by Ray Daniel
Copyright Information
Corrupted Memory: A Tucker Mystery © 2015 by Ray Daniel.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
First e-book edition © 2015
E-book ISBN: 9780738744247
Book format by Bob Gaul
Cover design by Ellen Lawson
Cover images: iStockphoto.com/4514278/©sorsillo
Editing by Nicole Nugent
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For my brothers, Bob and Tom.
acknowledgments
Thank you to my wife Karen for supporting my writing career in all ways possible. She’s lent me confidence, advice, critique, and editing at the times that I needed each of them. I wouldn’t be writing without her. She’s also an outstanding copyeditor.
Tom Fitzpatrick lent his outstanding copyediting skills to Corrupted Memory, reading an early copy and finding the spots where my meager understanding of comma usage let me down. Thank you, Tom, for taking the time to read and critique the manuscript.
Thank you to my agent, Eric Ruben, for being an early fan of this book and for finding it a home with Midnight Ink.
Speaking of Midnight Ink, thank you to Terri Bichoff for having faith in Corrupted Memory and Tucker, and to Nicole Nugent for saving my bacon with her remarkable fact-checking skills.
Thank you to Scott Aron Bloom, Kay Allerdt Helberg, and Tim McIntire for reading early versions of the book and giving me feedback. As always, thank you to Clair Lamb for her outstanding editorial guidance.
Finally, thank you to my friends at Mystery Writers of America and Sisters in Crime who make it so much fun to be part of the mystery-writing community.
Author’s Note
Corrupted Memory is a work of fiction. To be clear, the military aerospace company in the book, Global Defense Systems, is a fictional company. It does not exist and it is not a stand-in for any of today’s military aerospace companies.
I have had the opportunity to work with many people from the military aerospace industry. I have the upmost respect for the work they do, and I hope they enjoy reading Corrupted Memory as much as I enjoyed writing it.
One
Red Sox fans are nature’s yo-yos. On the way up, we experience an unreasonable exultation that assures us that all is right with the world, that the planets are aligned, and that God loves us. Then we crash, and as we fall we know that life is only suffering, that the world is a cold and malevolent place, and that love and passion are just ruses designed by a vengeful God to crush our spirits and kill our pathetic shoots of springtime hope.
It was a warm September night, and I was on the way up.
The Red Sox were winning. “Sweet Caroline” rang in the bottom of the eighth inning. And the seat next to me, instead of being empty, held a high school biology teacher named Lucy. We were on our third date, having navigated the shoals of introductions, coffee, and dinner to reach the point where I had invited her to a Red Sox game. Better yet, she had just invited me to her apartment to see a baseball autographed by Roger Clemens.
“Bum bum bum!” Lucy sang, pointing her finger at the field to punctuate each bum.
The song went on to say that good times had never seemed so good, and I had to agree. My seats are on the first base side of Fenway Park, up underneath the roof, protected from the rain in the fall and the sun in the summer. We had a clear view of the pitcher and plays at first base. My dad bought the seats in 1987, just after Bill Buckner and the 1986 Red Sox collapsed in the face of the Mets and the forces of history. He was sure that the Sox would be back in the World Series the following year, but he was wrong. The Sox didn’t see the World Series again until 2004, when we beat the Yankees four straight and swept the Cardinals.
I was at Game Four when Dave Roberts stole second base and reversed the curse, but my dad wasn’t. He had been dead for years, dropped by an aneurysm. I went to that game with my best friend, but I would have given anything for my dad to be standing next to me that day.
Lucy danced until the end of the song, her ponytail bobbing through the back of her pink Red Sox cap. We sat and I draped my arm around Lucy, squeezing her shoulder as she leaned into me. The Orioles bullpen was horrible. The Red Sox drew a walk, hit a single, and then hit a ground ball to the pitcher, who bobbled it, picked it up, looked at third, realized he was too late, spun to first, and realized he was too late again. Bases loaded.
I drank my beer and felt my Droid cell phone vibrate in my pocket. I looked at the screen. It was Bobby Miller, my buddy from the FBI.
Talking on a phone at Fenway was useless, so I texted.
At the ball game. Sox winning. Too loud to talk.
The phone buzzed again.
Need you now. Meet me at your house.
Lucy asked, “What’s up?”
“My buddy wants me to go home.”
“You’re not going, are you?”
I laughed and pointed the phone’s camera at her. “Smile.”
Lucy gave me a brilliant smile, all white teeth, blue eyes, and tanned September skin. I took the picture and showed it to her. She nodded and I sent it to Bobby’s phone with a message.
Busy tonight. See you tomorrow.
The Sox were already beating the Orioles 9–2, but the crowd smelled blood and was cheering for a complete drubbing. It looked like they were going to get it. The Sox cleanup hitter stepped to the plate.
My phone buzzed again.
Get your ducking app down here.
I showed my phone to Lucy. “He says I should get my ducking app down there.”
“Your ducking app? What’s a ducking app?”
I program computers for a living. I’m very good at it. I’m especially good at fixing bugs. All bugs look like this one: you have something that makes no sense, and you need to find the key that explains it. The answer usually comes in a flash of insight, like the one that hit me now.
I said, “Autocorrect. His phone thought it was fixing his spelling.”
Lucy grabbed my wrist, sending a thrill up my arm, and looked at the phone. “Fucking ass?�
��
“Bingo.”
“He said that you should get your fucking ass down there?”
“Yeah,” I said, typing.
Bite me.
The Sox grounded into a double play. The crowd moaned and sat. A few idiots started for the exits. Amateurs. You don’t sit through a whole baseball game and leave a half inning before it’s finished. That’s like leaving church in the middle of the closing prayers. Besides, half the fun of winning is listening to “Dirty Water” blare over the loudspeakers at the final out.
My phone buzzed again. I expected another badly spelled expletive, but instead Bobby had sent me a picture. I opened the picture and my stomach climbed through my chest. I put my beer down on my foot. It spilled under the seats. The crowd, the Sox, and even Lucy disappeared as I stared at a picture of a dead guy, lying on a brick sidewalk. The picture was small and grainy, obviously taken with Bobby’s camera phone.
It looked like my father.
My brain stuttered and locked up. The guy had my dad’s sandy brown hair, his pushed-in nose, his powerful, squat build. I had none of those things. I took after my mother, with her slender northern Italian roots. The guy’s eyes were open. Blood pooled on a brick sidewalk. I lived on a street with brick sidewalks.
I texted.
Is this guy in front of my house?
Yes.
I showed the picture to Lucy and said, “It looks just like my dad.”
She said, “But your dad’s dead, right?”
“Right.”
Another text from Bobby.
Now get down here.
Lucy stood. “Let’s go.”
Two
We emerged from Fenway’s staircase onto Yawkey Way, where the sausage vendors and T-shirt booths caused blobs of people to block the road. I took Lucy’s hand. We dodged down Yawkey toward Boylston. Walking home would take too long. I spotted a kid on a bicycle-powered rickshaw emblazoned with the logo of a local burrito company. I helped Lucy in and gave the kid a twenty. These kids worked for tips and they usually got paid at the end of the ride. By paying him first, I’d made him my buddy.
“Get us to Follen Street in the South End and crank on it.”
“You got it, dude!”
He darted the rickshaw out into Boylston Street traffic and headed downtown. Lucy slipped closer to me, our hips touching. We looked at the picture again.
“This can’t be my dad,” I said. “My dad’s dead.”
“I can see that it still bothers you,” said Lucy.
“It was years ago. I’m over it.”
“I guess so,” said Lucy. “It’s just that your hands are shaking.”
I held my hand out, palm down. The fingers bounced of their own accord.
I said, “That’s disturbing.”
Lucy put her arm around me and gave me a peck on the cheek. “It’ll be okay.”
A small dart of irritation shot through my stomach. I tensed, and Lucy took her arm back and sat facing forward.
“I shouldn’t have come,” she said.
“No. I’m glad you’re here. I’m sorry. This is just so bizarre.”
“Were you close to your dad?”
The kid slipped our rickshaw in front of a cab. The cabbie jammed his brakes and leaned on the horn. We had no seat belts. I imagined us sprawled across Boylston Street, cars bumping over our bodies.
“This was a bad idea,” I said.
“I think it’s fun,” said Lucy. She snuggled back in. I put my arm around her and steadied us in the rocking seat. Her question popped off the stack in my head: Were you close to your dad?
“Yeah. I was close to my dad,” I said. “I mean, I didn’t see him much, and we were very different people, but …”
“Different how?”
I slid into Lucy as the kid turned the rickshaw and drove over the Mass Pike bridge, down Dalton Street. The traffic lightened immediately. Other rickshaw drivers had congregated on the bridge like livery cab horses. The kid rang a little bell at them and they waved. We rode past Bukowski Tavern. I would have given anything to be sitting there instead of rushing to view a corpse. I pointed at the Tavern’s red facade. “We should have dinner there sometime.”
“Really? It looks like a hole in the wall.”
“Exactly. It’s my happy place.”
“I’d love to see your happy place.”
We pedaled past the Tavern. It was all downhill from here. We passed the dark expanse of the Christian Science reflecting pool and careened across Huntington Ave. I’d had enough. I called up to the driver, “You can leave us here.”
I helped Lucy out of the rickshaw and handed the kid another ten. “Thanks.”
“Sure thing, dude.” He pointed down the road to the corner of Follen, where a police car was flashing its lights. “Man, there are a lot of cops over there.”
“I know.”
I took Lucy’s hand. We walked toward the flashing blue lights.
Three
Confusing the South End with South Boston is viewed as an insult by the residents of both neighborhoods. South Boston considers itself a working-class Irish neighborhood where real men in hard hats drink coffee from the local Dunkin’ Donuts in the morning and beer from the local bar at night.
The South End, with its brick streets and houses, is better associated with Starbucks. It has been called artsy, gay, and “full of moonbats.” I’d call it diverse. The neighborhood was planned by Charles Bulfinch in the nineteenth century and was built when Boston replaced its swamps with brownstones. I live on the top floor of one of those brownstones—the one with a dead guy on the front stoop.
Lucy and I turned the corner to Follen. Bobby Miller was in a group of people surrounding a mass on the ground. With his bald head, barrel chest, and custom suit, Miller looked like a bowling ball on a job interview. We joined the group and stood next to Bobby. He glanced at me, saw Lucy, grabbed my arm, and pulled me aside. Lucy followed.
“Jesus, Tucker, you brought your date?”
“She’s standing right behind you,” I said. “Her name is Lucy.”
Bobby turned and shook Lucy’s hand, “Pleasure to meet you, Lucy. You take a very nice picture.” Then he spun back to me. “What the hell are you doing?”
I said, “A gentleman doesn’t dump his date in the Fenway Park grandstands.”
Bobby said, “A gentleman doesn’t bring his date to see his brother’s body in the street.”
Lucy put her hand to her mouth and looked at the covered body.
I said, “I’m sorry. My what?”
Bobby said, “Your brother. I’m sorry, man, I didn’t know that when I called you. We just found ID.”
“What are you talking about? I don’t have a brother.” I reached out and put my hand on Lucy’s back. She was tearing up. “It’s true.” I told her. “I don’t have a brother.”
Bobby said, “You mean, like he’s dead to you or something?”
“No, like he never existed. I’m an only child. I always wished I had a brother, but I don’t.”
Bobby beckoned me back to the body. Lucy followed and looked over my shoulder as he flipped the sheet off the face and shined his flashlight on it. The guy’s eyes were unblinking in the beam.
I’d seen pictures of my dad when he was twenty-something. They were taken during the ’60s. In a decade where you had to choose between hippie or establishment, he chose establishment. He was an engineer for a defense contractor and wore the crew cut and white shirt that was made famous by the NASA engineers during the space program. He worked for the same company until the day he died.
The guy under the sheet was a young version of my father. He looked just like my dad in those old pictures, except that he was the modern edition. He had a buzz cut instead of a crew cut. He wore a blue button-down shirt instead of a
white one. His button-down had a hole in it. His chest had been blown open. The two buttons over his sternum were gone. The pocket remained, with a logo on it. It was the logo for Global Defense Systems: GDS. My dad had worked at GDS.
I pointed to the logo. “So that’s why the FBI is interested in this.”
Bobby ignored the comment. He asked, “You don’t recognize this guy?”
I said, “Of course I recognize him. He looks just like my dad. It’s the only reason you got me out of Fenway.”
Bobby flopped the sheet back into place. “What does that tell you?”
“That there are people out there who look like my dad.”
“Here’s his ID. Check out his last name.”
Bobby handed me a Massachusetts driver’s license in a plastic bag. The license was blue, with a crappy picture of a guy who looked a lot like the one on the bricks. The license had a silver authentication shield across it and a little heart in the corner that told me someone was going to get this guy’s kidneys. The address in the center read Pittsfield, MA.
I said, “Pittsfield? That’s a hundred miles away. What was he doing here?”
Bobby said, “Read the last name.”
Lucy read the name from over my shoulder. “Tucker. His name was John Tucker.”
I said, “That’s my father’s name.”
Bobby said, “I thought you’d say that.”
“It doesn’t prove anything. It’s a coincidence.”
Bobby asked, “If your dad’s name was John, why did they name you Aloysius?”
“I was named for my dad’s father. He was killed at the Battle of the Bulge, and my dad wanted to honor him.”
“Jesus, by naming you Aloysius?”
I handed Bobby the license. “Can I take Lucy home now?”
A short Asian guy with a wide face and scraggly hair joined us. He asked Bobby, “Is this the brother?”
I said, “He’s not my brother.”
Bobby said, “This is Lieutenant Lee. He’s investigating your—John Tucker’s murder.”