Desdemona slipped out, money purse in hand, while Carmine led his doughty daughter into the sitting room and gave her a red wine spritzer.
“To use a phrase of the Mayor of New Britain’s, you done good, kid,” he said, bursting with pride.
That, plus gratitude to whatever power had looked after Sophia, carried him through giving her dinner—she was starving—and getting her to bed sedated with one of Desdemona’s “bombs.” Once the girl’s elation at escaping by her own efforts died down, she would sleep a sleep of nightmares unless her busy, clever brain was damped.
Then the reaction set in. He sat and shook as if in a rigor, twisting his hands together.
“The bastard! The fucking bastard!” he said to Desdemona, his teeth clenched. “Why couldn’t he come after me? Why a sixteen-year-old innocent, for crying out loud? The sweetest, nicest, kindest kid imaginable! I’ll rip his head from his neck!”
She cuddled in close and stroked his face. “You don’t mean that, Carmine. You mean a life sentence, marked never to be released. Are you sure it’s your murderer?”
“A little guy with a limp? It’s got to be. But why Sophia? He chose her deliberately—targeted her at school, had it worked out down to the last t crossed and the last i dotted. By rights her body should have been found tomorrow in the physics lab closet, maybe beaten to death if what he thumped on the floor was a baseball bat. The best club ever invented. What he didn’t count on was Sophia’s presence of mind in a crisis.”
“And the fact that she’s inherited your gut instinct, dear heart. Where any other victim would have assumed she was locked in by mistake, Sophia knew almost at once that she was in danger. So she concentrated on escape rather than waiting to be let out.”
He managed to find a smile. “Resourceful, isn’t she?”
“Yes, very. I don’t think you ever need worry about Sophia being one of life’s victims,” said Desdemona. “She’s going to pick life up and wring it dry.”
He got up feeling like an old man. “I don’t think I’ll be making a little brother or sister for Julian tonight, Desdemona.”
“There’s always tomorrow night,” she said cheerfully. “Now let’s break the rules and have a drink before bed. I can bomb Sophia and keep her out of school tomorrow, but I can’t do that to you. An X-O cognac is the answer for Daddy.”
“I’ll have to put a cop at the Dormer to keep an eye on our daughter,” he said, taking the snifter and warming it in his hand. “Concealed surveillance, but Seth Gaylord will have to know in case the duty sergeant puts a dodo on watch. Then tomorrow you’ll have to talk to Sophia and persuade her not to mention the incident to anyone, including Myron.”
Desdemona blinked. “Including Myron?”
“We can’t trust his tongue these days because I don’t know how discreet his lady love is. Tell Sophia it’s not a good idea to be marooned on her own at school or anywhere else right now. She’s to stick with a group and leave school along with everyone else. And that goddamn red Mercedes that Myron gave her goes into the garage! She can drive my mother’s Mercury clunker.”
Desdemona shivered. “It’s like the Ghost,” she said.
“Yes. That’s why I’m convinced our best weapon is Sophia’s ingenuity. If you talk to her frankly and don’t pull your punches, she won’t buck.”
The news about Sophia hit no one quite the way it did John Silvestri, whose daughter Maria had been savagely beaten some years ago. It had been a revenge aimed at Silvestri, who took it very hard. But Maria healed, married happily and moved on with her life; the perpetrator got a thirty-year sentence, twenty before parole. Knowing all this, Carmine told him in private of the attempt on Sophia; to see Silvestri weep was an ordeal and not for other eyes.
“Terrible, just terrible!” the Commissioner said, mopping his face. “We have to catch this bastard, Carmine. Anything you want, you got. Such a beautiful child!”
“I know it doesn’t really look that way,” Carmine said, sitting down, “but somehow I feel as if we’ve rattled his cage. It’s nine days since the twelve murders, and we’ve actually managed to solve some of them—Jimmy Cartwright, Dean Denbigh, Bianca Tolano—and catalogued the assassination of the three blacks as commissioned. There’s been a thirteenth death—the suicide of Bianca Tolano’s killer.”
“I think it’s impressive,” Silvestri said, composure restored. “Where to now?”