Third Rail

by Rory Flynn

  The organ music rises as the minister puts on his glasses and begins to speak. Harkness stands with the congregation. He hears fragments of the eulogy for the late Robert Hammond—hard-working man, committed to his family, survivor of tragedy—as he walks quietly down the aisle, gliding past the good citizens of Nagog and pushing through the heavy doors.

  ***

  From the edge of the woods, Harkness takes a closer look at the smudged white house. It looks abandoned, windows sheathed in opaque plastic, lumber scattered on the front lawn. Three tilted gables jut from the roof, covered with rippling blue tarps. Misshapen boxes of additions trail behind the house until it connects to a small outbuilding. In the field behind the house, a small crew is building a stage, their hammer strikes echoing. At the far edge of the field behind the house, the barn’s sloping roof is a patchwork of missing shingles and thriving moss.

  Harkness reaches into the inside pocket of his leather jacket for the metal case. He opens the digital wiretap. Patrick didn’t want to let it leave Narco-Intel, reminding Harkness that it costs about ten thousand dollars, which he already knows. And it requires a court order, a technicality that Harkness also knows about, but decided to skip.

  He puts on the black headphones and points the device at Dex’s house, tracing a path along the eaves, braided with cables, each ripe with data.

  The screen starts to glow.

  One by one, their screens pop up—e-mail accounts, blogs, and a couple of porn sites. Someone’s watching a Hitchcock movie, the one with the swooping biplane. Even with Dex at a funeral, his house has more traffic than an Internet start-up. Music blares and people chatter.

  His warning to Mouse didn’t make a difference. No one is leaving.

  Harkness watches for a few minutes as fast keystrokes send more data beaming out from the tilted house. There’s no mention of drugs. Or the captain. They aren’t stupid.

  Dex’s friends keep going back to a password-protected site that shows nothing but a few words.

  Headless at Freedom Farm. Halloween night.

  Come free your mind. A detailed agenda

  will be provided free of charge.

  For a moment, Harkness wonders what kind of party needs an agenda before he remembers the other name for Third Rail.

  ADA will be provided free of charge. Clever. And tempting.

  A gleaming dot wanders around the screen like a bee. Harkness clicks on it and a registration form pops up—name, e-mail address, favorite number, mother’s middle name, secret vice. In exchange, you get the password to a party and free drugs that might kill you.

  Harkness closes the silver case and slips back into the thick woods.

  A narrow, meandering path cut through the tall grass leads from the house to the red barn. A century ago, children wandered the path at daybreak to milk the cows. But what makes the barn so popular now?

  Harkness walks out on the field, cautious to keep the barn between him and the house. The heavy sliding doors are locked, but a small side door opens with a shoulder slam. Inside the cavernous barn, there’s a stack of lumber on one side, next to a radial saw circled by a narrow band of sawdust. Harkness walks closer, picks up a pinch of sawdust and smells it, finding it almost scentless, resin dried. Work on the house stopped months ago, when Dex and his friends found something more profitable to do with their time. Next to the back wall wait a couple of fifty-gallon barrels stuffed with trash.

  From outside, the barn ends with a row of high windows, but inside it’s windowless, the white drywall quilted with nail-gun dents. Even a quick look shows that the barn’s shorter on the inside than the outside. He walks to the white wall and feels along it for some kind of door, but finds nothing. The sawdust is tracked with dozens of footprints. Harkness shoves one barrel of trash and it glides across the floor. The other is locked to the floor with an unlikely set of brass nautical latches. He unfastens them and pushes the barrel aside, lifting a heavy wooden hatch to reveal wooden stairs that lead down into darkness.

  In the light from his cell phone, Harkness climbs down the stairs, walks a few feet, then climbs another set of stairs up into the cordoned-off end of the barn, where a bright room waits. Beneath blazing overhead lights, an intricate maze of glass tubes rises like coral from steel flasks and plastic drums. The droplets turn from clear to amber as they traverse the intricate apparatus. The room is filled with the low burbling of fermentation and distillation and the hiss of burners.

  Harkness has seen dozens of meth labs in backyards and back bedrooms, each jiggered together with duct tape, soda bottles, and science hose. But Dex’s lab—and he has to assume this is Dex’s work—is immaculate and beautiful, a glass reef of pipettes as brilliantly crafted and delicate as a spider’s web glowing in morning sunlight. The windows, painted black, shut out the world to create a private universe.

  The lab inspires a reverential awe, as if salvation pours from the condensation tank into a half-full Erlenmeyer flask.

  On one side of the lab there’s a desk with a laptop, a row of colored notebooks, and schematic diagrams pinned to the wall. On the other side wait racks of hundreds of familiar amber vials, some filled and closed, others awaiting the precious syrup. And neatly marked boxes of chemicals, herbs, and other raw materials line the wall.

  Harkness looks at the vials for a moment and reaches out to lift the rack and smash it. Instead, he plucks a couple of full vials from the rack and shoves them in his jacket pocket.

  He climbs down the stairs and back up into the barn, where he drags the barrel of trash over the opening and locks it down.

  His phone vibrates—a text from Thalia tells him Candace and Dex just left the church. Peering outside, he sees the stage builders walking across the field, hammers still in their hands, on the path toward the barn. In the final seconds before he has to slip out the side door and into the woods, Harkness rummages through the trash barrels, looking for insights no digital device could uncover.

  Beneath a layer of newspaper waits a jumble of dozens of empty Chinese takeout containers, still crusted with black bean sauce and maggots of old rice.

  Each bears the bright red 0 of the Zero Room.

  ***

  Late into the night, Harkness sits at the kitchen table, staring at his laptop and sorting through hundreds of Jeet’s photos. He’s creating a Greatest Hits of boldface names from the permeable worlds of Boston crime and politics. Then one inexplicable photo stops him cold.

  “Thalia.”

  “What?” She’s painting her toenails on the edge of the bathtub.

  “Come here for a second.”

  “They’re wet.”

  “Walk on your heels.”

  When she’s standing behind him, he zooms in on one section of a photo on a relatively quiet night in the back room of the Zero Room—a couple of strippers down to their thongs and bras; a serious-looking older man with a short gray beard; Mach and his slit-eyed henchmen; a famous chef with perfect hair and his Japanese girlfriend, ragdoll drunk.

  “Who’s this?” He points out a solitary figure sitting in a booth across from the gray-bearded man.

  “Don’t you know?”

  “Of course I do. I just want to make sure I’m right. Ever see him at the Zero Room?”

  “Nope, never did.” Thalia walks back to the corner of the loft. “But everyone goes to the Zero Room eventually. It’s like a magnet for lost souls.”

  22

  “BILL THOUGHT OF YOU as the son he never had, you know,” says Katherine Munro, an old-style Scottish mum with silver hair and pink-flecked skin. She’s friendly on the outside, steely on the inside, like a butcher knife sheathed in a knit tea cozy.

  “Yes, I do.” Harkness perches on a brittle side chair in the Munros’ living room, now crowded with flowers and cards, pies and cakes.

  “Thought the world of you. Loved his daughters, of course. But Bill was a man’s man, as they tend to say.”

  “Yes, he was.” During the first dark months aft
er the BPD put Harkness on administrative leave, the captain invited him to the Munros’ simple house for many quiet dinners. With their daughters in college, they were glad to have Harkness for company. Over boiled beef, roast potatoes, and good whiskey, they talked about Nagog—how the farmers were dying off and the developers swooping in, how they hoped that the town would never really change no matter how much new money arrived.

  “You’ve been talking to Sergeant Dabilis, yes?”

  “A nice enough man,” she says. “But a bumbler.”

  “Can’t argue with that, Mrs. Munro. He told me I’m not allowed to talk to you. Or even come here this evening.”

  “Why not? You’re a friend of the family. All of Bill’s closest friends have come around. It’s what you do when someone . . . when someone passes.”

  “Sergeant Dabilis is running the investigation and I’m supposed to stay completely clear.”

  Mrs. Munro puts down her teacup to clatter in its saucer. “He’s already making a mess of it.”

  “How?”

  “Showed me some . . . papers . . . some old electronic mails supposedly sent to him from William. They were truly disturbing. And they didn’t sound at all like Bill. After thirty years of marriage, I know what my husband sounds like.”

  Harkness knows how simple it would be to backdate fake e-mails and make them look like they came from the captain. Even Sergeant Dabilis could do it. “What were they about?”

  “About how he hated his life, and how he was desperately in need of more money.”

  “Really?”

  “Now, that last part might have a grain of truth in it, Edward. Look around here.” She waves at the simple room. “It’s not like we’re living in luxury. But we certainly get by.”

  Harkness notes the slip. They got by. Now, everything is less certain.

  “William was not a man who indulged in appetites and sin,” Mrs. Munro says. “Not liquor, fancy food, gambling, other women. Beyond his family, his work was what he loved and held dear. You know that. He was a leader.”

  “Of course, one of the best,” Harkness says.

  “Everyone carries something with them as they make their way through the world—something they want but can’t have, or a disappointment over something that never came to pass,” she says. “But he bore his small burdens well.”

  “Gracefully, even,” Harkness says.

  “So I don’t believe that he killed himself, not for a moment,” she says. “None of us do. He was a good Catholic and a devoted husband and father. Not the kind to just go out some night and throw himself off a bridge.”

  “Not at all,” Harkness says.

  “Only selfish men commit something as irresponsible and cruel as suicide,” Mrs. Munro says. “He wasn’t a selfish man.”

  An ancient telephone wire, painted into the ceiling molding, winds along the edge of the room. Harkness traces its progress and thinks about the conversations that once coursed through it—the captain calling to say good night to his young daughters, the captain taking important calls from headquarters. Not desperate calls, not late-night rants or early-morning lies.

  “I’m sorry.” Mrs. Munro reaches over and puts her soft hand over his. “I meant nothing by that last remark, Edward. Your father wasn’t selfish, I’m sure.”

  “Actually, he was,” Harkness says. “That and a lot of other things, some good, some bad. Like everyone.”

  “Yes, like everyone.” Mrs. Munro’s eyes shine with loss and anger. “The dead can’t tell us what they were thinking. That’s the terrible part of it, Edward. I have so many questions for Bill and I don’t know who to ask.”

  “I know that feeling.”

  “I’m sure you do,” she says. “Anyone who’s lost someone close to them is left with unfinished business.”

  Harkness shifts the conversation gently. “I was surprised to hear Captain Munro had health problems, ma’am.”

  “What problems?”

  “Didn’t he have some kind of leukemia?”

  Mrs. Munro shakes her head. “No, Bill was very healthy. Never missed a day at work. Always got a clean bill of health at the doctor’s. I would know. I always accompanied him to make sure he actually went to his annual checkup. He hated doctors almost as much as lawyers.”

  “Sorry, I must have heard wrong,” Harkness says.

  Mrs. Munro stands and straightens her black dress. She walks into the kitchen and returns carrying a thick white envelope with Harkness’s name written on the front in the captain’s familiar, precise hand. “I found this in his desk,” she says. “I’m assuming it’s some kind of police business.”

  Harkness takes the envelope. “I’m sure it is,” he says. “Thank you.”

  “If you hear anything at the station, anything I should know, I hope you’ll pass it along to me,” she says. “I don’t have electronic mail, but I think you know where you can find me.” She smiles. “Somewhere between this house and Saint Michael’s Parish.”

  “I hope you’ll let me help out in any way that I can, Mrs. Munro.” Harkness stands. “I loved the captain. I really did. From when I was just a boy.”

  “Of course, Edward,” she says, then stops. “I believe there’s one way that you could help honor his memory. One that could ease the burden of his passing.”

  “What would that be, ma’am?”

  Mrs. Munro’s hand tightens on his and she pulls him close. He smells whiskey and toothpaste.

  “Find whoever drowned my husband, Edward. Hunt him down and make him pay. Without an ounce of mercy.”

  ***

  The floorboards creak as Harkness paces around the loft.

  “Nothing you can do can get Mach to call tonight,” Thalia says. “I left a message that said we knew he had your gun and we were ready to deal. But he does whatever he wants, whenever he wants.”

  Harkness knows that cases aren’t always about action, about breaking down doors and barging into apartments. There are lulls and empty stretches waiting for one piece of data to show up and click into place—though this realization doesn’t make the waiting any easier.

  Thalia goes to the fridge and pours two iced coffees. “Here, drink this. We can get all wired and stay up all night waiting.”

  A week ago, she would have been handing him a bottle of whiskey. Harkness welcomes this cleaning up of their act. Thalia is less convinced.

  “Got any ideas about how to keep busy until the phone rings?”

  Thalia reaches to her shoulders to push the straps of her dress to the side. The dress falls to her feet like a stage scrim to reveal her breasts and the auburn delta between her pale, strong legs.

  “May not be that original,” she says. “But it definitely passes the time.”

  When Thalia’s cell phone finally rings, gray morning light is already filtering through the loft’s tall windows. She jumps up from the futon and stalks across the dark loft.

  She sits at the kitchen table and shouts in what sounds like Hmong to Harkness. The only words in English are motherfucker and douchebag.

  Thalia clicks the phone closed.

  “You speak Hmong?”

  She nods. “Mach taught me a little on slow nights at the bar.”

  Harkness sits next to her. “What’d he say?”

  “Says he’ll think about selling your gun back to you.”

  “Think about it?”

  “It’s just his way of starting the negotiations.”

  Negotiating with a grudge-holding sociopath is a challenge, one that Harkness would rather tackle himself. But only Thalia can get through to Mach. She’s an insider—though how much of one isn’t clear.

  “What does he want?”

  Thalia shakes her head. “Wouldn’t say. Wants us to make an offer.”

  “Any ideas?”

  “Fitzgerald and his chums were willing to pay ten grand for it just to fuck with you,” Thalia says. “Now Mach’s going to want even more.”

  Harkness closes his eyes. His G
lock is worth about seven hundred dollars without the extortion bonus. “That’s crazy.”

  “Besides a lot of cash, Mach wants Jeet’s photos—prints, files, everything.”

  “Surprise.” Somewhere in Dorchester, mayoral candidate John Fitzgerald is sweating Guinness.

  “So what do you think he’d take?”

  Thalia shakes her head. “I don’t know, Eddy. What does it matter? We don’t have that kind of cash.”

  Harkness walks to the refrigerator and pulls open the freezer door. He reaches his hand behind the bag of flour and the ice trays, then tosses the frost-rimed Apple Store bag on the table.

  “What the fuck is this?”

  “My offshore bank account.”

  “Really, Eddy.”

  “You don’t want to know,” Harkness says. “And I don’t want to tell you.”

  Thalia opens the bag and flips through the stacks of cash. “Jesus, Eddy. That’s a lot of cash.”

  “Depends on how you look at it,” he says. “Tourists drop that on a couple of handbags and dinner on Newbury Street.”

  “We could get the hell out of Boston.” Thalia’s eyes widen. “Move to New York and start over. Think about it.”

  “I have, believe me.”

  “Might be a smart move.” Thalia lights a cigarette, her last remaining vice, as far as Harkness can tell. Besides the occasional lie. “Maybe we should short him and keep some of the money.”

  “We’re just going to make him an offer, pay him, and be done with it.”

  “Mach isn’t just going to take your money and hand you your gun. He doesn’t work that way. He hates obvious. He’s always working a second angle. Maybe a third.”

  “I know that.”

  “You think you do.”

  “So?”

  “So we were just at one funeral. And the captain’s is coming up. I don’t want you to end up like him.”

  “I don’t intend to.”

  “Neither did he.”