by Keith Ablow
I actually fell asleep for about fifteen minutes, which left me feeling more tired rather than less, and did something very bad to my back, the middle of which felt as if a clamp had been applied to the base of my right rib cage and tightened until my diaphragm ballooned up into my chest cavity.
I pulled myself out of bed and struggled into the kitchen. I gulped down a glass of milk to calm my stomach, so I could tolerate another couple Motrin. I swallowed them, then gritted my teeth and stretched a little to each side, which nearly brought me to my knees before it started to bring me down to a tolerable level of pain.
I got in my truck and headed toward Boston. Route 1 was empty, and I flew over the Tobin Bridge, around the curves of Storrow Drive, and off the exit ramp to the Suffolk County House of Corrections.
Boston 's Big Dig construction had chewed up most of the parking near the place. The rest was reserved for Corrections Department personnel. I took a spot about five blocks away. I felt for my pistol, then realized I had left it back at the loft. Great timing.
I got out of the truck and walked, more quickly than I would have in daylight, checking around me now and again. I smiled to think what Laura Mossberg would have to say about my behavior-more evidence of post-traumatic stress disorder, my condition having deteriorated after being jumped.
A homeless man stepped into my path about a block from the front door of the jail. His face was covered with a couple days of beard, his eyes were bloodshot, and his breath stunk of alcohol. "You have my money," he barked.
I took a step back. That had to be the most interesting way I'd been asked for a handout in my life. I told him so, reaching into my pocket, watching his hands to make sure they didn't disappear into his clothing and reappear with a weapon.
"You gotta be different," he said. "Everybody's heard it all these days."
We weren't more than a quarter mile from MGH. "I guess you could grab a coffee and head in for a detox," I said.
"I'd rather grab a beer," he said. He winked.
A lot of people would have taken that bit of honesty as a good enough reason to keep their money, but I knew what it was like to need a beer. "Here you go." I handed him two dollars.
"I gave you a five," he said. "Where's my five?"
I smiled. "Now, you're pushing it. Good luck." I walked by him.
I hadn't gotten ten yards down the sidewalk when I heard footsteps behind me. I turned around and saw the same man walking toward me at a good clip, his eyes more focused than before, one of his hands down by his side, clutching something that glittered in the light drifting down from the street lamps. I thought of running, but he had closed to within five feet of me.
He smiled, his mouth full of perfect-looking, glistening white teeth, a mouth that seemed to prove he had been laying in wait for me, pretending to be homeless. He raised his arm above his head.
I reared back, cocked my fists karate-style, and waited for him to come a foot or two closer. If all he had was a knife, I'd have him on the ground before he could use it.
He stopped, dropped his arm. "I'm sorry," he said. "I scared you." He slowly held up a silver crucifix. "I forgot," he said. "Thank you. And God bless you." He smiled that toothy grin again, then pointed at his mouth with the crucifix. "Tufts Dental. Free clinic," he said, as if reading my mind. "Got 'em today." Then he turned around and started walking away in the direction of Charles Street, probably to get that beer he wanted, celebrate his new teeth, who knows?
I took a deep breath, talked my heart down to a regular rhythm, and headed for the jail. Maybe a call to Laura Mossberg, I thought to myself, wouldn't be such a bad idea, after all.
Within a couple blocks of the building, I saw television crews starting to swarm into position. I quickened my pace. I didn't want to talk about Billy's case until I had come up with just the right message to counter the story Bishop, O'Donnell, and Harrigan were spinning.
North Anderson had done his job paving the way for my visit with Billy, so I got my visitor's badge at the front desk without any trouble. I signed in, walked through the metal detector, then passed through three separate iron doors, each of which opened as the one behind it slammed closed.
Despite all the times I have visited prisons, I have never lost the feeling of melancholy that coming and going from such places provokes in me. I feel as if I am drowning in questions. By what twists of fate are these people locked up? Who still remembers them as little boys, full of innocence and wonder? And this, getting to the heart of the matter: By what good fortune do I walk the streets a free man? Because I do not feel the great distance between myself and these rapists and murderers and thieves that I presume most others do. I feel separated from them by something wafer-thin and translucent. I think they sense it, too. I carry the scent of their pack. But for the occasional kind words from my unpredictably violent father, but for a teacher in sixth grade who took a liking to me and told me I would amount to something, but for who knows what other myriad, minuscule details of my life story, I can easily imagine that I would be an inmate, too. And I feel this especially when leaving a prison's barbed-wire walls, returning my visitor's badge and retrieving my medical license. I half-expect a dubious stare from an omniscient front desk clerk, a finger raised, Just one moment, then an alarm sounding, a rush of booted feet coming my way, my sentence shouted at me as I am carried off to a cell, the din all but obscuring my plea: "Guilty. Guilty as charged. Guilty as hell."
I took a long, wide corridor toward the interview rooms. The fluorescent lights made my skin look cadaverous. The floor, a high-gloss, gray linoleum, translated every one of my steps into an ominous echo bouncing off bright white, cinder-block walls.
A guard met me at the end of the corridor and brought me to Billy Bishop, already seated at a small table, inside a six-by-eight-foot room with a glass door. He was wearing the standard-issue orange jumpsuit, with a black number stenciled across his chest. He stood up. He looked every bit as wiry as he had at Payne Whitney, but all the brashness had drained out of his posture. "I wish you had lent me that money," he said, forcing a grin. "I could have been long gone."
The guard and I exchanged reassuring glances, and he left. I stood just outside the room. "I'm glad you're all right," I said.
Billy made a display of looking around him. "I wouldn't say this is all right," he said.
I nodded toward the table. "Let's talk," I said.
He sat down. I took the seat opposite him. I noticed that the fingers of his hands were laced together so tightly that his knuckles had gone white.
"Strange place," he said, his voice suddenly a sixteen-year-old's, full of worry.
"It is." I paused. "Tell me how you're doing."
"How am I doing? I'm done," he said, his eyes showing none of their old fire. "Win won."
"Not yet," I said. "We're still working."
He closed his eyes and nodded. "They have me in protective custody, because I'm accused of hurting… killing a baby. I guess that ranks me with the guys who like sex with kids. If they could get at me, they'd-" He stopped and looked straight into my eyes.
Being imprisoned is more stressful than many men can stand. But being imprisoned as a pariah, a target, makes everything else look tame. "I want to ask you straight out," I said. "Did you have anything to do with what happened to Brooke or Tess?"
He kept looking right at me, never blinking, and shook his head.
"You didn't," I said. I wanted him to speak the words.
"I felt bad for the twins," he said. "They were born at the wrong time, into the wrong family. Like me, losing my parents. I didn't have any desire to hurt them."
I nodded. "I'm going to help find an attorney to represent you," I said. "In the meantime, you've got to try to keep your mind busy while you're in here. And you've got to try to stay hopeful."
"That's a long yard," he said. "Game's about played, don't you think?"
"It's not over. I promise you."
Billy's eyes filled up. He looked a
way while he struggled to hold back his tears. Then he took a deep breath and looked back at me. "I've got one idea," he said. "It's my last shot, or I wouldn't even mention it."
"What's that?"
"If Garret saw something the night Brooke was murdered, something about Darwin, would his word mean anything in court? Would a jury ever believe what he had to say?"
I thought about all the circumstantial evidence linking Darwin Bishop to the crime. An eyewitness, especially Bishop's son, might well be enough to make jurors believe Billy had been wrongly accused. "I think his testimony could change everything," I said.
"You should ask him, then," Billy said.
"I did," I said.
"That was before they caught me. Ask him again."
"Why don't you tell me?" I said. "What will Garret say that he saw? He must have told you."
Billy shook his head. "That's not up to me to talk about."
I wasn't sure why Billy would maintain a code of silence around something that might get him off charges of attempted murder and murder. "Why not? Why can't you talk about it?"
"Because I figure there's a good chance the jury won't budge, even with Garret's testimony, and then I'll get put away for life, and he'll be all alone with the devil. Just Garret and Darwin. If it were me, I don't think I'd take that risk. I mean, we're not that close. I'm not his real brother. And I've done some rotten things since I moved in with him. The stealing and all that. He would have been better off without me there."
My heart went out to Billy at that moment. He had lost his family in Russia and hadn't ever really been a full member of the Bishop family. Julia hadn't really favored his adoption, after all. Maybe that was part of the reason he'd started getting into trouble in the first place. "I'll ask Garret to think about it," I said. "You should ask him, too. Because it really could turn the key and get you out of here."
He nodded to himself, glanced at me, then looked down at the table. "If I did get released…" he started, then stopped short.
"Go on," I encouraged him. I was glad he could at least entertain the possibility that he'd go free.
"Nothing," he said. "It's stupid."
"Try me," I said.
He just shrugged.
"I've said more stupid things in my life than I can count," I assured him. "You'll never catch up."
That got him to smile. He glanced at me again, a little longer this time. "Well, if I ever did get out of here, I wouldn't have anywhere to go. They'd never take me back home." He cleared his throat. "Not that I'd go there, anyway."
"That can all get worked out," I said. "Between the Department of Social Services and Nantucket Family Services there are…"
"What I'm getting at is… Well, maybe I could kind of crash with you a while," he said. " 'Cause I think I could be different than the way I've been. If I had someone around I trusted. You know?" He looked at me, for my reaction.
I was slow to respond because at least half my mind was occupied with thoughts of Billy Fisk, how things might have been different for him if I'd been willing to go out on a limb.
Billy looked embarrassed. "It is a stupid idea. I mean…"
"I'd be willing to give it a try," I said.
"You would?" His voice was equal parts surprise, doubt, and relief.
"Sure," I said. "Why not? What have we got to lose?"
Billy and I said our good-byes, and I headed out of the prison. A prison guard friend of Anderson 's escorted me to a back exit so I could circle around to my car without being hounded by the media. "They'll be waiting for you," he explained, handing over copies of the Boston Globe and Boston Herald. Both papers, apparently worried about exhausting their readers' appetites for the Bishop family saga, had run stories about me. The headlines were typical tabloid trash: "Doc in Hostage Drama Back for Billionaire Babies" and "He Doesn't Shrink From Murder." The photographs of me that accompanied the articles had been shot during my testimony years ago in Trevor Lucas's very public murder trial.
All in all, I knew the coverage wasn't a bad thing. The media would be primed to listen to the message about Billy that Anderson and I hoped to get out. I just had to be careful to pull the trigger at the right time.
It was 4:10 a.m. En route home, I called the chemistry laboratory at Mass General to check on Tess's blood work. The laboratory technician told me the toxic screen had been negative; no new substance had been found in the baby's bloodstream. That ruled out Julia having slipped Tess anything to slow her breathing-at least anything recognizable by routine testing.
I called North Anderson next. He'd been in touch with Art Fields about the prints Leona had lifted from inside the prescription bottle. Three individuals-including Darwin Bishop, but not Billy Bishop-had touched the inner surface. No surprises there. "I would guess the other sets belong to Julia and maybe to the pharmacist who filled the prescription," Anderson said. "So that's another chink in the armor of Harrigan's case against Billy." He paused. "How did your visit go with him? They let you in, didn't they?"
"I just finished," I said.
"How does he look to you? Is he holding up?"
"He's lost some weight. And he's scared. But he hasn't lost hope."
"Good for him," Anderson said. "He's a tough kid, then. Did he give us anything we can use?"
"He thinks Garret may be holding something back," I said. "He wants us to ask him one more time whether he saw anything the night Brooke was killed."
"It's going to be hard to get access to him, but we can give it a shot."
"It's the best one we have," I said.
"You're headed my way then?" he asked.
"First thing."
"Call me before you leave. I'll swing by the airport and pick you up."
"Will do."
I took the left onto Winnisimmet Street, heading to my loft. Luckily, I happened to glance down the first cross street, called Beacon. I noticed two of Darwin Bishop's Range Rovers parked halfway down the block, engines running. That was a very bad sign. I drove past my building and saw a couple of Bishop's men huddled in the entry way, either politely buzzing my apartment or, more likely, getting ready to jimmy the front door.
With my wound still howling at me and my gun on the coffee table five stories up, I wasn't about to go looking for trouble. I figured I'd travel real light to Nantucket, buy myself a change of clothing on the island. I needed a new pair of jeans and a new black T-shirt, anyhow. My favorite set was bloodstained, and the T-shirt had a nasty tear across the back, to boot.
I turned up Front Street and drove straight for Logan Airport and the first Cape Air commuter flight of the morning.
Anderson picked me up at 7:30 a.m., an hour before his scheduled meeting with Mayor Keene. We headed over to the temporary State Police headquarters for the Bishop investigation, a specially decked out trailer that had been sited next to the Nantucket Police Station.
Brian O'Donnell greeted us cordially enough, maybe because he figured Anderson was about to be fired, anyhow.
As we walked through the strategy room, its conference table loaded with maps of the island, its walls covered with aerial photographs of the varied terrain, I managed to hold back from needling O'Donnell about the fact that Billy had apparently escaped the island before all the ATVs and choppers started scrambling through cranberry bogs and hidden forests.
Anderson showed less restraint. "Did they use infrared heat-seeking devices out there in the moors?" he asked O'Donnell.
"I believe so," O'Donnell said, without breaking stride.
"Anything turn up? A lost dog or cat, or something? That might make an interesting human interest story for New England Cable News, trigger some goodwill toward the department. You always want to have something to show for a production as expensive as what went down around here."
"We got what we were looking for," O'Donnell said, turning to smile at us for the briefest moment. "That's all that matters."
O'Donnell's office occupied the last third of the trailer. He took a
seat behind a folding aluminum table he was using as a desk. We each took one of the plastic chairs opposite him. He laced his fingers behind his neck. "Gentlemen, how can I help you this morning?" he asked.
I got right to the point. "I'd like to interview Garret Bishop one more time," I said.
"Impossible," O'Donnell said.
"Why is that?" Anderson asked.
"You already know why. The investigation is wrapped up. Garret's given his statement. We have a suspect under arrest. Billy will be indicted by the grand jury within a day or so."
I heard O'Donnell loud and clear. Don't rock the boat. "I think Garret may be able to add critical information about what happened in the Bishop household the night Brooke died," I said.
"We have a clear picture," O'Donnell replied, with a grin. He glanced at Anderson in a way that seemed to telegraph that he'd seen the photograph of him with Julia on the beach. He let his not-so-subtle double meaning sink in for a few seconds. "The picture's been developing ever since Billy Bishop tortured his first animal. From there, he's escalated. Breaking and entering. Destruction of property. Arson. Murder. We've been over this ground."
"That picture doesn't fit with the fingerprint evidence I shared with you from the state laboratory," Anderson said.
"It doesn't need to fit that data," O'Donnell countered. "'Unless you're a Navy Seal, you're not going to get into and out of a property with no evidence you were ever there. The important thing for Billy, given that his hands had been all over that house for years anyhow, would be to keep his prints off anything directly linked to the mayhem he committed while inside. It's simple enough. He wore gloves. End of story."
"I don't think you'll get a conviction with the information you have," I said. "Garret might actually make that easier. If he tells us anything, it might cut against Billy, not for him. I have no idea."