Fixer Redux

by Gene Doucette

  “The threat got run up the flagpole, State House protocol kicked in, and everybody got outside okay. A couple of scrapes and bruises, nothing serious. First responders to the scene did a nice job keeping a lid on a crazy situation. Good work all around. Now, I’m told that at that time, Mr. Bain was taken into custody. Is that accurate?”

  “We hung onto him for questioning,” White said. “He wasn’t under arrest.”

  “He could have left if he wanted to?” Justin asked, for clarification.

  “If you want to put it like that, sure.”

  “He was cooperating with your investigation is the point I’m trying to make, Joe.”

  “Sure. I mean, he wasn’t telling me anything, so I don’t know if you want to call that cooperation or not.”

  “Fair enough. Let’s fast forward. Bomb squad arrives. Who briefs them?”

  “I did that,” Chief Gregorian said.

  “Okay. They go in. Fifteen minutes later, they send out a runner with the word that they’ve got a live one. After that? We’ve got a lot of uncertainty.”

  The image cut to a still of the State House, immediately after the explosion. Justin pointed to a spot where there used to be a window, and a wall.

  “This is early, but so far it looks like the epicenter of the blast was about here. You’ll recall that the room where the bomb was found was over here. The implication is that they were in the act of removing it, rather than that the bomb became independently ambulatory. I’m gonna table any discussion about why they were doing that for now.”

  Maggie remembered the last time she worked with the men from the bomb squad. Then, the device in question couldn’t be secured to the full satisfaction of the team, so they destroyed it in a reinforced drum. That drum was large and extremely heavy, and was ferried around the city on the back of a flatbed truck. What probably happened at the State House was that they were moving the bomb to get it to the drum, but until someone could confirm that, she understood why the question was an open one. Because the other possibility—that they thought it had been safely disabled, when it wasn’t—was scarier.

  Justin nodded at Mikey, who went to the next image. It was a photo of the bomb, taken with a camera phone.

  “Roughly four seconds before the bomb went off, this image and two others were uploaded to a cloud server shared by the joint domestic terrorism task force. It was sent from Tom Osteen’s phone. Tommy didn’t make it.”

  Maggie swallowed hard. She needed to have a good cry about the loss of Tom Osteen and the rest of the team, but now was not the time.

  Justin continued.

  “Current thinking is, he took these pictures and pointed them to the shared drop box so when he had a signal again they would upload automatically. Here’s the problem: Tommy’s phone got a signal while he was still next to the bomb, which means the jammer failed, for at least long enough for that to happen. In that same window, the bomb was triggered. Go to the third image?”

  Mikey forwarded to the third picture, which was a close-up of one component of the bomb. It was the reason these images had ended up in the joint task force mail drop.

  “Maggie, why don’t you tell us what we’re looking at?”

  The image captured a cell phone that was obsolete about ten years earlier, wired to a block of C-4. Drawn in black marker on the explosive was a peculiar symbol: a straight line, or staff bisecting a half-circle, with flat lines drawn off the ends of the circle. It looked almost like an ergonomic crucifixion cross.

  “This is a signature,” she said. “The type of wires used, the explosive, the phone and especially the symbol are all things we’ve seen before. It’s the same design used by Borowitz and Ledo.”

  There was a murmur in the room, as this was evidently news to some people.

  “I’m sorry,” Cindy Lane said, “But aren’t both of those people in custody?”

  “Yes, they are.”

  Nick Borowitz and Sharon Ledo had been brought down by Maggie’s task force eight weeks ago, at which time—for reasons having less to do with law enforcement and more to do with politics—victory was declared and medals were handed out, and the task force was shut down.

  Maggie had never been fully convinced they’d arrested and/or killed all of the parties involved, but Nick and Sharon weren’t talking, and the FBI needed a win. And it was a big victory. She just thought there was more work to be done.

  “So that means...?” Cindy asked. “I guess I don’t understand.”

  Justin answered. “It means an associate of Borowitz and Ledo is still out there somewhere. It could also mean the members of the task force were the target. We’ll get back to this as well.”

  As far as Maggie was concerned, the photograph made this entire thing her case, or rather a case belonging to the joint task force she happened to be running. Even if they were the target, they were also the best equipped to take over the investigation. She had spent most of the day trying to make this point.

  But then there was the problem with Corrigan, which made demands for her recusal pretty credible.

  Mikey advanced the slide, to a shot of a more modern cellphone.

  “This phone belongs to Mr. Bain,” Justin said. “According to witnesses, he placed a phone call at the same time the bomb went off. Given he was also considered a suspect in the case…sorry, he was being held for questioning in the case…this coincidence is a little peculiar. According to the records on the phone, no calls went through. We’ve reached out to the provider to find out if anything else was transmitted from the phone at around that time. A text message or something.”

  There were hundreds of people in Boston Common at that time, who were either about to place a call or already on one. Any one of those cellphones could have triggered the device, and the only difference was that Joe White wasn’t staring at them when the bomb went off. On top of that, Corrigan didn’t even use the phone.

  She’d been making this point all afternoon—that what Joe witnessed was just a coincidence—but somehow nobody else could see the logic in it. Corrigan attracted coincidences like blood attracted sharks, but that was also something nobody was ready to hear.

  Everything that happened after that sort of hurt her case, too.

  “Detective White placed Mr. Bain under arrest at that time,” Justin said, “and took the phone as evidence. Mr. Bain was driven here, and held a couple of floors down in one of the tanks…and that’s where we have a new problem, don’t we?”

  “Any leads yet, Justin?” David asked.

  “Not at the moment, no.”

  Justin’s response was directed at Maggie. She wasn’t sure what to make of it, except maybe to warn her to keep quiet.

  “You all know this,” he continued, “but let’s make sure we’re keeping to the same page. Corrigan Bain escaped police custody a little over an hour after he was walked in the front door. According to the sergeant he assaulted—Will Pekoe, if anyone knows him, they’re saying he’ll be fine—Bain asked for his phone call and surprised Will when the door was opened.”

  “I’m sorry, can I stop you?” This was from Jeanine Mastrangelo, the task force’s ICE liaison. “I’ve heard this a couple of times now, and…look, I don’t know the sergeant, but that story’s a little thin. Don’t you think?”

  “Pekoe’s good police,” Chief Gregorian said.

  “Nobody’s saying he isn’t, but look: Pekoe goes in alone, right? Is that even…Detective White, is that protocol? Guy’s your only suspect in the bombing, and this sounds like drunk tank procedure to me. Have you checked the security footage?”

  “I get your point,” White said, “and I promise we’ll be talking to the sergeant after he’s cleared, but we’ve got a bigger problem here. Our lead suspect is in the wind; I think we should focus on that.”

  “Did the tape show him attacking Pekoe?” David asked. “I think I’d like to see that, Joe.”

  “Camera didn’t show anything. Looks like there was a malfunction.”
<
br />   Jeanine laughed.

  “A what?” she asked. “Say that again.”

  “The camera that covered the cells wasn’t on,” Joe said. He at least had the sense to look embarrassed about this.

  “All right,” Jeanine said. “Look, again, I don’t want to step on toes here, but if I could point out the obvious? It looks to me like your bigger problem isn’t that this Bain guy escaped, it’s that you’ve got someone in your station who helped him get out.”

  “That’s unjustified!” Gregorian said.

  Maggie stifled a laugh, and made a note to buy Jeanine a drink if they ever got to a point in this awful day where they had time for one.

  “I’m sorry, sir, but I know where those cells are and it’s three flights of police and security doors between the bars and the outside,” Jeanine said. “He had to have had help. Probably the same guy who turned off the camera.” She looked at David. “Tell me I’m wrong.”

  “I don’t think you’re wrong,” David said.

  “Mikey,” Justin said, “do you have the security feed loaded?”

  “Sure thing,” Mike said. He was interfacing the projector with a laptop; going from the prepared presentation to the security footage meant going back out to the desktop and initiating the camera feed stored on the computer.

  “We’re still looking this over, right Joe?” Justin said, while Mike got to it. “I’ve only seen it once myself. Didn’t plan on sharing it until we understood what was going on, but…well, have a look.”

  A grainy black-and-white image jumped to life on the projector screen. It was security camera footage, as promised, filmed from a ceiling corner. Maggie recognized it as the open-desk layout on the floor outside the holding cells. It was where Corrigan would have had to go after leaving the cell.

  The floor was half-occupied with office personnel—mostly uniformed officers, with a few civilian employees. Out of context it might have been a midnight shift, or a precinct in a tiny suburb.

  Corrigan showed up in the top right corner of the screen, walking slowly past two unoccupied desks. Ahead of him, an officer was bent over a desk, examining something being shown to him by a second, seated officer. If either one was to turn around they would see Corrigan standing there, but neither did.

  Looking like a man avoiding obstacles only he could see, Corrigan stutter-stepped and dashed from spot to spot, right through the center of the room. One second, he was upright, the next he was crouching. Twice, he walked in a circle. Nobody saw him.

  After four minutes of this, he ended up at the other side, where he exited to get to the stairwell.

  The footage ended.

  “So,” Justin said. “We have no idea how he did that. Maggie?”

  Maggie was surprised they were even talking to her.

  “He was lucky?” she offered.

  She knew exactly how Corrigan did what they just watched him do, but didn’t think she could explain it.

  “Does he have some special training we need to be aware of?” White asked her.

  “Like what? He’s a ninja?”

  “Now look—”

  “No, you look, detective,” she snapped. “You arrested him for making a phone call he didn’t make, claim he assaulted a cop while the only camera that could have recorded that mysteriously stopped working, and then your guys let him walk out of the station without anyone saying boo and somehow, somehow it’s all his fault. Because you’ve got a gut feeling or some shit.”

  Justin stepped in. “Maggie, that’s enough.”

  “I don’t think it is. Corrigan saved my life this morning. He saved the lives of a lot of the people. And the police want him accountable for the lives he didn’t save.”

  “How’d he know the bomb was there?” White asked. “Is he psychic?”

  You’re pretty close, Maggie thought.

  “You don’t arrest the hero for being a hero,” she said.

  “Sure, unless that’s the whole idea.”

  They had been arguing off and on for most of the day, starting when she arrived at his tent about fifteen minutes after Corrigan had been taken away in a cruiser. She’d heard everything White had to say—and vice versa—but this was new.

  “You mean a hero complex?” David interjected.

  “I’ve had guys pulling files all afternoon downtown,” Joe said, “and his name pops up all over the place. Accidents, near-accidents, people tripping into the street or down stairs, air conditioners falling outta windows, bikers almost getting creamed by trucks…I got fifteen jackets with his name in ‘em so far, and I’ve only pulled from two precincts. It’s always the same thing. He was just in the area, happened to notice, did a thing, everybody’s okay. This is not normal.”

  “All right,” Justin said. “Okay, I see what you’re saying. Make your case.”

  “I think this guy gets off on acting the hero. Maybe it was legit a couple of times, early on, and he liked it, and wanted more.”

  Maggie was pretty sure if Corrigan was in the room he would have laughed out loud at this. Staging two or three things a day so they looked like accidents would have been way beyond his—or anyone’s—means, but since White didn’t know about all of them, he couldn’t appreciate how impossible what he was suggesting actually was. Corrigan also spent half of his career trying to figure out how to retire. Thanks to a lot of therapy, he finally had. That he got off on it somehow was comical. If anything, he hated the attention.

  “He graduated in to staging things,” White continued, “because the little stuff stopped doing it for him. So, he put a bomb in the podium in a place he was gonna be, when there were gonna be a lot of cameras around to catch him being a big hero. And hey, maybe the bomb was supposed to go off.”

  “It would have taken out everyone in the room,” Jeanine said.

  “Then he was expecting a smaller explosion. Wouldn’t be the first time some yabbo got the C-4 wrong. Plus, we’re all aware of his relationship with Agent Trent. He could have gotten details on the Borowitz and Ledo signature from her.”

  He looked at Maggie.

  “Look, it doesn’t make me happy to say this, okay? It doesn’t. But it adds up.”

  “How would he get the bomb into the podium?” Justin asked.

  “How would anybody? The State House is locked down 24/7 and swept regularly. We don’t know. But right now, my money’s on the guy who just walked out of a police station completely unnoticed being able to pull something like that off.”

  The room fell silent while everyone gave that some thought. Some of them were taking him seriously, Maggie realized.

  “Justin, come on,” she said.

  “It’s a theory,” her boss said with a shrug.

  “It’s not close to one. You know we left someone unaccounted for in that case, this should be ours.”

  “I bet he was counting on that, too,” White said.

  “I swear to God—”

  “Both of you, stop it,” Justin said. “All right, here’s what I think. Joe, you’re already on it, so go find Bain and see if you can make a case. Maggie, you and the task force run the Borowitz/Ledo angle. Whoever closes the case first wins. Does that make everyone equally unhappy?”

  There were nods and murmurs and a couple of sighs, but no vocalized dissent, not even from Chief Gregorian, whose toes Justin Axelrod had just stepped all over.

  “Good. Daily briefings, keep the chain-of-command, you’re all professionals here. Don’t forget we lost four guys today. By this time next week, I want the name of the people responsible to be on every headline in the country. Got it?”

  The meeting broke up. Maggie rose along with everyone else and started for the elevators. They would have to get back to the FBI offices to reopen a lot of files, and she had no intention of waiting until morning to start doing that.

  Justin pulled her aside before she made it very far, into a private room off of the conference room.

  “I need to ask you this,” he said. “Do you know where h
e is? No bullshit.”

  “I haven’t talked to him since we got out of the State House together this morning,” she said.

  “That isn’t what I asked.”

  “No, I don’t know. I assume he didn’t go home, and that if he had, Joe would have had someone there to arrest him.”

  “Okay,” Justin said. “I’m asking because they’re going to do the same thing. The longer he stays in the cold the worse this is going to look, you know that.”

  “I do. But I don’t know where he is or where he would go. He also doesn’t have any special combat training, he doesn’t know how to build bombs and never would if he did, and he wouldn’t have been aware of B and L’s signature because I didn’t bring my work home with me. This is all a misunderstanding.”

  Justin nodded gently.

  “I believe you. But we have to let them run their investigation, especially because their suspect has a special relationship to you…to us. There can’t be any question of us holding out.”

  “I get that. And thanks for not pulling me from the case.”

  “You know it best. Just don’t cross up with them.”

  He clapped her on the shoulder and left her alone.

  She sat there in the conference room by herself for a few minutes, wondering if she had just lied to her boss or not.

  6

  Call him a hero if you want. What I see is a crazy person running around Boston, and an FBI that is either unable or unwilling to bring him down.

  —Anita Hoffman, Good Morning Boston, AM 670

  There was a solid three or four seconds of panic and confusion awaiting Corrigan when he woke up. He didn’t know where he was, or how he got there. The entire previous day had disappeared, and he was supposed to be awakening next to Maggie, in his own bedroom.

  Instead, he woke up alone in a strange place that looked like it belonged on a furniture sales floor.

  “Right,” he said aloud, listening for the temporal echo and not hearing much of it. He may have woken up in the wrong place, but his head was straight, and he felt like he’d gotten a decent amount of sleep.