There had been burglaries. That was also true.
At roll call at nine-forty-five Sergeant Tierney had stood at the front of the little briefing room with its drop ceiling and its one window that looked out at the salt dome, and he had put the three addresses up on the screen again, the way he had at every roll call for five weeks. Saw Mill Pond Road, September third. Twin Lakes Drive, September nineteenth. Old Church Road, October fourth. Sunday nights, all of them. Big houses, set back, owners out or asleep. The same way in every time: a back door or a mudroom door, a small pane of glass taped and broken, the hand through. Jewelry, watches, cash, things that went into a pocket. And nobody had seen a car. Every one of those houses was on a long private drive, where at night you heard a car, the dogs went off, the motion lights came on. Nobody had heard one.
"They're walking in," Tierney had said, tapping the screen with a capped pen. "They're coming on foot from somewhere. Bedford PD likes the train. The Sunday late train. Gets in at Katonah at twelve-fifteen, here at twelve-twenty-one, Goldens Bridge twelve-twenty-six. You get off, you walk in, you do your thing, you walk out, you sit in the woods till the first train back in the morning. Five-oh-two southbound. Nobody looks twice at somebody on the five-oh-two. It's all landscapers and housekeepers."
Somebody had laughed at that, Reilly maybe, at the back. Tierney had not.
Then he had clicked to the next slide, the one he did not need to put up because everyone in the room knew it, and Conor had looked at the table in front of him.
Old Church Road. October fourth. Number 41, the yellow Colonial with the stone wall and the big copper beech, where a retired schoolteacher named Hortense Lacombe had lived alone since her husband died. She was eighty-four. She had been asleep. She had heard the glass go in the mudroom door and she had come downstairs in her nightgown with a flashlight and her husband's old field hockey stick, God help her, and somebody in the dark of the kitchen had put both hands on her shoulders and shoved her backward, not hard, she said later, almost gently, the way you would move a coat rack out of your way, and she had gone down on the tile and broken her hip in two places. She had lain on the kitchen floor for six hours until the woman who cleaned for her came in on Monday morning and found her. She had told the detectives, from the hospital bed at Northern Westchester, with her hair loose on the pillow and a tube in her arm, that there had been two of them, and that one of them had been a woman.
"I heard her," Mrs. Lacombe had said. "On the porch, outside. When they were leaving. She said, 'Come on, come on, the train.' A woman's voice." And then, according to the detective who had told it at roll call, she had added: "Not a young woman, I think. And an accent. I'm sorry. I couldn't tell you which."
Mrs. Lacombe had taught fourth grade at Wickham Falls Elementary for thirty-one years. She had taught Conor. She had taught him long division with a set of plastic counting bears in six colors that she brought in from home in a cookie tin, and she had kept him in from recess for a week in 1984 for punching Brian Dowd in the stomach, and on the last day of that week she had sat down across from him at the little table by the window and said, Conor, I'm not going to ask why you did it, because I think I know. I just want you to know that whatever is going on at your house, it is not your fault. And he had sat there with his face burning and hated her, and he had not understood until he was thirty what she had done for him in that one sentence, and he had never told her.
He had gone to see her at Northern Westchester on the fifth. He had stood at the foot of the bed in his uniform with his hat in his hands like a boy, and she had looked at him a long time, the way she used to look at the class over the tops of her glasses, and then she had smiled and said, "Conor Sheehan. Did you ever learn your sevens?" and he had laughed, and then for some reason his eyes had gone hot and he had had to look at the window. She was in a rehabilitation place now in Mount Kisco. She would probably not go home. Her son was coming from Oregon to look at the house with a realtor.
So: Sunday night. So: the late train. So: a woman's voice on a porch, not young, an accent. Conor had written it in his notebook in block capitals at the roll call on the fifth and he had looked at it every night since.