by David Hosp
‘What is it?’ Finn asked.
‘McDougal.’
‘What about him?’
Kozlowski glared at Finn. It was the first time Finn had ever seen even a hint of panic in the man’s eyes.
‘What about him?’ Finn demanded again.
‘He came back,’ Kozlowski answered.
Spencer Carleson sat in his huge corner office in the top floor of the tallest building in downtown Boston. It wasn’t the tallest in the city – the Prudential building in Back Bay held that distinction – but Carleson preferred the downtown area. It was closer to the water and it had better views. It was also closer to the courthouses. Of course, whenever he was forced to go to court, he felt as though he’d already failed. He was a master of compromise, and an astute political operative. No one in the Commonwealth was better connected. His job, as he saw it, was to keep his clients out of court.
That was looking like a difficult task with Buchanan.
‘You were great, Spence,’ his client was saying. ‘I really appreciate it.’ It sounded like he actually meant it.
Carleson’s secretary had met them at the door to the office when they returned from the conference room. She had a tray of warm, damp face towels in a silver tray, and she handed one to each of them, using tongs the way they do in first class on transatlantic flights. Carleson saw Buchanan raise an eyebrow, but he didn’t care. A warm towel after a tense meeting refreshed him. Right now he needed refreshing.
‘Seriously,’ Buchanan continued, ‘I thought that detective was going to come across the table at you. That would have been perfect. I can’t imagine I’ll be having much of a problem with him from now on.’
Carleson was rubbing the towel over his face, savouring the last of the warmth. ‘Thank you, Senator,’ he said. ‘I appreciate your confidence, but I wouldn’t start the celebrations just yet. All I’ve done is delay an inevitable confrontation.’
Buchanan looked stricken. ‘You can’t be serious,’ he said. ‘You really think they will pursue this?’
‘I’d count on it.’
‘But you were so clear in there. They have no right –’
‘They have every right,’ Carleson cut him off. ‘What I said in there doesn’t mean a thing. It was a bluff. They have a dead woman in Roxbury. That gives them the right.’
‘But I’m a United States senator.’
‘Dead women trump political office every time,’ Carleson said with a sigh. ‘If anything, the fact that you’re a senator puts you in a more vulnerable position. You can’t dodge as well as a private citizen might.’
‘I can’t believe this. Isn’t there anything we can do?’
Carleson threw the towel on the table. ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘Perhaps we can exert a little control through back channels. Try to get Detective Long off the case and delay the investigation at least until after the election.’ He evaluated his client’s face. ‘Is there anything I need to know before we start? Anything you want to tell me? I’m your attorney, anything you say is protected.’
Buchanan put his head in his hands. ‘Long is right about McDougal,’ he said. ‘He’s donated to campaign ever since the beginning. So have his employees.’
‘And he was reimbursing his employees for whatever they donated to you,’ Carleson added. ‘It’s one of the easiest ways around the campaign financing laws. One of the most illegal, too.’
‘I don’t know what he was doing with his employees,’ Buchanan said, raising his head. ‘I never asked.’
‘You just assumed that janitors and secretaries liked you enough to give up ten percent of their wages in the hope you’d be elected?’ Carleson shook his head. ‘Come on, Senator, you can see how that looks.’
Buchanan shrugged. ‘I assumed, but I didn’t know for sure. McDougal claimed to be responsible for over a million dollars in contributions, but I never asked how.’
‘What was he getting in return for his money?’
‘Access. Like everyone else.’
Carleson rolled his eyes. ‘He gave you over a million dollars, and all he got was “access”?’
‘Nothing more,’ Buchanan insisted. ‘He wanted the inside track on a series of government contracts that were awarded this summer. I told him I would see what I could do. Turns out, it wasn’t much. I’m a first-term senator, and there were too many people lined up at the trough ahead of me. McDougal’s companies didn’t get any of the contracts. Not a single one. You can look it up.’
‘That must not have made him happy,’ Carleson said, stroking his chin.
‘That’s putting it mildly. If I didn’t already have security, I’d have gotten some after the way he read me the riot act.’
‘So the question is, what does all this have to do with Elizabeth Connor’s death?’
‘Nothing,’ Buchanan said. ‘I swear to God, Spence, I have no idea what happened to that woman.’
Carleson stared at the man. He considered himself an expert at reading people. It was a part of what made him a great lawyer. But in this case, Buchanan was a riddle, and Carleson realized after a moment that he wasn’t going to be the one to solve it.
In the end, it didn’t matter. Guilty or not, the man was a client. A wealthy, influential client at that. That was all that really mattered. ‘Okay, then,’ Carleson said. ‘Let’s put our heads together and see what we can come up with.’
Mildred Shumley walked her dog in the little New Hampshire neighborhood every night. It was one of the few things left in her life that she still found bearable. Everything else seemed to be falling apart.
Life was supposed to get easier as she got older. She and her husband had planned carefully for their retirement, making sure that they had enough to carry them through. It wasn’t working out the way she had planned. Much to her dismay, Robert was living far longer than she had expected. By the time they were ready to retire, his cancer had spread and the doctors had assured them that he had a year, maybe eighteen months at the outside. That was two years ago, and her husband appeared to be making a miraculous recovery, thanks in large part to the miracles of modern medicine that were rapidly eating through their savings. Add to that the impact of the stock market crash, and Mildred was unsure how she was going to survive once Robert finally checked out. At one point she thought her son might help them out. But his fancy title hadn’t protected him when his investment firm went belly up. Now he was talking about moving home. That was all she needed.
She was cataloguing her troubles as she passed across the street from Shelly Tesco’s house. The place was dark, and Mildred assumed that her neighbor was out for the evening. Good for her. Maybe if she could find a man, Mildred would have something worthwhile to gossip about. That was really her only remaining pleasure in life.
As she glanced at the house, a man came around the corner from the back. At first he looked like a shadow; dressed all in black, he moved without making a sound. But he had a thick head of gray hair and his face was too light to stay hidden. She felt the tingle of something juicy to talk about, and ducked back into the shadows of an overhanging tree. He was the right age from the look of his face, probably early sixties, though he moved like he was much younger. Perhaps Shelly had found a man after all.
Mildred dismissed the thought after a few seconds’ observation. He didn’t move like someone leaving a tryst. He walked with purpose to the low, heavy sport sedan parked around the corner, never looking back at the house. Not only that, but the house was dark. Not the kind of dark where people are trying to conserve energy, but really dark. Dead was the word that came to Mildred’s mind as she looked at her neighbor’s house. The house looked dead.
The car’s engine started, and the man pulled away. He didn’t speed, but there was no let-up in his pace.
Mildred watched the car disappear into the darkness of the unlit street before she stepped back out into the street light.
She pulled on the leash, and walked her dog up the walkway to Shelly Tesco’s front door. Sh
e rang the bell ten times and waited three full minutes before she gave up. She should leave it alone, she knew. It was none of her business – that was what Robert would say when she got back. Maybe Shelly was on vacation, and the man was a friend or a relative sent to check up on the house.
That certainly wasn’t her impression, though.
She decided to wait. She’d call over to the house in the morning. Maybe again tomorrow evening. If she didn’t get an answer, then she would ring the police no matter what her husband said about it. After all, what good were neighbors if they didn’t keep an eye on one another?
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
‘We’ve got to get her out of there,’ Finn said. He started around the corner, but Kozlowski blocked him with a hand to his chest.
‘I gotta think,’ Kozlowski said.
‘Think fast, then. Do you have any idea what he’ll do to her if he finds her in there?’
‘She’s smart,’ Kozlowski said. ‘She’ll probably stay hidden.’
‘Probably?’ Finn hissed. ‘To hell with probably.’ He ran to the back door and shoved it. It gave no ground. He stuck his head in and hissed, ‘Sally!’
No answer.
‘Sally!’
He pushed the door harder, and it groaned. Kozlowski was behind him, and pulled him away. ‘Making noise isn’t going to help her. The more commotion we make, the more likely it is that she’ll get caught.’
Finn was in full panic now. He headed back toward the front of the building. ‘I’m going in.’
Kozlowski grabbed him. ‘If we go in there now, we’re all screwed. Eamonn’ll call in his boys and in a matter of minutes, this place’ll look like a Sinn Fein meeting. Her best hope is that he does whatever he needs to do and leaves without ever knowing she’s there. I don’t think she’s gonna show herself, and I don’t think he’s gonna find her.’
‘You willing to bet her life on that? Because that’s what we’re doing.’
Kozlowski stared hard at Finn. Then he nodded.
Finn paced back and forth, agitated. Finally he said, ‘Fine. But we’re getting ready in case something goes wrong. We hear any noise in there – anything that doesn’t sound right – and we’re going in. Period.’
Kozlowski nodded again. ‘You got a gun?’
Finn shook his head.
Kozlowski reached down his leg and pulled a .38 out of his ankle holster. ‘My spare,’ he said, handing it over to Finn. He reached into his jacket and pulled out his .357 Magnum. ‘I’m gonna slide up closer to the door on this side,’ he said. ‘You circle around the building and come at it from the other direction.’
‘Okay.’
‘Be careful,’ Kozlowski said. ‘There’s a driver in the car, and for all we know there may be others. Probably not, but be ready for anything.’
Finn nodded. ‘If I hear anything unusual, anything at all, I’m going in,’ he warned his partner.
‘You don’t have to tell me,’ Kozlowski said. ‘I’ll beat you in there myself.’
It was pitch black and slow going inside the warehouse. Sally felt her way along the wall, stepping carefully to keep her balance. She hated the dark, and a part of her wished she’d stayed with Lissa at her apartment. Finn needed her help, though, and that gave her no choice.
It hadn’t occurred to her that she might have trouble finding the front of the building. She had a good sense of direction, and she figured she could feel her way along the wall until she came to the right door. If she’d thought about it, she would have taken the flashlight from Koz, but she had moved too quickly, in part to cut short any protest from Finn. She regretted it now.
She checked her pocket for her cell phone, but realized it was in her bag back at Lissa’s apartment. There was nothing left to do but press through the darkness.
Following the wall turned out to be impossible. There were steel shelves lined up all along the main walls of the warehouse, and there were crates and boxes stacked in front of the shelves. After twenty feet or so, her passage was blocked, and she was forced to turn right. She assumed the turn was ninety degrees, but there was no way to be sure. After another ten feet she tripped over a low cardboard box, rolled on the floor and bumped her head on what felt like a metal filing cabinet. She swore as she got up, and looked around in the darkness. There didn’t appear to be any windows in the place, and there wasn’t even enough light to make out shapes.
She started to move forward again, but tripped over another cardboard box. She was disoriented from the fall, and she’d lost all sense of direction. She reached out to feel the objects around her. The filing cabinet was to her right now. All of a sudden she was struck by the musty odor in the place. She hadn’t given it a second thought when she entered the back portion of the warehouse, but now, lost in the darkness, the place closed in around her. In the darkness the air grew heavier, almost too thick to breathe. If she’d been able to figure out from which direction she’d come, she would have headed back, if only to get the damned flashlight from Kozlowski and to breathe fresh air for just a moment. Her heart beat wildly in her chest.
She began moving again. Driven by fear, she dropped to her knees and began crawling to keep from falling, desperate to find some way out. Every time her fingers clawed their way into a new obstacle her panic deepened, but she forced herself to keep going, forced her fingers to keep groping in the dark. At one point they dug their way into some sort of coarse fabric wrapped around a solid, curved shape that initially felt like a human shoulder. She nearly screamed, but managed to bite her lip. After a moment, she realized it was a rolled carpet.
She pushed herself forward.
Suddenly, like the dawn after a storm, a light appeared in front of her. It was just a crack at the bottom of a door, not nearly enough to let her see anything around her with any clarity, but enough to guide her; enough to sketch the outlines of the obstacles between her and the door.
She was hyperventilating by the time she reached the light, panic and relief sweeping over her in successive waves. Deprived of oxygen, she was beyond clear thought. She turned the knob and pushed the door open.
She was in an office with gray carpeting and a large wooden desk. There was a sofa next to a filing cabinet. Two chairs faced the desk. The light was blinding after coming from complete darkness, and she had to shade her eyes for a moment. Once they had adjusted, she saw a man standing at the far side of the desk, his back to her.
The possibility that there might be someone else in the warehouse had never crossed her mind; it wasn’t in the realm of conscious possibility, and so at first she was disoriented. She started to open her mouth, but before she could the man spoke.
‘Hello,’ he said. She didn’t recognize the voice. It was calm, even a little friendly. It was at that moment it occurred to her how much trouble she was in.
Finn was crouched by the northwest corner of the building, twenty feet from the front door, like a sprinter on his mark. Kozlowski’s spare gun was gripped tightly in his right hand, and his muscles were tense. From his angle, he could see into McDougal’s car. There was one man, the driver, seated at the wheel, his head tipped back against the headrest, eyes closed, mouth open. It looked like he was taking a nap.
McDougal had entered the building alone, which meant there were only two – a fair fight in terms of numbers for him and Kozlowski, unless Eamonn called in backup. It might be wise to move now; they would certainly be able to take out the driver quickly enough, having the advantage of surprise. The prospect of storming the front door, where McDougal could pick them off easily, was less attractive.
Besides, Kozlowski might be right. Sally might be safely hidden away, and McDougal might come back out any moment and drive away.
Finn cursed himself for not being strong enough to keep her from going into the building. The truth was a part of him had wanted her to go in. It was the only way to find the information he needed about his mother’s death. Crouching in the dark, Lissa’s words came ringing back to
him: Make damned sure it’s worth it.
The driver stirred; he reached into his pocket and pulled out a phone. Finn’s finger found the trigger to Kozlowski’s spare gun.
Eamonn McDougal hadn’t intended to return to the office. When he pulled out of the lot for the evening, he thought he was done. Halfway home, he realized he’d forgotten Coale’s phone number, and the only place it was kept was in the file. Normally, he would have programmed it into his cell, but phones could fall into the wrong hands, and he couldn’t risk someone else getting hold of the number.
When he got back to the office, he told his driver to wait outside. He unlocked the front door and disarmed the alarm on the front door, then went in. The file was in the cabinet in his office. It took him only a moment to unlock the drawer and pull out the folder. The number was on the inside of the manila file, written backwards as an added precaution in case the wrong eyes should ever fall upon it.
He dialed the number and waited. He was facing the wall behind the desk, looking at all the pictures of him with various celebrities and politicians. He’d led a remarkable life for someone born and raised in poverty in the outskirts of Belfast. As a child, he never imagined that he would be where he was now. He was the true definition of a self-made man, and no one was going to ruin that.
Coale answered on the second ring. ‘Hello,’ McDougal said. Lost in a self-congratulatory haze, he might have sounded a little too upbeat. ‘Is it done?’
It took a moment for Sally to realize that the man hadn’t seen her. At first it sounded like he was greeting her, that somehow he’d been waiting for her. Then she saw the phone in his hand.
She looked around, heart pounding. It might have made the most sense to back out of the room slowly, but her momentum was carrying her forward, and fear had sapped too much of her strength to allow her to change direction. She looked frantically for someplace to hide. The sofa to her right had an angled back, creating a narrow space against the wall, partially hidden. It looked just big enough, and she let her momentum carry her down in a silent dive. She shimmied her skinny body behind the sofa. Rolling onto her back, she looked down to make sure her feet weren’t sticking out. She could see only a narrow section of the room – out to where the door to the warehouse stood open.