Trying to remain calm, trying not to cause alarm, I asked, “Why do you have your sister’s phone?”
“When she was at my place the day before she died, she forgot it.” She smiled and added, “That’s just her. She was always leaving keys, gloves, her purse, anything that wasn’t attached to her body.”
“May I see it?”
She leaned forward and handed it across the coffee table to me. I looked carefully at the darkened face of the Motorola flip phone. I pressed the power button, wondering if it had the juice to turn on. Immediately, lights lit up. Words and numbers flashed across the small screen. Then everything settled back into the typical symbols and figures and the phone fell dark again.
I was transfixed, almost embarrassingly so. When I realized this, I looked at Maggie and said, “Do you mind if I just play with this for a moment and see if there’s anything worthwhile?”
She shrugged and said, “Go ahead.”
I knew beyond any doubt that the police and the FBI had already culled through her home, office, and cellular telephone records trying to discover who she called in the hours and days before she was killed. I also knew that as a reporter, I had no shot at these records. The phone itself, though, was an entirely different animal, or in this case, opportunity.
I played with some buttons until I finally got the phone to list the last ten incoming calls. I scanned through them quickly. Some had names assigned to them, others were just numbers, still others said Restricted, meaning the caller wasn’t identified, not to Hilary when she answered, not to me now.
I pressed a few more buttons and the last ten outgoing calls appeared on the screen in the same general pattern—some with names, like “Maggie” and “Laura,” and others with just numbers. One of those numbers struck me as vaguely familiar, but for the life of me I couldn’t pinpoint why.
I got up and grabbed a legal pad out of the kitchen and wrote all the names and numbers down. Then I came back into the living room and asked Maggie if I could hold on to the phone for safekeeping. She agreed.
I quickly banged out a call to Vinny’s cell phone, figuring, since his flight took off in a matter of minutes, that he’d be impossible to reach. He picked up on the first ring with his typically curt, “Mongillo.”
“I need a favor.”
“I need a drink. Peter Martin has me in a middle seat in fucking coach. These fucking chairs were built for runway models, not for real people with real appetites.”
I didn’t touch that one. Instead, I told him I had a few telephone numbers that I needed identities assigned to.
“Give ’em to me. Make it quick before they make me turn off the phone.
I read him the unidentified numbers in question. He hung up without so much as a good-bye or a good luck.
I checked the clock and realized it was twenty minutes until my rendezvous with Tom Jankle.
“Where are you staying tonight?” I asked Maggie.
She had been sitting on the couch watching me, and she shrugged, as if it didn’t matter, as if she didn’t care.
“Not a big planner, are you?” As soon as I spoke the words, I regretted them.
She met my gaze and replied, “I haven’t really had the chance to be since my sister was killed.” She said this matter-of-factly, not accusatorily, God bless her.
I nodded. “I’ve got to go out for a while. I’m going to lock you in. Put the deadbolt in place, and plan on spending the night here. If you’re in bed when I get back, I’ll grab the couch.”
She started to say something, then stopped, smiled, and said softly, “Thank you, Jack.”
And like that, I was gone, wary not of what I didn’t know but of what I did.
Chapter Thirty-five
I stood outside Gate A of Fenway Park on an increasingly breezy late September night looking up and down the darkened street for my destiny, which would come in the form of a rather peculiar FBI agent by the name of Tom Jankle.
This exact spot, on this precise night, could have been ground zero of Boston’s longest hopes and most heartfelt dreams. The Major League baseball playoffs began on this day, and a couple of hundred miles to the south, the Yankees were playing a team that didn’t really matter, and the various members of the Red Sox were watching it all on national TV. And here I was, standing outside the ballyard watching yesterday’s litter float past in the unfriendly breeze. The desolate scene was a metaphor for my life. Or again, maybe that’s an analogy. As Peter Martin might say, who gives a flying frick.
Nine o’clock, the designated hour, eventually gave way to 9:30, and the only people I saw were the occasional testosterone-charged gaggle of college fraternity members making their way toward Landsdowne Street for another night of beer guzzling at the area’s clubs. No sign of Jankle, and thus, no sign of hope. It was all beginning to remind me of that endless wait outside the Louvre two days before—two days that felt like a month. At least that concluded reasonably well, even if a perfectly gorgeous woman openly laughed at my nudity.
So there I stood, the wind blowing harder, the air growing colder, my nerves ever more frazzled, when a navy blue van slowly turned left onto Yawkey Way, lumbered past me on the opposite side of the street, then banged a U-turn and pulled up to the curb. When the side panel door slid open, I flinched, half expecting—or maybe more than half expecting—that I was about to be gunned down with or without cause right outside of Fenway Park.
Instead, I heard the easy voice of Special Agent Tom Jankle casually say, “You look cold out there.”
“You would too if you’d been made to wait for more than half an hour.”
He stepped out of the van with a smile, his bushy mustache twitching in the streetlight, as if he were always chewing on something that didn’t actually exist. His hair had that boyish Pete Rose freshly washed gloss to it, silvery black and slightly mussed. He walked past me without shaking my hand and said, “Sorry about the time, but I was getting a whole slew of stuff for you. You’re going to thank me in a moment.”
He was carrying one of those strange metal briefcases that you always see as the last objects on airport baggage carousels, as if they exist only reluctantly and no one actually owns them. In the other hand, he was jangling a small key ring. “Follow me,” he said.
We walked past the metal garage-style grates that were pulled shut over the yawning entrances, to a narrow steel door with no sign, just a simple discolored knob. Jankle thrust a key into the hole, gazed warily up and down the street, then pulled the door quickly open. He held it for me, then yanked it shut behind us.
We stood in the dark together until he pulled a penlight from his pocket and flashed it around. I could see the hazy outlines of a beer stand against a far wall—Coors/Coors Light, $4.75, a shameless rip-off—and beside it, a snack bar with shelves for bags of popcorn and peanuts. On the concrete ground before us were piles of orange cones and pallets of boxes. The whole place was vacant and raw, permeated by a sense of defeat. We were here because the Red Sox lost. I was here because I had in some way lost.
Jesus mother of Christ, I really had to get a grip.
“Stay close,” Jankle told me. He walked slowly through the labyrinth of obstacles and said to me without turning around, “Be better if we were here to watch the first game of the play-offs, no?”
No shit. Be better if Hilary Kane were still alive. Be better if he’d never sent his thugs to get me last Monday night. Be better if a lot of things were different, but most of them probably weren’t worth bringing up there and then. So we walked in silence down a ramp toward the main concourse, then up another ramp toward a block of pale light, though light might be the wrong word. What was up ahead was just somewhat less dark. Maybe that, too, could be a metaphor.
As we ascended the ramp, I could feel the air growing cooler and a little less stale. The smell of old beer gave way to the freshness of an autumn night. And suddenly we emerged into the open air, into the stands, specifically the box seats between home plate an
d third base. The park was blanketed by a moon-splashed dark, eerily quiet, strangely still. The breeze was halted by the outer walls, lending an odd sense of serenity to the environs within.
“Nice night for a game,” Jankle said, giving me that typical half smile of his, as if he could find amusement in virtually any situation at any time.
I didn’t know if he was talking about baseball, or the games he was about to try playing with me. We soon would see. By way of explanation of our location, he said, “I’ve been a big fan for a long time, so the owners let me come and go.”
I didn’t respond. I wondered if that meant on game nights as well. I wondered how his superiors might regard such an, ahem, perk. Truth is, I was pissed off. This was the guy who thrust me into a situation where I cost a young woman her life, and he was sitting here acting somewhere far beyond cavalier about the whole thing, as if, perhaps, she had died in the name of some worthy cause. Maybe that’s what he believed. Maybe that’s what he fucking believed.
“Let’s sit down and relax,” he said. And we did, the former though not the latter, parking ourselves in the red field boxes with a seat in between us. He held the metal case in his lap, inserted a key and opened it. Then, while looking inside it rather than at me, he said, “So you now know there was more to the story than what I gave you.”
As he talked, he pulled out a microcassette recorder, removed a small tape from a plain manila envelope, and stuck it into the slot. He readied the tape, then put it down on the seat between us. He shut the metal case and put it on the ground beside him. Then he looked at me flush for the first time since we’d entered the park and said, “I leaked you some good information. It paid off for you. You got some paintings recovered, which I didn’t even foresee.”
“It also got Hilary Kane killed,” I said.
He looked down, nodding. “I didn’t foresee that, either,” he said.
“How could you not?”
He didn’t immediately answer. At first, I stared at him trying to gauge his mood and motivations, but he betrayed little of the former and none of the latter. I got the sense with this guy that his highs weren’t all that high and his lows never dipped all that low, that life was lived in the safety and security of a sanguine middle ground. Not a bad way to live, actually.
He took a deep breath, looked back at me, and said, “Out of some frustration, I brought you onto the periphery of the story. This is all on background, by the way. You can use it, just not attributable to me. Call me a ranking investigative official.”
Great. Last time we set ground rules like this, Hilary Kane was dead within eight hours. What poor soul was out there waiting to meet their maker because I’m a lunatic at the keyboard?
“Understood?”
I nodded.
He repeated himself: “Understood?”
“Yes.”
He chewed and twitched and did all that other stuff he does. Some might think it’s endearing, but for reasons I can’t fully articulate, his mannerisms were starting to bug me.
He said, “We’ve had Danny Harkins under court-sanctioned electronic surveillance for the last six months, based on the belief that he is complicit with his son in some of the crimes, and that he knows where his son is located now. That surveillance essentially involves wiretaps on his cellular telephone, his work lines at City Hall, and his home telephone at his Ritz-Carlton condominium.
“We’ve been frustrated, or at least I have. We know through secondary informants that he’s had elaborate contact with his son, but he’s somehow concealed it from us. Then this deal happened with Hilary Kane. She saw what we’ve been trying to see. We didn’t know if he knew what she knew.
“So I was trying to smoke him out, as the saying goes. I wanted him to realize that she saw something in his apartment, something that would make him panic, get on the telephone, make some calls that he wouldn’t have otherwise made, act in ways that aren’t characteristic.”
He paused here, looked at me, and added, “And then we’d make our case. And in the process, we might even nail the nation’s number one most wanted fugitive.”
We both sat in silence. I gazed down at the park, at the tarpaulin covering the infield glistening in the moonlight. I imagined what it would be like to sit in these seats at a game on that very night, maybe with Hilary Kane. She’d be wearing a baseball cap, cheering loudly, scarfing down popcorn, asking questions.
Actually, I don’t know where that thought came from. Just kind of popped into my addled mind.
I turned to Jankle and said, “You panicked him all right, didn’t you?”
He gave me a rueful nod. “That we did. And now we have this delicate matter of proving our case while somehow trying to continue to use him to apprehend his son. You understand, this ain’t easy.”
“Hilary would tell you just how hard it is, if she could be here to do it. Short of that, I bet her sister would let you know.”
He nodded again, looking down, as if conceding my successful jab. “It was a miscalculation,” he said. “We saw the mayor as a thief, but not a murderer.”
More silence. Then he reached down and picked up the microcassette and said, “So here’s a peace offering. You can take notes off this, but I can’t let you take the recording with you.”
I looked at him blankly, and he added, “It’s a recorded conversation between Dan and Toby Harkins, August eighteenth. It will be self-explanatory.”
He unceremoniously hit the Play button, and silence ensued. I don’t know why, but I thought of Rosemary Woods, President Nixon’s secretary, erasing a critical tape for eighteen of the most repugnant minutes of silence that any right-minded American might ever hear. Finally, I heard a voice say, simply and abruptly, “Yeah?”
It sounded like the younger, more felonious Harkins had just answered the phone.
“It’s your old man.”
“Hey, old man.”
“Listen, you have the paintings all rounded up?”
“Everything’s under control.”
“You have all of them?”
“Yeah, except for two. I sold them for cash. We’re going to need it.”
“And the plan is still in place?”
“Everything’s like we talked about. I just need to think it through a little more and line up all my ducks.”
“It is, Toby. It is. All right, I’ll be in touch.”
And with that, the line went dead.
Jankle shut off the recorder and asked me, “You want to hear it again?” I did, and the second time through, I took careful notes, a veritable transcript of the short conversation. When the tape was finished, he carefully placed the recorder back in the metal case and said, “So they had a plan, father and son. We know this much. We know that the father knew the location of the son. We obviously know they were in direct contact. Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to eavesdrop on their conversations since.”
I asked, “What if the plan was to surrender?”
Jankle pursed his lips and sucked in his cheeks as he considered what I had just said.
“Doesn’t gel with anything else that we have,” he replied. “And if they were surrendering, why sell two priceless stolen treasures? Basically, Dan Harkins, the mayor of Boston, is already complicit in that. He also knew where a fugitive was hiding, a murderer, and instead of turning him in, he helped him stay on the lam.”
I nodded. Everywhere I looked, everything I heard, seemed only to add to the ambiguity of it all. Or did it?
I played the taped conversation over in my mind. I ran through the crystal clear images of the videotape of Harkins and Hilary walking through the lobby, and of Hilary nervously leaving half an hour later.
There’s no question, this tape, reported in the Record, would devastate Dan Harkins’s career, his future, his life, as would the existence of the videotape. I pretty much had him dead to rights, so to speak, with a federal law enforcement source saying he had been under electronic surveillance for the past six months
. So why wasn’t I rushing to print with this? Could it be that in the wake of my massive fuckup with the previous story, that my journalistic trigger finger was freezing, and that I wasn’t doing my job? It had never happened to me before, this reportorial impotence, and I didn’t like the feeling one bit.
I asked, “What else?”
Jankle, his head down, looked at me sidelong. You could hide a family of Koreans in his mustache, it was so thick. He said, “Well, we didn’t see it coming, but somehow that leak got us some of the paintings back. We’re pretty damned happy about that. I feel like I owe you, which is why I’m giving you this. And if it makes you feel better, and I hope it does, we will go after Hilary Kane’s killer with a vengeance, and maybe even find a way to prosecute in federal rather than state court.”
That did make me feel better, because I had the lingering sense that no one gave a damn about her amid the ass-covering and accusations.
He added, cryptically, “We’re not so sure Boston PD is taking any of this very seriously.”
He was looking at me expectantly, though I wasn’t sure why. So I asked the obvious, which is often what we do in the sometimes majestic and occasionally mundane business of reporting the news. “What do you mean?”
Jankle replied, “We have a suspicion that maybe the locals, some detectives, tipped off the mayor that he was under surveillance, and that’s why we haven’t been able to grab him on tape. Truth is, we always had suspicions in this case that there was too close a relationship between Boston PD and Toby Harkins, and that he might even have been tipped when his indictment came down, which is how he knew to flee.”
Lights went on, not in the park, but in my head. Pieces began flying into place, fitting together. Hank Sweeney flashed in my mind, that morose look on his face as he walked through the jetway door bound for anywhere but Boston, escaping a past that I was now starting to understand. It was coming clear that he had helped Toby way back when, and now he couldn’t bring himself to tell me.
I looked at the face of my cell phone, which told me it was 9:55 P.M. I was terribly sad for Hank but rejuvenated by the revelations on the story. I had about two hours to the drop-dead deadline of the final edition. I suddenly felt the driving need to get something in print.
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