Fixer Redux

by Gene Doucette

  Bill: Don’t.

  Kiki: I’m gonna say it.

  Bill: I mean, they already, they’ll make fun.

  Kiki: I don’t care. I’m excited. I’m pumped. I’m gonna say it. Boston has its own superhero.

  Bill: She said it.

  Kiki: And in just a minute, we’re going to have a woman who just might agree with us. Her name is Monica.

  —Transcript, Boston Morning Nosh with Kiki and Bill

  Silly season for the media began on the third day.

  The news outlets—local and then national—were given a lot to work through on the second day, when both the BPD and the FBI had morning and evening press conferences, in which they rehashed everything that had already been mentioned in the press conferences that took place on the evening of the bombing. Mostly, there wasn’t anything new to say so instead things that weren’t true were listed.

  Did someone claim responsibility? No.

  Was a suspect under arrest? No.

  What about the rumors that…? No.

  Big stories like this—and Maggie had lived through a few—relied as much on controlling the rumors as the facts, and on ignoring the out-and-out lies if belief in them ended up being useful. The people responsible were listening too, after all.

  The media couldn’t cope with a long investigation, though. The twenty-four-hour cycle needed regular feeding, so it was always a good idea to hold back trivial information to dole out later, just in case. Justin called it kindling. Maggie preferred to think of them as the control rods in a nuclear reactor; without regular application, there would be a meltdown.

  But this story was too big and the information the FBI doled out was too small, and so on the morning of the third day, the meltdown began. The subject of the meltdown: Corrigan Bain.

  There was a good deal of restraint shown on the subject of Maggie’s boyfriend, all things considered. Was he the hero or the suspect? Since law enforcement couldn’t decide, neither could the various media outlets, but in their speculation they generally stuck to the available facts, which was nice.

  But then the facts started to get weird. A little more than twenty-four hours after the bomb, a local web designer who had built a fan page devoted to Corrigan, years earlier, was given all the air time she wanted on basically every network that wanted her, and every network wanted her because she had one hell of a story.

  The media still seemed to be pretty good about this, by not giving much credence to the woman’s claims, an omission of tacit support that left the impression she was a crank.

  She wasn’t. About half of what Monica Devereaux had to say about Corrigan was wrong, but she was right about the important stuff. Maggie just happened to be one of the few people alive who knew it.

  But then, just in time for the late news, a new photo emerged, and the story that came with a photo was odd enough to start tipping everything over.

  A pipe burst in a restaurant in Chinatown at the start of the dinner rush. It was one of those stories that didn’t even make the news unless it was a slow news night or unless someone was killed. Nobody had been killed or even hurt, according to most accounts, but one of the reasons for that might have been that Corrigan Bain was in the restaurant when it happened.

  She knew Corrigan well enough to appreciate that this was not the sort of place he would visit for dinner, especially not when he was wanted by the police. This was an appointment, which meant he’d come out of retirement.

  She wondered if it was intentional, or if it just started happening again, like in the old days when it seemed out of his control. Either way, the timing was pretty terrible. If nothing else, it lent credence to part of Joe White’s argument that argued Corrigan liked being a hero, because here he was acting the hero when he should have been either hiding, or turning himself in to clear his name.

  With this new tidbit—and no real news to go with—the media had gone from passively speculating on Corrigan’s guilt or innocence to aggressively arguing it one way or another. Suddenly there was no gray area in which to work: he was either a completely innocent man who by coincidence, or some sort of magic, had acted heroically a whole lot; or he was a sinister, attention-seeking monster.

  Maggie was watching a nine AM news show when she saw what had to be the bottom of the speculative news barrel. An expert—in something, who knew what—was explaining how it would be possible to deliberately cause a water pipe to burst.

  It was ridiculous, but maybe not surprising. According to David, the BPD was checking into the possibility of an explosive in that Chinatown pipe. Crazy, maybe, but that’s what you do when you have no leads.

  That appeared to be where everyone was, by day three—no leads—which was why the media was starving and people were talking about Corrigan so much, and also why Maggie was sitting in the middle of a roomful of case files with no useful information in any of them.

  It was a crime with a ton of evidence, and no suspects. More precisely, it had two suspects, but they couldn’t have done it, because Maggie already arrested them.

  Sharon Ledo and Nick Borowitz were both in a federal penitentiary after a slam dunk trial. Both were in prison for the rest of their natural lives, although some legal team somewhere was probably thinking up a challenge to that decision, in light of the past three days. It was neither the largest nor most complicated case Maggie had been a part of, and Borowitz and Ledo weren’t exactly criminal masterminds, but when it came to domestic terrorism investigations, it was a fine bit of work.

  They should have kept it going. Some of the evidence led in other directions, but after the main cell/cult was arrested—thirty-two people were taken into custody, total, and seven more would have been had they not died in a firefight with law enforcement—the investigation was shut down.

  “You want me to reassemble the cork board?” Jeanine asked. She was unpacking one of the dozens of file boxes: the one that had the pictures they used to visually illustrate the investigation. It was mostly for show, for when someone with a bigger title walked in and asked for an update.

  “I’m thinking no,” Maggie said. “Not unless you want to rearrange it so Sharon and Nick aren’t at the top of the pyramid anymore.”

  Brian held up a picture of Corrigan.

  “We could put him at the top,” he said.

  “Not funny,” Jeanine said.

  “It’s a little funny,” Maggie said. “But please don’t.”

  Maggie sifted through the box in front of her. There was nothing new to be found in it, as any one of the task force members could attest to, having each done the same thing she was doing, two or three times.

  The case originally came together from a bunch of pieces of things that only made sense when lined up correctly. There was chatter, some of which turned out to be benign, some being the sort of noise that causes law enforcement to sit up and start writing down names. It was the fuck the government sort of rhetoric that might be ignored if the person saying it was a disgruntled teen with a black-light in his bedroom and too many piercings, but which was taken more seriously when coming from a man in his twenties.

  The chatter couldn’t be connected to anybody, though, not for a long time, so it sat out there on a file, waiting to be attached to something that gave it meaning.

  Elsewhere, an army officer with the Corps of Engineers went missing one day. Sharon Ledo was a lieutenant when she disappeared, a Fall River girl who was working in Concord for the US Army. Sharon was such a clean-cut all-American type, that even though there was ample evidence her departure had been voluntary—she’d packed her bags—she was still treated as a missing-person rather than an AWOL army officer. Not that the available details added up to terrorism, either. Not at first.

  A few months after Sharon’s disappearance, customs intercepted a package of electronics which included components that could be used to detonate a package of C-4. At the same time, the online chatter started to get a lot more specific. And then, one morning, someone found a dev
ice sitting in a cardboard box underneath a pedestrian footbridge in Charlestown.

  It was crude, even by the high school science fair standards against which it was initially judged. It consisted of a brick of clay attached to a car battery and some metal rods, a half-dozen entirely unnecessary extra wires, and an old cell phone.

  A woman walking her dog came across it, and thought enough of what she was looking at to contact the police.

  The respondents included Tommy Osteen, Maggie’s friend from the bomb squad. Tom recognized two things: the bomb wouldn’t work as designed; if it had been designed properly it would have taken down the steel footbridge, because the C-4 was real.

  Maggie was looking at a photo of that bomb, taken by Tom nearly two years earlier. It wasn’t like the later devices, which had to be destroyed because there was a good deal of uncertainty behind the best approach to dismantling them. This first one was dead on arrival, and that was fortunate, because after it had been made safe, the police reached out to the FBI for help sourcing the explosive, and they wouldn’t have been able to do that if it had been detonated.

  The device really did look like something a kid could have made. The first time she saw the photo, her instinct was to reach out to the colleges to see if any film students could lay claim to what appeared to be a half-decent cinematic prop.

  Nobody called in a threat before the device was discovered, and nobody laid claim to it after it had been found. This ended up being a pattern for the entire investigation, which was somewhat infuriating but also instructive. Whoever was behind the bombs didn’t want to voice anything. For the same reason, the media wasn’t nearly as engaged as they could have been under the circumstances.

  Her team shared the bomb’s schematics with every Bureau office in the country, and soon, three more devices had turned up: in San Diego; in Omaha; and in Miami. All three were destroyed. Based on the on-the-ground assessment, the Miami bomb would have worked perfectly; the only thing keeping it from doing so would have been reluctance on the part of the bombers.

  That would mark the last time they discovered an explosive before it went off.

  Unless we’re counting the State House bomb, she thought.

  David stuck his head into the room. They had claimed one of the larger conference rooms in the FBI for the unpacking of these files, just as they had taken over the A/V room more or less completely. They also had the full and complete assistance of every single on-duty FBI agent in the building if they wanted it, so basically their bomber case was the only thing anybody was working on.

  “Guys,” he said, “you don’t have the TV on?”

  “We didn’t like what was on,” Brian said, nodding to Maggie. She’d turned it off shortly after hearing about how her boyfriend sabotaged city plumbing in his spare time.

  “Turn it on. I’m not promising you’ll like it, but it sure sounds like a lead.”

  It was set to channel four, which a little while earlier had a national news show running. It was showing anchors from the local desk now, a sure sign that something new had broken. The hosts were an older white male with a trustworthy face and a twenty-something woman showing exactly the correct amount of cleavage for this time of day. Maggie couldn’t remember their names, because every channel had their own version of these two people, with the only apparent distinction being the ethnicity of the female anchor.

  Digitally projected behind them was a symbol Maggie was entirely too familiar with. It was the same symbol found on the C-4 brick on the first device, and on every other one since, including the one that killed Tommy.

  The male anchor—she thought his name might be Chet—was in mid-sentence when the sound kicked in.

  “…sent to all the local news stations this morning. Again, the message appears to be from the people responsible for the State House bombing, but that has not been confirmed.”

  “Of course it hasn’t, you assholes,” Brian said. “You didn’t talk to us first.”

  “What’s the message?” Jeanine asked. She was asking the television.

  “Once again, here is the message,” possibly-Chet said. His face was replaced by a full-screen text box, showing the symbol, followed by two words:

  FREE THEM

  “How do they know that’s from the bombers?” Jeanine asked.

  “The symbol,” David said.

  “Yeah, fine, that’s how I know, and how you know. How do they know? We kept it out of the papers.”

  “Good question,” Maggie said. “Brian, get them on the phone. All of them. We need to know when this went out, who got it, where it came from, why none of them called us first. If this was sent from a single location we need to be at that location right now.”

  “Yeah,” Brian said, already pulling out his phone. “I have some people to yell at. They should know better than to run with something like this. Imagine if this was some kid with a fax machine.”

  “Right, except it’s not some kid with a fax machine.”

  He nodded. “No, it isn’t.”

  Maggie looked at David. “How long ago did this story break?”

  “Less than ten minutes.”

  “We shouldn’t have found out like this.”

  He got where she was going. “They were as surprised as we are. I caught a call from Joe on my way to you, asking why we’re keeping secrets.”

  “Who do you think they’re talking about?” Jeanine asked. “In the message.”

  “Free them? I’m pretty sure we all know who,” Maggie said. “And in an hour or two, so will the rest of the country, I’m guessing.”

  Her cell phone rang. She expected it to be Justin, or perhaps someone higher asking for an update, but she didn’t recognize the number. The voice was familiar enough, though.

  “Something’s going to happen,” Corrigan said, before she could even get to hello.

  It was nearly a minute of hang on guys, I have to take this and lemme move to my office, one sec bits of stalling and hopefully acting normal in front of her trained team of investigators before Maggie could get alone. That moment of quiet was found in the affectionately-termed junk room, which was where all the electronic components that weren’t being used in the A/V room lived. It was pretty much the only place guaranteed not to have anyone in it, and it was windowless.

  “Where are you?” she asked.

  “I’m not going to say, Maggs. You know why.”

  She sighed. “Dammit, you’re not making any of this easy.”

  “I know, I’m sorry. Look, the messages started again. I don’t know why, and I’m not remembering the dreams any more. It’s like it used to be.”

  “That’s all on you, babe, you know this,” she said. “You made it stop before.”

  “Did I? Or did it just go away?”

  “It was you.”

  “Maybe. But it’s back again, and I have appointments, and maybe that’s a good thing. I don’t know. I just can’t surrender right now; you understand that, right?”

  “Something big is going to happen, you said.”

  “Yes. Tomorrow.”

  “Where?”

  “I’m not…I can’t tell you, Maggie.”

  “Of course you can,” she said.

  “I’m not sure if I can stop it this time. I don’t want you there.”

  “Corrigan…”

  “I heard a voice, Maggs.”

  “You’re hearing voices?”

  “Not voices, just one voice. Never mind, I can’t explain right now. The police are already here.”

  “Jesus Christ, Corrigan, just let them take you in and we can—”

  “I gotta go. If I don’t talk to you again…I’m sorry. I’m doing my best.”

  “Don’t hang up, don’t…”

  He hung up.

  “Dammit,” she muttered, resisting the urge to throw her phone at one of the walls, where it would surely win against the thin plasterboard.

  She opened the door to find David waiting in the hallway.

>   “That was him, wasn’t it?” he asked.

  She sighed. “Get in here. I don’t know what to do.”

  Corrigan hung up the hotel phone and snuck another peek at the parking lot. A second cop car had already arrived. He was going to have to get out before any more showed up.

  It had been a rough morning. He awoke with a start, the sense memory of what he saw coming next still fresh, which was to say that his chest hurt, because that was where the bullet was going to hit him.

  He visited a particular point in the future that had two deeply unpleasant outcomes, and the really bad thing was that the gunshot was the least-bad option.

  Aching from the memory of his own death-that-hadn’t-happened-yet, he dutifully got up and marked the location on the map, then went to the bathroom to check himself in the mirror. He half-expected to find, if not an actual bullet hole near his heart, some sort of bruise. There was neither.

  He felt better after a shower, but then faced a new problem: he was in dire need of some coffee, and food.

  There was a pancake house down the road, but he had to think eating there was an unnecessary risk. A drive-through would be better. In the meantime—and this was his only real mistake of the morning—he figured he could tide himself over with a snack from the vending machine in the hotel lobby.

  The woman at the counter recognized him. She didn’t say so, but he could tell.

  The first police cruiser showed up twenty minutes later.

  “And now you’re out of time, Corrigan,” he said.

  His voice wasn’t echoing, which indicated he had a good grip on the present. That was going to be important shortly.

  “If it’s ten-thirty, it must be time for the first false alarm,” Aaron said with a laugh, when they got the call. He and Janet had barely been in the cruiser twenty minutes before they were directed to the motel down by the river. It was the fourth false identification they’d answered since yesterday, and now that this Corrigan guy was national news—because of whatever the heck went on in Chinatown—it was probably going to be all they did for the entire shift.