said Angela. “Because they’re hiding something.”
“Which is their right,” pointed out Alice, the annoying voice of authority. “No one’s obligated to expose themselves to the world. Although Mr. America over there seems happy to be doing it.”
“Oh, that’s just Jonas,” said Angela. “Ignore him.”
But it was hard to ignore the silver-haired man lifting weights next door to the Greens. He stood in front of his living room window, bare-chested and pumping iron in full view of the neighborhood.
“That man doesn’t want to be ignored,” said Jane.
“Well, he is in awfully good shape for a man his age,” Alice noted.
“Sixty-two,” said Angela. “He was a Navy SEAL.”
“And it, um, shows.”
“Forget Jonas! It’s the Greens I want you to look at.”
Except there was nothing to look at. All Maura saw were lowered blinds and a closed garage door. Weeds grew through the cracks in the driveway, and if she did not already know that someone lived there, she would assume the place was vacant.
“And look, it’s back again,” Angela said as a white van slowly drove past. “Second time this week I’ve seen that van come by. That’s something else I need to keep my eye on.”
“So now you’re doing neighborhood vehicle surveillance?” said Jane.
“I know it doesn’t belong to anyone on this block.” Angela’s head slowly swiveled as she watched the van make its way down the street and out of sight. Maura wondered how many hours a day Angela stood at this window, taking in this view. After four decades here, she must know every car, every tree, every shrub. Now that her children had grown up and her husband had walked out, was this what her world had shrunken down to?
A few houses away, a lawn mower roared to life as a skinny man in Bermuda shorts trimmed his grass. Unlike Jonas, this man seemed completely disinterested in his appearance, flaunting knee-high socks and sandals as he pushed his mower.
“That’s Larry Leopold. He’s so good about keeping up his yard,” said Angela. “He and Lorelei are the kind of neighbors everyone wants. Friendly people who take pride in their property. But the Greens, they’re different. They won’t even talk to me.”
Maura saw the twitch of a window blind in the Greens’ house. Someone inside that house was watching them right back. Yes, it did indeed seem strange.
A cell phone rang.
“That’s mine,” said Frost and he headed back to the dining room, where he’d left his phone.
“So now you see the situation,” said Angela.
“Yeah. Too much time on your hands,” said Jane. “Vince really needs to come home.”
“He’d pay attention to me, at least.”
“I have been paying attention, Ma. I just don’t see any reason for law enforcement to get involved with people whose only suspicious behavior is avoiding you. How about we leave those poor people alone and go back to the dining room for dessert?”
“Sorry to say we’ll have to skip dessert, Mrs. R,” said Frost, returning to the living room. “Just got a call. Jane and I need to leave.”
“Where are we going?” asked Jane.
“Jamaica Pond. They found Sofia Suarez’s laptop.”
They parked on Perkins Street, right behind a police cruiser, and walked down the shallow bank to the water’s edge, where Patrolman Libby was waiting for them. Jamaica Pond was the largest body of fresh water in Boston, and the mile-and-a-half path that encircled it was a popular route for joggers. With daylight quickly fading toward dusk, there was now only one runner on the path and he was so focused on keeping up his pace that he didn’t glance at them as he pounded past.