The Murder List

by Hank Phillippi Ryan

  “I was getting my cell phone,” Baltrim says, but obeys, holding out both hands, palms up. “Because three strangers are on my sidewalk, in front of a kid, asking for—”

  “I’m Assistant District Attorney Martha Gardiner. Middlesex County District Attorney’s Office.” Gardiner does not offer to shake Baltrim’s hand. “This man is from the state police. We’re here to—”

  “Middlesex … the what? Well, why didn’t you the hell say so?” Baltrim stands his ground but leaves his hands in front of him. “You’ve terrified a child, trespassed on my property, and lied about—”

  “We have a warrant to search these premises,” Gardiner interrupts, “and if you continue in this vein, we’ll be forced to take you in for resisting.”

  “Hey. I’m not resisting anything.” Baltrim puts his arms down, with a dare-you glare at Ben. He tucks a wide-eyed Jonah behind him. Crosses his arms over his chest. “Search? What are you talking about? Search for what?”

  I’ve stepped back a foot or two, as instructed, staying out of this. Is this standard procedure? Scaring a kid and goading a suspect? If Baltrim ever complains about these tactics, if they are tactics, there’d be no outside witness to confirm what happened. Except a maybe-five-year-old child.

  “We can do it with you or without you.” Gardiner has pulled the envelope out of her blazer pocket. Hands it to Baltrim. “If you’re willing to open the door, fine. If not…”

  Our two black cars, probably summoned by Ben, are once again turning onto Raeford Street. Unlike our surreptitious arrival, they make no pretense of stealth.

  Gardiner, almost smiling, gestures to the cars. “We have people, as you see, who will open the door anyway. You may not be pleased with how they do it. Your decision. You have, I’d estimate, thirty seconds.”

  Baltrim has opened the envelope. Pulls out the stapled pages, unfolds them. Scans the front, turns the page. I see the blood drain from his face.

  “Run home now, Jonah,” he says. “Tell your mom I’ll call her later.”

  You shouldn’t use up your phone call, I want to tell him. You need a lawyer. But I keep quiet.

  BEFORE

  As I tramped up the perilously snowy hill toward the statehouse, I replayed Tom’s words.

  “Soon we’ll talk,” he’d said. What did that mean? What did “Hold on to this” mean?

  This time of the morning, even before the earliest Monday rush hour, Beacon Hill seemed like another world, with steep one-way streets and narrow sidewalks. Rows of brownstones, with their shared walls and ornate front doorways, windowpanes, some glowing with light, so delicate they were almost lavender. Trees edged with snow, gnarled bare-branched magnolias and dogwoods old enough that Samuel Adams might have seen them. Cars, most of them blanketed white in their coveted parking spots, would probably not move all day. Dark wrought-iron gates protected the shuttered enclaves of the superprivate superpowerful.

  At the carelessly shoveled back steps of the statehouse, I stomped the snow from my boots, saw my breath in the air, felt off balance from the senator’s midnight visit. What would happen inside this building today? It could not be the same for us, not ever. I paused, in longing and in uncertainty.

  The parking lots, domain of the upper echelons, were newly plowed, though the line of old green dumpsters at the rear, lids down, were blanketed with snow, too, white bumps indicating the rocks holding each rusty top in place. Trash guys came Friday, and then not again until Monday evening. Tucking my thermal coffee mug under one arm, I dug out my employee ID card and showed it to the uniformed guard, who waved me by without looking at it. The statehouse, lofty, marble-floored, and walled with oil portraits of founding fathers, is public space, former governor Patrick had once declared, so security was pretty casual.

  Once inside, I brushed the melting snow from my black coat and unwrapped my plaid wool scarf, spattering droplets on the yellowing marble floor. I pushed the silver button for the unreliable elevator, and as we arrived on the second floor, I looked, as I can’t get over doing, at the glorious stained-glass windows of the senate president’s Communications Office, circa turn of the last century, a rainbow mosaic with medallions and swords and two sailing ships, the Arbella and the Mayflower, sailing timelessly on a turquoise glass sea.

  Calvin Coolidge once worked in these offices. I wonder if he hit on his staffers.

  Senator Rafferty—as I was retraining myself to think of him now—certainly would not mention his visit to my apartment. And I certainly would not. Mutually assured destruction, I supposed it was. Although I hadn’t done anything. Nothing at all. Except take the envelope. And the box. And what was inside. A necklace. Clasped around my neck now and tucked underneath my black sweater. Like a talisman. A promise.

  I jammed my damp coat and scarf over the top rung of the curved rack by the door. I shouldn’t keep the necklace, I’d decided. I couldn’t let him think I was available that easily. But I could wear it secretly, this once, and then I’d put it all back, exactly how it was. And return it. Maybe I’d keep a picture of it, for … nostalgia.

  “In fact,” I said out loud.

  “In fact what, Rachel?” Logan Concannon’s oboe voice entered the room before she got through the doorway. Clipboard, glasses, cell phone in hand. Tom’s—Senator Rafferty’s—chief of staff has some kind of parabolic hearing. Or maybe she’s simply proficient in being at the right place at the wrong time. I’ve heard her called Gollum, though I personally had never done so out loud. It was her job to keep all the political and administrative moving parts moving. And stop the ones that needed to be stopped. As a result, she’d managed to not only know everything her boss was doing, but also everything everyone else was doing.

  My hand trembled a bit, thinking of that, as I dumped a spoon of sugar into my coffee mug.

  “You’re an early bird,” she went on. “How was your weekend?”

  I knew that’s simply what one said on Monday. I knew she had no idea about what happened at my apartment on Friday.

  “Same old same old.” I changed the focus. “How about you?”

  Logan’s famously private, closemouthed. Her longevity—and her memory—is legendary. She knows who she owes and what they owe her. She deposited her clipboard and phone on a striped wing chair, chose a coffee pod from the rack, then inserted it into the machine.

  “My weekend was fine, when it finally began,” she said, pushing buttons to start the brewer. “The senator and I had a late night here on Friday. The budget. As always.”

  The heat kicked on in the room, the ancient statehouse furnaces clanking into action, pumping a blast of hot air against my legs. I felt the heat rise in my face as well. Why was she talking about Friday night? Working late on Friday night? Because you work in the same office, I told myself. This is called Monday-morning chitchat. She chits, you chat. She’s referring to the one thing you have in common, the process of government. Not that she was in that car.

  “You are so devoted,” I said. I opened our little fridge for milk, stalling. Hoping she’d go away. Her office is down the hall. Exactly. So what was she doing here? I sniffed the milk. Iffy.

  I set my mug on an end table, poured some of the milk into it anyway. The necklace, hidden, was burning its golden shape into my chest. I’d be branded with tiny stars.

  “We were here until, oh, might have been midnight,” Logan went on. As if she and I talked about the senator’s activities all the time. Which we did not. Coffee water burbled into her mug, a triumphant puff of steam announcing the cycle was complete. “Friday night. Rachel? We need to discuss that.”

  I could hear the sound of her spoon stirring the coffee. She had not added anything to that cup. She was simply stirring. Looking at me. Waiting for me to say something.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Gardiner, blazer draped over the back of her chair and the cuffs of her silk blouse unbuttoned and turned back, apparently her version of casual, clinks her full wineglass against Andrew DiPrado’s, then E
li Lansberry’s. “First we make an arrest, then we toast the system. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how justice gets done.”

  I’m too far away down the caramel leather banquette at Alden & Harlow for Martha to clink against mine, so she wine-salutes, smiling in my direction. Nick Soderberg is absent, and no one has mentioned him. Five o’clock on a Thursday, when it’s light outside and we’re theoretically in work mode, seems an unsettling time to be drinking Chardonnay with your boss and colleagues in a trendy Cambridge restaurant. But Gardiner told us it’s an office ritual—handcuffs, arrest, and then wine.

  This place used to be a Cambridge landmark. As Casablanca, Jack’s told me, it was the go-to romantic spot for Harvard students, the instant messaging that your intentions were serious. Casablanca’s long gone, if seven years is long, and now, as Alden & Harlow, all pale wood, warm suede, and immersive greenery, the subterranean bistro is beloved by my law-school foodie colleagues. Those who can afford it. But Gardiner explained that since the post-arrest drinking tradition started in this space, albeit (she said “albeit”) with beer, here it will continue. “Ritual is ritual,” she’d proclaimed. “This is what we do.”

  What we do. What Gardiner and the SWAT guys did, to be more precise. I’d been on the outside, literally. Completely bummed not to be involved in the search of Jeffrey Baltrim’s house and see how they handled it. Gardiner wouldn’t let me go inside. Even more annoying, since Jonah refused to budge, she’d ordered me to babysit until his mother got home. Because I was a woman? Or maybe Gardiner was making sure I knew my place. If Andrew DiPrado had been there, would Gardiner have given him the same assignment? I doubt it.

  I slide out of my seat, making bathroom excuses, and zigzag past tables of earnest twosomes, early drinkers, one solitary dark-suited businessman, maybe, staring into a martini glass. None of them had just participated in an arrest for murder. As I walk down a flight of industrial-concrete stairs toward the red-lacquer door marked W, I mentally reprise my morning, a high-wire act that’s only beginning.

  Jeff Baltrim’s front door had closed with me left on the front stoop. Not a sound escaped. What were the police doing inside? How were they doing it? So frustrating to be kept on the sidelines.

  “Do you have any books in there?” I’d pointed to Jonah’s backpack. Might as well talk to the kid. “Maybe about dinosaurs? Or trucks?”

  “Why is my uncle inside with those police? My mom says police are good. They help us.”

  “Do you live next door?” I asked.

  “He’s the pizza man. He’s not my real uncle. We only call him that. I’m five. We get pizza all the time!” Jonah’s words spilled over each other, his eyes wide with enthusiasm. “Sometimes, my mom lets me go with him, like babysitting. I don’t have a dad. Because she’s a nurse. In the night. Sometimes I sleep in the backseat.”

  I’d looked at him. Calculating. His mother was a nurse, too? I could almost hear Jack’s defense. No one, he’d try to persuade a jury, would murder someone while a kid was asleep in the backseat of a pizza delivery truck. But my husband would not be able to help Jeff Baltrim. My ambition had made sure of that.

  “That sounds like fun,” I said. “Is it a pizza truck? Or a car?”

  “It’s a car.” Jonah looked at me from under his baseball cap. Idiot grown-up.

  “Did you go with your uncle yesterday night?” I shifted on the dusty wooden step. My black skirt would never be the same.

  Jonah wrinkled his nose. “What’s a yester day of the night?”

  Okay, he was five. “The night before today. Did you wake up in the car today?”

  I could almost see him trying to remember. Then he stood, pointing. “A butterfly!” he exclaimed. “Catch it!”

  I needed him to focus. But, yeah, he’s five. “Why don’t we let it be free, Jonah? See how happy he is? Jonah?”

  “What?” He plopped back down on the step, his eyes on the brilliant black-and-orange creature that fluttered away past a pink dogwood blooming in the yard next door.

  “Did you wake up in the car today?”

  “It was dark,” he said. “So dark! And it wasn’t even morning. And we came home. Uncle Jeff picked me up and carried me. And he smelled yucky.”

  Yucky, I thought. Whatever that means. Like oregano? Or death? Was this child an alibi? Or a witness for the prosecution? How would a suspect ever know who was about to be turned against them? What supposed ally was about to ruin his life?

  Ben and his cadre of SWAT guys had emerged with three sealed paper bags of evidence. What they’d seized, I have no idea. Jonah’s mother arrived, asking me questions I had no idea how to answer. I’d taken her name and told her—I hoped it was correct—that Gardiner would be in touch. Later I reported to Gardiner what the boy had said about accompanying his “uncle” on last night’s deliveries, and the “yucky” smell.

  That turned out to be a mistake.

  “Doing a bit of private investigation, Ms. North?” Gardiner’s voice had sounded unmistakably dismissive. “But you’ll learn, I hope. Kids like that are unreliable, unpredictable, and prone to fantasy. He’s maybe five, have you forgotten that? What’s more, it would be no surprise that we’d find evidence the boy had been in the delivery car. Correct?” And that had been the end of that. She’d seemed so contemptuous I hadn’t dared ask what they’d found in the search. I see why Jack hates her. But she’s my boss.

  Back at the banquette, Gardiner’s deep into discussion with Eli and Andrew. A glossy black plate of golden fries, sprinkled with parsley flakes, has appeared on the table.

  I slide in to my seat and take a sip of my white wine to paper over the moment of awkward silence. “What did I miss?”

  “We were handicapping defense attorneys,” Gardiner says. Using a manicured thumb and forefinger, she selects a french fry, then points it at Eli. “Correct, Mr. Lansberry? And our defendant’s history.”

  “While you were babysitting,” Eli says, “Andrew and I checked Jeff Baltrim’s finances. Asset search, property search. Oregano Brothers was happy to hand over his employment application. And—”

  I sneak a glance at Gardiner, who’s placed her french fry on a triangular side plate and is now spooning a puddle of ketchup next to it. Babysitting is exactly what I’d thought at the time, but it seems unnecessarily disparaging for her to have described it that way to my colleagues.

  “And?” Andrew interrupts. “Indigent city. Tough to afford a lawyer on a pizza-delivery salary. He’ll get assigned someone from the murder list.”

  “Not Ms. North’s husband, however.” Gardiner pats the salt from her lips, puts the black napkin back in her lap. “Lucky for him. What you missed while you were … indisposed, Rachel? Today’s search revealed Jeff Baltrim was once Tassie Lyle’s patient at Boston Med.”

  “Did you know little Jonah’s—?” I begin.

  “That boy’s mother is not involved, Rachel.” Gardiner dismisses my question, rolling over it. “But it appears our suspect had been selling drugs Ms. Lyle had procured for him. Seems she’d refused to continue, and our boy was not pleased about that. Gentlemen, and Rachel, welcome to the legal profession. This one’s a slam dunk for the prosecution.”

  BEFORE

  I stared at the empty coatrack by the door of my office, at the line of empty wooden hangers. Most everyone else had gone, and some idiot had stolen my coat and scarf. Who could have possibly…? But no. No one had swiped my coat. I’d left it in the coffee room, damp and soggy, before this morning’s encounter with Logan Concannon. I’d been so freaked out and eager to leave the room that I’d forgotten it. No big deal, usually, but now it meant that instead of sneaking out this evening through the back hallway and down the elevator by the stairs, I’d have to retrace my steps and retrieve it from the Communications Office coffee corner.

  Logan had been distracted from our “We need to discuss that,” conversation, thank all that’s holy, and I’d successfully dodged her all day.

  “‘We need t
o discuss that?’” I muttered. “Not a chance.” Not until I could figure out what to say. At least confer with Tom. But I hadn’t seen him, not all day. He probably was avoiding me on purpose, to prevent an awkward moment. I touched the necklace, nestled under my sweater, then opened my outer door and turned left into the gloomy hallway.

  I’d laugh about this, I tried to convince myself, when I found out what Logan had really wanted to discuss.

  If Tom—the senator—was in his private suite now, I’d be able to dash in and dash out undetected because the suite had no windows that connected to the coffee room. But the senator’s front door connected to Logan Concannon’s office, and therein was my dilemma.

  If Logan’s office door was open, she could definitely see the coffee room from her desk. And she could see me.

  “Plus,” I said out loud, then stopped as the word almost echoed in the emptiness. Plus, I thought, who was there to stand up for me? “He said, she said” was a cliché, a trope, and now, because of something I didn’t do, a reality. Thomas Rafferty could say anything, anything, and no matter how I tried to counter it, I was the employee, the vulnerable one, the expendable one, the little guy with no power. In the final analysis, power was the only currency.

  No surprise on Beacon Hill.

  I pulled open the stained-glass door to the Comm room. Waited. Listened. Nothing. Logan’s door was closed. The sliver of gap at the top showed only darkness, so the lights were off. Logan was gone. Score one for Rachel.

  Then I remembered. I had the necklace. That was way more currency than “he said, she said.”

  With newfound confidence, my heart finally calming, I stepped toward my coat on the rack. Reached up a hand. My boots were there, too. And then I heard the voices.

  Coming from Logan’s office. The lights are off, my brain insisted. Yes, they were. But someone was in there.

  “Rachel,” a voice said. Logan’s voice. “Well. I see.”

  I stopped, frozen, my hand midair, a few inches away from my coat. Logan had not come into the room. She was not talking to me. She was talking about me. There was not likely to be another Rachel. Was Logan on the phone? Or was someone else with her?