“So Sally’s our bomber,” Beckett said.
“And a head case,” Charlie said. She pointed to her temple. “Brock is worse. Whatever they did to that guy in the loony bin, there’s nothing going on upstairs. He does what Sally tells him.”
“Meaning Leon’s the only one we can negotiate with. You think he’ll keep his word if we deliver the goods?”
“I think he knows he’s in over his head. If we give him a lifeline, he’ll grab it.”
“Why are we just hearing about this now?” Beckett asked. “You should have called as soon as they cut you loose. We could have already been moving on this.”
Under the table, Charlie’s hands squeezed her knees tight.
“I’ve been at the hospital.”
She tripped over her words, fumbled, dropped them all at her feet. She gathered them up and started over again.
“My dad. Jimmy’s people, they, uh . . .” Charlie’s jaw clenched. “They couldn’t get at me, so . . .”
Beckett sat up and pushed his shoulders back. Dom reached over. Her hand rested, firm, on Charlie’s shoulder.
“He’ll live,” Charlie said. “He’s just . . . yeah.”
Beckett held his silence, unknowable gears turning behind the walls of his eyes.
“I can only imagine how much it’s burning you up,” Dom told her, “but what I said before stands. You don’t want to go after these guys.”
“No, I really, really do.”
“You know what I mean. Look, Charlie . . . you take out Lassiter’s leg breakers, and no one on earth would blame you—I mean, they’ve got it coming—but Lassiter’s going to come around asking questions. You take out Lassiter, and some men from New York are going to come around asking questions. You do not want that.”
“I had another idea,” Charlie told them. “I was thinking, this morning, on my run. Putting it all together, you know?”
“We’re listening,” Beckett said. He tilted his head, like he was catching a scent in the air.
She spoke slowly, feeling the weight of her words, knowing she couldn’t take them back once she’d given them voice.
“Sally and her crew can’t go to the police, obviously,” Charlie said. “And neither can Sean Ellis. If his connection to the diamond-exchange theft is ever exposed, he’s ruined for life.”
“Sure,” Dom said. “Where are you going with this?”
Charlie’s fingers played across the stack of notes and maps. Slow, like a piano player warming up.
“What if we found the diamonds and used them as leverage to get Sean Ellis back safe and sound?”
She hesitated, took a deep breath, and finished the thought.
“And what if,” Charlie said, “once we took care of Ellis, we kept the diamonds for ourselves?”
Neither Dom or Beckett replied, not at first. They shared an unreadable glance.
“You want to rob the robbers,” Beckett said. Not judging. Just confirming.
“My dad is in a hospital bed right now, and it’s my fault. When Jimmy Lassiter’s deadline runs out, I don’t know what they’re going to do for an encore. Cripple him. Maybe kill him. My only way out right now, my father’s only way out, is to get the money to pay Lassiter back.”
Dom drummed her lacquered nails on the table.
“I’ve got bills piling up like you wouldn’t believe,” she said. “My scumbag ex is dragging the divorce out as long as he can, trying to break me. And he’s winning. I lose this case, I’ll be lucky to see my little girl once a year at Christmas.”
She locked eyes with Charlie.
“I’m in. Let’s do this.”
They both looked to Beckett. His gaze was distant, contemplating, calculating.
“You realize this could get messy,” he said. “The kind of messy you have to dig six-foot holes to clean up.”
Charlie knew. “I’ve seen that kind of messy before.”
“This isn’t a battlefield, and you aren’t a soldier anymore. It’s not the same thing.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” Charlie said. “As far as I’m concerned, this is absolutely a battlefield. Right now, it’s the only battle worth fighting.”
Beckett leaned back in his chair. His gaze fell upon the table, to the scattering of maps and notebooks. He weighed his verdict in silence.
“Then we’ve got a lot of work ahead of us,” he said. “Let’s dig in.”
They divvied up the pile of research and plunged in, following Leon Guster’s tangled trail. He’d tried to recapture his own history, rebuilding the night of the diamond-exchange heist from memory and padding it out with newspaper clippings and police reports. Grids on graph paper traced each one of the robbers’ movements down to the minute.
7:22 a.m., manager gets loose, opens front door for cops. 7:23 a.m., Michael, left of door, opens fire. One cop and manager go down. Second cop retaliates, kills Michael. Sally, standing behind west-facing counter, shoots second officer.
Less than five minutes of chaos given a clean, clinical breakdown, right up until the moment when Professor Kinzman had split up the loot and sent everyone in opposite directions, out into the storm.
That’s when the carefully annotated time column became a string of increasingly fevered question marks, jotted in a shaky hand.
He’d traced Sean and Kimberly’s doomed route through the snow fifteen different possible ways, using the exchange as a starting point and the recovery site of Kimberly’s body—a five-foot snowdrift in a dead-end alley—as the final destination. He’d checked every storefront along the way, though the whole city had been locked up tight that morning due to the incoming blizzard. He’d even, at one point, finagled his way into the junction tunnels under the street in case she’d stashed her share of the diamonds under a manhole cover. Years of work, and nothing to show for it but question marks and Xs marked in red highlighter showing all the places the diamonds weren’t. He’d meticulously constructed the exact opposite of a treasure map.
“This is useless,” Dom said. Nobody had spoken a word in maybe an hour.
“Her share went somewhere,” Charlie said. “She left the exchange with the diamonds. They weren’t on her body. Something happened to them between point A and point B.”
Beckett furrowed his brow at the map before him, tracing highlighter trails with his fingertip. “Two possibilities we need to consider. Number one, Sean’s lying. He really did take her share when he ran.”
“They’re going to kill him,” Dom replied. “If that’s true, he’d be stupid not to give it up.”
“Sure. But never underestimate how money, or the fear of losing it, can make a man do stupid things,” he said. “Number two, the diamonds were on the body.”
“You think someone stole them?” Charlie asked. “An EMT, maybe, or a cop?”
“Wouldn’t rule it out. And if they did, that trail’s ice cold. We’ll never find them now. Time to start thinking about a plan B.”
Plan B. There might be a plan B for saving Sean Ellis. There wasn’t one for saving her father. Charlie pushed her chair back.
“I need to stretch my legs,” she said. “Be right back.”
The stacks held a little comfort. That empty nostalgia glow, taking her back to when she was a kid, when the stakes had been so much lower. She knew she couldn’t stay. That kind of reminiscing was a poison, a distraction from the mission at hand. On her way to the bathroom, she crossed paths with Mrs. Frinkle.
“I found some more material in the archives for you,” her former teacher said, lighting up at the chance to be helpful. “Some newspaper articles, all about the Blizzard of ’69, mostly the emergency response and the cleanup timing. Would love to know what you’re researching it for . . .”
Her voice trailed off, leaving her bait on the hook. Charlie didn’t bite. “Thanks, Mrs. Frinkle. I appreciate that. Every little bit helps.”
“Talk about bringing back memories.” The elderly woman chuckled. “I thought the snow would never e
nd.”
“You were there?”
“Oh yes, I grew up in Boston. Started my teaching career there. Don’t tell anyone, but teachers enjoy the occasional snow day too. Of course, that was a bit much.” Her gaze went distant, thinking back. “The city was so different then. The tumult in the seventies, the development boom in the eighties . . . oh, I’m not complaining; I still love going into town now and again, but it doesn’t look anything like my memories. Goodness, when the blizzard hit, they hadn’t even finished work on One Boston Place. I lived right by there; I remember the snow clinging to the shell, glistening like crystal on those brand-new windows.”
Intel. Every mission Charlie had ever run in uniform had come down to field-intelligence reports. Good intel meant you had a shot at coming home alive. Bad intel left you chasing your tail while the locals got some free target practice. She held up a finger.
“I’ll be right back,” she said.
She darted into the study room and grabbed the nearest map, spinning it around, hunting for the small print on one corner of the rumpled paper.
“Leon made a mistake,” she said. “One very big mistake, and everything he did, everything, was built on one critical error. He didn’t see it. But I do. No wonder he never got anywhere.”
Beckett eyed her, curious. “What do you see, Little Duck?”
“His maps. He based all of his research, his timeline, Kimberly’s trail . . . all of it, he based off these maps.”
She rapped her short-cropped fingernail on the copyright print at the corner of the rumpled paper.
“Modern maps. He’s trying to trace Kimberly’s trail, all the way back in 1969, on maps that were printed five years ago. He’s looking at the wrong Boston.”
THIRTY-SEVEN
Paper maps of Boston showing the streets of 1969 were hard to come by. But with Mrs. Frinkle’s help and a couple of library computers, half an hour of research struck gold. Charlie printed out a vintage set of maps in big, bulky blocks and assembled them on the study-room table like puzzle pieces.
She circled the diamond exchange and Kimberly’s death site in cherry-red highlighter. Then they huddled around, comparing the vintage map to Leon’s, combing the grid one quarter inch at a time.
“Here.” Dom jabbed at the printout. “This little side street. Barely bigger than an alley, but it doesn’t even exist today.”
Charlie leaned closer and squinted. “She could have run through there, yeah.”
“Better hope she didn’t toss the stash in a trash can, thinking she was going to come back for it later,” Beckett said. “She did that, game over.”
Charlie drew a highlighter trail, marking Kimberly’s possible route through the alley. The hot-yellow line of ink sparked a fresh explosion of possibilities, streets, and hiding places Leon hadn’t even glanced at. The vintage map had a key, numbered circles highlighting points of interest. One bubble along the most direct route to Kimberly’s final destination caught Charlie’s eye.
“McCormack Building?” She pointed to a purple square, one block off Water Street. “That ring a bell with either of you?”
Dom took her phone out. “Not offhand. I don’t know that area super well, though. Let me see if it changed names at some point.”
It had changed more than names. A quick dive into the building’s history told a tale of broken promises and broken investors. The McCormack had been slated as competition for the city’s fast-rising skyline, only to run out of money less than half a year into the project. The site had sat abandoned, a skeleton with its steel bones on the verge of rust, until the bank had swooped in and sold it off for pennies on the dollar. Today, the McCormack was Emerald Springs, a midrange condo tower catering to the young-urban-professional crowd.
In February of 1969, construction on the McCormack had already stalled. Only the foundations had been finished. The foundations, the rudiments of a parking garage, and the skeleton of the HVAC system.
“I’m running along the street,” Charlie murmured. She traced the line of highlighter ink past the McCormick’s purple block. “I left the exchange maybe . . . five minutes ago, tops, judging by the distance. The snow’s coming in fast, faster than we anticipated. It’s cold as hell, and I’m only wearing a windbreaker. I can barely see five feet in front of my face. And I can hear police sirens.”
Dom leaned over the map. “They’d sound like they were coming from everywhere. All around her. She’d have to get off the street and find a place to stash the diamonds so she wouldn’t get caught with them.”
“And then get some distance,” Charlie said. “The cops were bound to catch up with her; she would have known that much. She just didn’t imagine hypothermia would catch up with her first. So she ducked into the first empty, open place she saw, dumped the loot, and then kept running.”
She drew a highlighter circle to mark her best guess. “Right here, I’m thinking. And considering the new owners used the guts of the unfinished McCormack to build their condo—”
“Good chance the diamonds are still there,” Beckett said. “So what are we waiting for?”
They needed more. “Somewhere in the foundations” wasn’t good enough; it was still a needle in a haystack. Still, they could narrow their search down with a few key facts. Given the timing, Kimberly would have had less than ten minutes to stash her share. When she’d ducked into the construction site, only the unfinished garage level and the utility rooms had been complete, along with the skeletal shell of the lobby.
“She would have picked a place that was out of sight but easy to get to,” Dom said. “Both because she didn’t have long to find a hiding spot, and because, as far as she knew, she’d be coming back for the diamonds as soon as the heat had simmered down.”
Mrs. Frinkle came to the rescue. With her help and another couple of hours on the hunt, they found a guide in the historical wilderness. The clue was buried in an issue of Modern Architect from September of 1969, titled “The Tragedy of Grand Designs.” The piece offered a detailed breakdown of the McCormack’s troubles, complete with lavish sketches of the corporate palace it had been intended to become. The photographs—black-and-white snaps presenting the final, sorry state of the building alongside sketches of the architect’s dream—showed them exactly what Kimberly would have seen on her desperate, doomed run.
They were halfway to Water Street, cruising down the boulevard in Beckett’s shark car, when Dom looked to the rearview mirror and swore under her breath. Charlie sat in the back seat. The nylon belt tugged on her shoulder as she leaned forward.
“What is it?”
“Don’t look back,” Dom said. “Malloy’s tailing us.”
She almost looked back on instinct. As it was, she had to tense up her shoulders to keep her body rigid, staring straight ahead. She shot a glance at the mirror and caught a glimpse of the car behind them, a minivan with a harried-looking soccer mom at the wheel.
“You sure about that?”
“Behind the Caravan,” Dom said. “He’s good. Just not as good as me. Beckett, hang a left up here; let’s see what he does.”
They slid into the turn lane, and the minivan kept going straight. The car behind, a white Ford with a bug-spattered grille and windows tinted amber, had no choice but to fall in on the shark car’s tail. Chunky plastic sunglasses and a watch cap weren’t enough of a disguise to keep Charlie from recognizing Malloy’s reflection. Dom’s former fellow officer and full-time nemesis was stalking them.
“I believe in coincidences,” Beckett said, “but only small ones.”
“How did he find us?” Charlie asked.
“How’d he ‘just happen’ to cross paths with you at the police station?” Dom said. “Dirty tricks are the only tricks he’s got.”
“Better question is why,” Beckett said.
Dom shifted in her seat. She crossed her arms and glared at the mirror, sharp enough to slice the glass. “He’s a bloodhound. Always has been. Jake may have clamped down on what happened
to Sean Ellis last night and told the ops who got jumped to keep their mouths shut, but something leaked.”
“And if he asked around Sean’s condo, and someone remembered seeing us there—” Charlie said.
“Seeing me,” Dom said. “I doubt Malloy has any idea what he’s even looking for; he just knows something is up and I’m in the mix. That’s all the incentive he needs to start digging.”
“Going to be digging his teeth out of his throat, he keeps this up,” Beckett growled. He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel as they waited for the light to change. “But this is a problem we’ve got to deal with here and now. What’s the call? Scrub it until we figure out how he’s tracking us?”
Charlie’s stomach was as tight as their deadline. They’d been given forty-eight hours to find the diamonds and trade them for their client’s life. Over twelve hours were already gone, and Charlie had no doubt that Sally would pull the trigger on her traitorous classmate the second the last grain of sand ran out.
If she hadn’t done it already.
“No chance,” she said. “No time.”
“Seconded.” Dom looked to Beckett. “Can you lose this clown?”
His answer was a tight-lipped smile.
The left-turn light flickered green. Beckett eased into the turn, then stomped on the gas and swung the wheel right, swinging across two lanes of traffic and shooting straight through the intersection. Horns blared behind them, tires squealing. Charlie chanced a quick look over her shoulder. She saw Malloy stalled out and helpless, straddling two lanes and blocked by the near collision. His bug-flecked Ford faded into the distance as Beckett torpedoed up the boulevard.
Emerald Springs was a midprice condo with midlevel security. A single uniformed guard sat in a booth beside the entrance to the parking garage, but the movie playing on his tablet PC had his undivided attention. He didn’t even glance up as they cruised on by, down a short, steep ramp and into the gallery below the tower. Beckett pulled into the first open spot and killed the engine.
“I need to give my baby a pat down,” he said, “try and figure out how Malloy found us.”
The Loot (Charlie McCabe Thriller) Page 24