Or it could have had nothing to do with me. This could be about Claire. He could have come into her house to cover up the same things I’d been hoping to discover. If I wanted to shine a light on everything that led up to her fall, maybe he wanted to bury it. It was a decent theory, except that so far I hadn’t found anything in the house worth killing for.
There was only one way to find out for sure. I didn’t like it, but I couldn’t think of any way around it. And I had a client to answer to. She would expect information. So I grabbed a flashlight I’d seen in the walk-in pantry, put on my shoes, and went out the front door. Standing on Claire’s topmost step, I scanned the park. I didn’t see the man I’d stabbed. In fact, I didn’t see anyone at all. But he couldn’t have gone far. And once I found the place where he fell, there’d be a trail to follow.
A hundred feet into the park, I found his blood on the grass. Where he’d been able to walk, the trail was harder to follow. The drips and spots were spread far apart, and hard to find in grass that hadn’t been cut in a week. But where he’d fallen, and crawled, the trail was obvious. Long smears of blood darkened the grass. Walking or crawling, he’d moved in the same general direction, a track that took him diagonally away from Beacon Street.
Charles Street cut the park in half, and he must have lingered under a tree there for a while, resting, before he crossed the street. He’d dropped his ski mask on the sidewalk, but I didn’t even think of touching it. It was heavy with his blood, and had hit the concrete like a paint-laden sponge. By the time he made it across the street, he was getting weaker. The blood was one long streak now—he was crawling, and he never got up again.
The end, for him, was against a wrought-iron fence that surrounded the graveyard abutting Boylston Street. I saw the leaning headstones, and heard the wind in the maple leaves, and then I saw him. He was sitting with his back to the fence and his legs out in front of him. His chin was on his chest. I turned off the flashlight and crouched next to him. The longer I stayed here, the more certain it was that a jogger would come past.
“Hey,” I said. I poked his shoulder with the butt of the flashlight. “Just tell me why.”
He didn’t answer. I nudged him a little harder with the light.
“Was it DeCanza that sent you?”
Again, he didn’t answer. I was ready to knock him on the forehead, but before I could, he began to list sideways. Slowly, like an old tree going over. He hit the footpath face-first, and didn’t move. I didn’t need to put my fingers on his neck. He’d stopped bleeding, which meant his heart was done beating.
I’d never killed a man before, in self-defense or otherwise. I knew that later on, I’d be thinking about this. If I made it back to my apartment on Grant Street, and if Agent White wasn’t there waiting for me, I’d lie in my bedroom with the door open and listen to the neon sign buzz through the night, picturing this moment. But right now, I needed to figure out what to do. I ran my hands over his pockets—he was wearing black mountaineering pants and a matching long-sleeved shirt—and found nothing but a subway card. I took it, because I’d touched it and I wasn’t wearing gloves anymore.
Of course he wasn’t carrying a wallet or a driver’s license. Which left one last option. Everything I knew about police investigations said not to do it. Common sense screamed no. But I needed to know who I’d just killed. I stood and turned him face-up with my foot. Then I used my phone to take a picture of his face.
I took the long way back to Claire’s house, walking until after sunrise. I had an urge to call my ex-wife. Juliette Vilatte was closer to my age than to Claire’s, and had grown up a hundred miles to the north, so she wouldn’t have known her. But little else separated them. They’d likely gone to the same sorts of Parisian prep schools, had probably attended the same fundraisers and charity balls. Their parents’ planes would have sat in nearly adjacent hangars in San Jose, from which they would have jetted off for their summers in Cannes and their weekends in Saint Vincent or Tahiti.
I hadn’t spoken to Juliette since we’d signed the settlement agreement. I hadn’t felt the slightest desire to talk to her until now. But maybe it was natural that I wanted to hear her voice. The first time I’d done real damage to another man, it had been Juliette who reassured me. Who had told me that it would be okay. Which was odd, because the man I’d attacked was the California Supreme Court justice who had been her boss. She’d begun her brief legal career as his law clerk, become his mistress somewhere in the middle of it, and ended it as his wife. Her father had smoothed that transition the best he could. Juliette had insisted. I stayed out of jail, and her father bought a son-in-law who was far more valuable and pliable than I’d ever been. I was still trying to figure out what Juliette had gotten out of the bargain.
But as much as I wanted to, I couldn’t call her. That was impossible.
So before the sky grew too bright, I found my way back to Beacon Street. Even by daylight, I couldn’t see any blood leading down the steps or across the sidewalk toward the park. I let myself inside. I couldn’t detect Claire’s perfume anymore. There was just the nasal-sting of bleach. It smelled like a cover-up.
11
I spent an hour checking the house for blood I’d missed on the first sweep. Inspector Chang could be here as soon as this evening. I didn’t want him to find a stray spot of blood on the wainscoting and decide to spray the floors with Luminol. If he did that, and then looked out the front window and noticed the Boston Police combing the park with K-9 units, it wouldn’t take him long to put the two together.
I showered in Claire’s bathroom, dressed in the clothes I’d been wearing, and went out. My phone’s map led me to a department store on Boylston Street, where I bought a button-down shirt, a tie, and a sport coat. I put them on in the store, standing in front of a mirror near the entrance. My back was already black and blue from the fall down the stairs, and I was wearing handprints all the way around my neck. But after I fastened the top button and cinched the Oxford knot, the bruises were out of sight. My upper lip was a little bit swollen, and that was it.
Outside, I found a cab and got a ride across the river to Harvard.
From the notebooks, I’d learned that the professor who’d so excited Claire last December was a writer named Julia Forrester. She taught investigative journalism in what sounded like a mostly self-directed class, and she had a long trail on the internet. She’d started out writing online, at places like Slate and Vice, before stepping up to Vanity Fair, and nearly ten years at The New Yorker. There was a three-year gap in her bylines, and then she’d reemerged with a book about miners and death squads in Brazil. She’d learned two local languages while living in a string of Amazon villages, and had come out of the jungle with a major book deal and an even bigger price on her head. Two years later, she detailed the ties between an Uzbeki crime family and the CIA. A sticker on the cover of that book—which I’d found well annotated on Claire’s shelf—announced that it was Soon to Be a Major Motion Picture.
Forrester had taken a visiting professor post last year, and Claire noticed. It was from Claire’s notebooks, and not online, that I learned Forrester’s office hours.
I got out of the cab at Harvard Square and backtracked on foot toward the Barker Center for the Humanities, following footpaths between the brick buildings and not making much eye contact with the kids I passed. I found a trash can and dropped in a rolled-up paper bag that contained my bloody shirt. I found a second one and dumped a sealed envelope with the knife.
Then I paused on a bench and checked the Boston Globe on my phone. There was a story, ten minutes old, about an apparent murder victim found next to the Central Burying Ground. There was no mention of the man’s name, or the fact that he’d left a blood trail hundreds of yards long leading back to Beacon Street, or that he’d dropped a black ski mask in the middle of the park. Not a usual piece of jogging attire for a June morning that had started out at seventy degrees. If the police knew all those things, they’d have reali
zed this wasn’t an ordinary mugging-gone-bad. I wondered, not for the first time, about cameras in the park. No one had seen me stab him, but a camera might have caught me following his blood trail and finding him. There was so much to worry about that the only solution was to let it all go. It would play out one way or another.
The building that housed Julia Forrester’s office was a giant brick pile, a mix between Monticello and a London train station. I found my way up a broad staircase to the second floor, located her office suite, and went in past an empty secretarial desk. Forrester’s door was open, and she was sitting behind a plain wooden desk. I recognized her from the jacket photos on her books. Curly brown hair, streaked with a little more gray than in the publicity shots. Horn-rimmed glasses in bright red, which drew attention away from the small scar just under her nose. There was a laptop in front of her, and she was writing. I knocked on the wall next to the door, and she looked up.
“Hi,” I said.
“Yes?”
“My name’s Lee Crowe.”
I stepped into her office and shut the door behind me. I took out my investigator’s license and handed it across the desk.
“I came out from San Francisco to see if I could meet you. I hope this is an okay time.”
“You’re not a student.”
“No.”
She pushed my PI card back without having given it more than a glance.
“If this is about something I wrote—”
“It’s about a student of yours—a former student. Claire Gravesend.” I saw her eyes refocus. She’d recognized Claire’s name. “Her mother hired me to look into all this.”
“All what?”
“You haven’t heard?” I asked. “She was in your class—”
“She withdrew,” Forrester said.
“So you haven’t heard.”
“Heard what?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Her mother said Claire admired you, that she’d sought you out. So I guess you might’ve been close. But Claire was found dead in San Francisco. Two days ago.”
I had no information that Claire had been close to anyone. Her class notes lacked any personal information. Olivia had told me that she’d spoken to Claire’s journalism professor. As far as I knew, she was the only person in Boston that Olivia had reached out to when her daughter went silent.
“How did it happen?” Forrester asked me.
“She went off a building on Turk Street, in the Tenderloin.”
“What do you mean, she went off a building?”
“Either she jumped or someone pushed her,” I said. “There was a car on the sidewalk, directly underneath. A Rolls Royce Wraith.”
“It was her car?”
I shook my head. But it was interesting she’d asked the question. She must have spent enough time around Claire, or done enough other research, to know about the money.
“It was there for a photo shoot,” I said. “Part of a magazine ad. It didn’t have anything to do with her.”
“As far as you know,” Forrester said.
I nodded.
“For all I know, she had a bone to pick with Rolls Royce and wanted to make an impression. But I doubt it.”
Forrester closed her laptop and leaned back in her chair.
“Olivia—the mother—said Claire was seeing you during office hours, starting September?”
Forrester nodded.
“She wanted to take my class. It was full. So she came to persuade me to accept one more student.”
“And she was successful?”
“She was very serious. Committed to it.”
“What exactly was this class?”
“Investigative journalism. Getting all the way into a story. Telling it in full. Truman Capote goes to Kansas and comes back with In Cold Blood. That was the model.”
“Or Julia Forrester goes to Brazil and comes back with a blockbuster, and a new scar,” I said. “I’m guessing everyone in the class was supposed to come up with a story?”
“That’s right.”
“What was Claire’s topic?”
“I know she had one,” Forrester said. “But what it was, exactly, I have no idea. She left before she submitted a topic for approval. She’d taken a bioethics course. And she was interested in stem cell research—controversial stuff, depending on which circles you run in.”
“That’s medical treatments they get from fetuses?”
“Embryos,” she said. “Totally different.”
I could write everything I knew about stem cells on a grain of rice. There’d be room left over for what I knew about bioethics, and the difference between an embryo and a fetus.
“You think she was writing about stem cells?” I asked.
“I’m just telling you the sorts of things that caught her interest. If she’d stayed through the class, we would have developed the concept. And she’d have gone out in the field to work the story.”
“Was she doing interviews?”
Forrester nodded, then pushed up her red glasses.
“What I knew about, it was all on background. Talking to professors here, and at MIT. Getting the lay of the land before she went out to ask hard questions.”
“Is it dangerous, sending kids out to dig things up?”
“All journalism is dangerous. If it’s any good.”
“What was she asking the professors?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know who she was talking to, or even what departments they were in.”
“Are all your student conferences that vague, or was she guarded?”
“She was guarded, and then some.”
“But she must’ve told you something. Enough that you made an exception and let her into your class.”
“She talked a good game,” Forrester said. “She told me the books she’d been reading.”
“The genetics stuff,” I said. “That’s what you’re talking about?”
Forrester nodded again.
“Did she withdraw from school to work on her story?”
“I don’t know why she left. She didn’t stop by to tell me.”
“But you talked to her mother?”
“That’s right.”
“Did she seem concerned?”
I saw her eyebrows arch up above the top of her bright red glasses.
“Isn’t she the one who hired you?”
“I’m looking at every angle,” I said. “Did she seem concerned?”
“She was worried enough to fly across the country and track me down,” Forrester said. “She struck me as extraordinarily measured. Composed. But that doesn’t mean she wasn’t concerned.”
“Did you ever see Claire’s back?” I asked.
“Excuse me?”
“Her back,” I said. “Maybe in a low-cut dress, or a tank-top. Something that would show her skin.”
“I don’t know what you’re getting at.”
“You don’t know about the scars?”
“What scars?”
“So you never saw them?”
“I never saw her wearing anything but sweaters and jackets. She started coming to see me in September, and it was already fall weather. This is Boston, not California. What scars, Mr. Crowe?”
I took out my phone and found the autopsy photo, zoomed in on it to crop out the enormous impact wounds on her buttocks and the back of her head.
“Her mother wouldn’t tell me what they were,” I said. “And I don’t have a clue. This is from her autopsy. The ME noted them in her surface examination. She didn’t speculate on what they were—just well-healed old scars. Not a contributing factor in her death.”
I handed the phone to her. She took off her glasses and held the screen close.
“Jesus,” she said.
“I know.”
“I never saw these.”
“Not even the ones on her neck?”
She shook her head. She touched the phone’s screen, zooming out to see the whole photograph. She winced and handed the phone
back.
“I wouldn’t have seen those,” Forrester said. “She always had her hair down. Sometimes a scarf. You’ll ask how I remember, so I’ll tell you. She had very nice scarves.”
“Always?” I asked. “Hair down, neck covered?”
“I never saw it any other way.”
The nanny next door had given me a dead-on description of Claire. And she’d been wearing her hair up. Maybe she put it up in the summer, when it was warmer out. But Forrester was talking about sweaters and jackets and scarves. Indoors. As though Claire was deliberately hiding her skin.
“Did you have anything else, Mr. Crowe?”
“One thing—did Claire use a laptop?”
“Of course.”
“She took notes by hand, but wrote papers on a computer?”
“I assume so,” she said. “She brought one in here once, when she was trying to get into the class—she handed it to me and showed me her course transcripts.”
I got up to leave, then paused and gave her one of my cards.
“Call me if you think of anything else. What she might have been writing about, where she might have gone after she left school. Anything.”
“All right.”
I opened the door and went back to the stairs. There was enough information from Forrester to keep me thinking for a while. At least I knew my instincts were still intact. I’d searched Claire’s house from top to bottom but hadn’t found a laptop. It didn’t seem plausible that she wouldn’t own one. If she’d left school to work on a paper, she’d have taken the computer with her. I had no idea where she’d been staying for the last six months. If I could figure that out, maybe I’d find the laptop.
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