Billy met us and took Hector into custody. The arraignment was scheduled for the following morning. There was no rush, since Hector already had counsel, and any bail that he could post was not an option in a felony murder case. That done, I turned to something I had been anxious to do, and yet dreading all afternoon. I drove to Danny’s home in Beverly. Danny’s success as a jockey took him all over the East Coast, from Saratoga Springs in New York to Gulfstream in Florida, but his heart always remained on the north shore of Boston, where he and I had spent the better part of our teen years with our foster-father, Miles O’Connor. Miles had a daughter, Colleen. He raised her from the day his wife died in childbirth. If she’d been raised in a convent, she’d have had a more liberated upbringing. At the top of the list of negative worldly influences to be kept as far outside of her world as humanly possible were Miles’s live-in rescues, Danny Ryan and myself. We barely knew she existed until she was in her teens.
