oOo
Dooley called David. I sat at my desk staring at my computer screen, every ear cell aquiver trying to listen to the conversation. I could not think of David without thinking over what we did together. I could not think over what we did together without framing it in a view of a webcam, transmitting it all back to a pay-per-view porn site.
Dooley had his back to me and spoke softly so I couldn’t hear what he was saying.
He hung up and turned around, looking out the window thoughtfully.
“Well?” I asked.
“He’s out west in California someplace. He’s working his way back to Boston. Middle of next week he’ll be in New York, performing. He’ll be back before Halloween.” He looked a question at me.
“He’s always up here for Conclave.”
Dooley lifted an eyebrow at me.
“At least, he was when we were together,” I amended grudgingly.
“Are you following his concert schedule?”
“I’m on his mailing list. He’s a fine pianist.” It sounded false, even to me.
Dooley watched me for a moment, saying nothing.
I snarled at him. “Like you’ve never checked up on an old girlfriend or an ex-wife.”
Dooley nodded. “Just keeping you honest, Loquess. Certainly, he checked up on you.” He chuckled.
I felt wretched. “So, what did he say?”
“As soon as he gets in town, he’ll come here.” Dooley leaned forward. “I talked to him and checked his concert schedule, too. There’s no alibi in it. He was here in Boston for both murders.”
I didn’t know whether to feel excited or sad. Then I remembered Dobbs and I just felt angry.
oOo
Dooley and Hoffman went home. Rush came by my desk on his way out.
“Here,” he said and gave me the disk.
I took it and stared at it.
Rush had his coat on. He was going home. I could go home, too. To my bugged apartment.
I sure as hell wasn’t going home. I wasn’t sure I could ever set foot in that apartment ever again. It dawned on me I had no place to go.
“Albert thought you might want this,” Rush said. He put a key on my desk.
“What’s that?”
“It’s the key to one of Albert’s rental apartments. It’s in Mission Hill—not too far from your place. Albert kept it after the divorce from his second wife. But he doesn’t use it. He thought you might not want to go home.” Rush grabbed a pen and wrote down the address. “Doesn’t have a roof door, though.”
“I don’t need a roof door.” I took the key. “Thanks.”
Rush nodded, embarrassed again. He left.
I held the key up to the light. You just never know about people.
I put the disk in the office microwave and watched it crackle and burn. Then, I took my stick up to the roof and used my special key. I walked dutifully over to the circle lit in blue by the single runway lamp. Sniezek’s drawing had long since blown away. The rain had cleared. I just stood there and looked around, trying desperately for perspective.
The facts of the matter were not in dispute. But I realized I had once thought so much better of David now that I realized I thought so much less of him.
oOo
David once told me that Boston had no skyline when he was a kid. On those rare treats when he was home from the hospital, his mother would sometimes bring him down to the city on the train for some special occasion—like the Saint Anthony’s festival or First Night. Never Conclave, of course—to see those events, all David had to do was walk down to the park, tune his radio to WGBH and listen to the coverage.
The skyline seemed to just suddenly appear one night when he was in Paris or New York or Missouri. He returned and a dozen hotels, high-rise offices and bank buildings had emerged perfect and whole from some deep wound in the ground.
I had come out for Conclave when I was fourteen, relying on a vague invitation from Sam during a training clinic that summer. I showed up on his doorstep the week before he took three golds in a row: z-sprint, free ascent and marathon. Maybe I impressed him. Or maybe he just thought it was something I needed. Regardless, he invited me back every summer until he died.
When Sam finally persuaded me to fly into the city with him, I saw Boston as a huge collection of spires and columns towering over deep canyons of brick and marble. It sure was a skyline to a young Missouri girl like me.
Now, it was merely a collection of buildings.
I stood, watching the city at night.
As I looked towards the harbor I saw every now and then the firefly light of a witch flying here or there—illegally, of course. They could not have had clearance to fly in the city itself and certainly not at that altitude or at night. If they were caught, it could be a fine or grounding for the full length of the games.
But nobody had ever arrested a witch for an illegal flight during Conclave and I wasn’t going to be the first. I remembered Sam and I discovering a furtive back alley a surprisingly short distance from Faneuil Hall, a quick dizzying full vertical ascent to a steady hover, looking down on people shopping, driving down the street, listening to the babble and mutter fade in and out like the sound of the ocean.
“It’s a fine city,” he had said, a faint Chicago twang still left in his voice.
And I remembered watching the city at the end of my first shift after David had moved out, standing in this very spot, about to hover over the earth, held up only by my will, wishing I could share that sensation with him. If I had been able to, would he have left? And now was I glad he did?
I unlatched my stick and pulled out the radio, got clearance for a patrol flight—which meant I could fly anywhere in the city I wanted. I toggled the roof lights and took off in a haze of blinking white and green.
But I didn’t turn on my own running lights. My transponder was on and if there were other aircraft in the vicinity, Boston control would let me know. I flew over to where I had seen the fireflies.
Sure enough, two witches were sitting in the corner shadow of Exchange Place watching the lights on the Customs Tower. I came down behind them, tracing one corner in a vertical descent. I could watch them and it would be unlikely they could see me.
“It’s not so big. Atlanta is much bigger,” said one, a girl, in a sweet drawl.
“Really?” The other was a boy. “Bismarck is tiny.”
“Well, it is way out there in Minnesota.”
“North Dakota,” said the boy in an easy voice suggesting he’d been making that correction all evening.
I guessed neither was more than fourteen—no older than I was coming up here with Sam. Fearless—or at least not admitting to fear—sitting with their legs dangling over a ten-story drop, holding their sticks lightly beside them as some sort of magic talisman.
And, should either fall, of no further use to them than that. I doubted they had the experience to remount in time on a free descent. They would hit the street just about the point they realized they weren’t going to get airborne.
I thought about just leaving them there. But Sam had taken care of me—if I had fallen, Sam would have raced gravity down to save me and died before giving up. Who was going to look out for these two kids?
I descended in front of them—if they got scared and fell, they’d fall backwards onto the roof and not forwards to their inevitable death. They scrambled away from me.
“Hey,” I said gently. “It’s okay.”
“Don’t report us—” started the girl.
I waved her silent, came over the parapet and set down beside them. “Katelin Loquess, BPD.”
“Crap,” said the boy bitterly.
They proffered me their pilot’s licenses without me asking for them. The boy’s name was Sarjit and the girl’s Naomi. “It’s a long flight from Salem. Do you know how to get back?”
“Sure,” said the girl confidently. “We came down here this afternoon.”
“Give me your log books.”
They did and I made a show of pulling out my flashlight and going over them.
“You’re athletes?”
Both nodded.
“What events?”
Both in acrobatics—not surprising. Acrobatics favored young, light, lithe bodies: low mass.
“Staying in the athlete’s village?”
Both nodded.
“Do you have regulation night lighting?”
They looked at one another. Naomi looked defensive. Sarjit shook his head.
“Radios?”
Again, the head shake.
I gave out a theatrical sigh. “So, you’re flying in a municipal area and transiting a Class B airspace without notification or fulfilling a Minimum Equipment List.”
Now, they looked miserable and scared—which is exactly how I wanted them to feel. When Sam and I had done the same thing, Sam had made sure we weren’t in violation of anything except athlete’s village curfew. These kids were joyriding—and I was going to let them get away with it, provided I put the fear of god in them first.
I pointed at Sarjit with his log book. “You don’t have much experience in municipal flight. You could use inexperience as an excuse. But you—” I pointed at Naomi with hers. “You have a municipal endorsement. Forget all the FAA violations, uncleared flight in Boston is ‘flying to endanger’. Hefty fine and possible jail time.”
Naomi had been looking ready to argue with me but when I brought up FTE, she went pale. The FAA regulates witches just like it regulates any other aircraft, but within urban airspace, control is delegated to the states—which, in the case of Massachusetts, is further delegated to the cities. This meant I had real authority to enforce federal, state and city regulations on these two.
Which both of them knew in the abstract—being on the supplement to the FAA written exam—but Naomi had the municipal endorsement so it must have been drummed into her by her instructor.
I let them think about it for a moment while I finished looking over their logs to see if I’d missed anything.
“Follow me down to the pavement. If either of you exceed two hundred feet a minute—”
“We won’t,” Naomi said quickly.
We walked to South Station. I watched as they bought tickets on the Rockport line back up to Salem. “You take a cab back to the village. I don’t want you a millimeter in the air before practice tomorrow.” I gave them back their licenses and logs and left them there. From a narrow alley near the Garden, I took off and started flying over to Hoffman’s apartment. Maybe tomorrow I’d go over to Parker Street and pack up a few things. I could look for a new place. There were no chains that tied me to Parker Street. Nothing tied me down but my own mind.
I thought of the kids, probably congratulating themselves on getting off scot free.
I smiled and thought of Sniezek: Was this what it felt like to act like a cop?
Chapter 2.4: Friday, October 22
In our investigations we had created a sketch of the lives of Wallace, Plante and Rabbitt. Now, Hoffman and Rush had us all work on a timeline of what the principals had been doing for the last two weeks and an understanding of what they had been doing for the last two years.
Hoffman and Rush took Plante, since it involved both a celebrity and a trip to New York.
The common thread between Wallace, Plante and Rabbitt was Rabbitt’s church—the task given us by Hoffman and Rush. Computer forensics had found a set of spreadsheets listing donors but they were coded or numbered: one, red, blue, thirty-two. Forensics was unable to connect the dots and tell us who they were.
We obtained Rabbitt’s bank records. Sure enough, there were deposits corresponding to the spreadsheet entries, but when we looked up the cancelled checks, they were all cashier’s checks and money orders made out for Rabbitt himself. Small checks. A couple of thousand here and there. It didn’t amount to much. There was a conspicuous withdrawal on the day of Plante’s murder but it was only a couple of thousand dollars. A man couldn’t go far on just that.
“Is Rabbitt rich?” I said. “Did he fund the church himself?” The screen was filled with different checks. “Maybe he has an account we don’t know about.”
Dooley shook his head. He pointed to numbers on the check images. “That’s a bank routing number. Here’s another one. They correspond to the issuing agency and they’re all different.” Dooley leaned back. “Looks like he cashed the checks into money orders and cashier’s checks. Probably used one of those paycheck cashing places. We would have to find the issuing agency, find the deposit corresponding to this particular check and then find out whose check that was.”
“Can we do that?”
Dooley shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe. The regulations aren’t terribly well enforced on these places. They have to keep records but they’re probably on paper. It’ll take time. I expect he was trying to preserve his donors’ anonymity.” He thought for a second. “It’s a good way to sock away money for yourself.”
“What do you mean?”
“Say Matilda the Donor Lady gives you a check for five grand. You go down to one of these check cashing agencies and split the check into two checks. Each of them for twenty-five hundred dollars. Each of them to you. Then, you deposit one check into the church and the other one you send somewhere else.”
“Wouldn’t you have to show records? Tax purposes?”
Dooley shrugged. “Probably. But I bet Rabbitt’s church doesn’t get looked at all that closely. And if the mythical dummy organization isn’t that big and doesn’t get the attention of Homeland Security, it could hide for a long time. If there were a lot of small checks across several donors over time, you could collect a pretty sizeable nest egg without anybody noticing. It would require a lot of cross-checking by the IRS to make sure all of the tax-deductible contributions were accounted for.”
I pointed at the computer. “If that’s what he did, his take was a lot better than fifty-fifty.”
“Or,” said Dooley slowly, “he had all of the contributions made out to a different organization and had that organization donate. That keeps his church safe.”
“And it means if we can trace back these checks to Rabbitt, they might point to where the real money is.”
“If this isn’t complete supposition, that is.”
“Yeah.” I rubbed my eyes. “Let’s give it to the financial guys and let them figure it out. If it’s there, they’ll find it.”
Dooley nodded. “Might take a while but it’s worth doing.” He made the call.
oOo
We started pulling facts together. We didn’t know where Wallace was after church and before he was murdered that Sunday. But we were able to collect facts on Plante. He’d taken a cab to the church and returned. He’d had breakfast the next day in the hotel café and returned to his room—card use confirmed that. Then, he’d been discovered. There were no calls to or from the room that morning. He’d made two calls to his manager in New York and one to his helper, Roche. Then, nothing until he was discovered. There was nothing unusual in his bank records for the couple of weeks prior to his murder—or, at least, that was the story we were sticking to until the financial forensics guys got back to us.
“Maybe Plante saw something. Maybe he saw Rabbitt kill Wallace. Rabbitt figures it out—or maybe Plante contacts him.”
Dooley looked over the table at me. “You think Plante was blackmailing Rabbitt? I think Rabbitt could have gotten all the money he wanted out of Plante without blackmail. Besides, there’s nothing in the phone records.”
I nodded. “Spiritual crisis. Plante comes over to see Wallace—”
“No record of the trip.”
“No cab record. He walks this time.”
“Why would he walk?”
“I don’t know. Maybe Wallace told him something he needed to think about—he takes a walk to clear his head and ends up at the church. But Rabbitt isn’t there. So he crosses the street to look up his friend Wallace.”
“He kn
ows Wallace is staying in the basement?”
I nodded. “Say he does. Plante comes over to see Wallace and catches Rabbitt in the act of murder. His religious leader has committed a horrible act. He flees. Rabbitt tries to contact him—”
“Still no record of contact on any cell phone we know of.”
“Rabbitt doesn’t try to phone him. He comes over—he knows Plante’s habits. He knows Plante is going to be resting before the act.”
“Does he?”
“I rest before a meet. I bet Plante rested before a show.”
“After he’s witnessed a murder?”
I shook my head. “Right. That wouldn’t make sense.”
Dooley waved me on. “I bet after witnessing a murder Plante would be doing anything but resting. Let’s say he goes back to the hotel room to think.”
I pointed at Dooley. “Rabbitt tries to persuade Plante it’s all for the greater good. He fails. They join in prayer and when Plante is kneeling, Rabbitt slips him the knife.”
Dooley pulled at his lower lip in thought. “Without a doubt the broadest and most speculative piece of detective work I’ve ever heard.”
“It’s not feasible?”
“I bet it’s not even close. Let’s get back to the church records.”
I thought for a moment. “I’ve got an idea.”
“Always a dangerous thing.”
“We need a window into Rabbitt’s church.”
Dooley nodded. “Yes.”
“There aren’t that many checks. Probably only a few moneyed donors supporting a largely homeless congregation. It could be the donors didn’t even attend the services. But Wallace did attend and he was homeless—”
“And still managed to pay for the Where’s Katelin service.”
“Maybe one of the donors paid for him. Or maybe Wallace never actually signed on at all—it was Rabbitt. That would explain how we saw a record of Wallace’s sign-on the day after he was killed. But forget that for a moment. If we want to know Wallace’s background, we need to be able to find the people who came to the church. We need a window into the church population.”
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