Fixer Redux

by Gene Doucette

  “I asked him. He wouldn’t tell me.”

  “Great. So now we got him on withholding information regarding the commission of a crime. Add that to assaulting the police and resisting arrest. That’s just today.”

  “I think we can agree Bain handled that situation about as well as it could be handled,” David said, without laughing or anything. Joe couldn’t believe it.

  “For Chrissake, Davey, the way to handle it was to not resist arrest! I got every blue uniform on triple overtime looking for him right now, and if he had just surrendered this morning you know what I’d have time to do? I’d have time to find this asshole with the funny camera on his face, and then maybe that something big you’re talking about is something we get to stop like it’s our job to do.”

  “You need his help,” Trent said. “If he surrendered, he’d be out of the rotation. From his perspective, he didn’t have a choice.”

  “Tell me, please, why after all these years I suddenly need the help of a freak who thinks he can see the future, just to do my job.”

  “Because if we’re right, the guy in the picture can also see the future,” David said.

  “Right. Your boy beat up four cops so tomorrow he can put himself in harm’s way, because according to you that’s what he does. And he doesn’t want anyone else to know where this is going down for what reason, exactly?”

  They shared another of their damn looks.

  “He might think we’ll just get in the way,” David said. “You have tried to arrest him twice now.”

  Joe looked at Maggie Trent. She looked like she just swallowed a bird.

  “What did he say on the call?” Joe asked. “When you asked him for the address?”

  “He said he didn’t want me there because he wasn’t sure he could stop it,” she said.

  “Okay. Well that’s really chivalrous and all.”

  “Joe…”

  “David, if the goal here was to get me to call off the manhunt for Bain, it’s not going to happen, and the reason it’s not going to happen is because wherever this guy is going to be tomorrow is where I want to be too. Even if he has nothing to do with the bomb, it sounds, from where I’m sitting, like he’s going to be near the next one before it goes off. If he’s not gonna tell us where and when that is, we’ll have to follow him around until he shows us. You wanna help me get him off the street, I’m all ears. Otherwise I have to go.”

  Joe got up, and heel-turned for the door.

  “Okay,” Trent said. “Hang on a sec.”

  “I’m listening,” he said.

  “Did you check the hotel room?”

  “Personally? No. All the guys at the scene ended up cuffed. We put up some tape. Why? Think he’s got a hostage in there?”

  “There might be a map of the city in there.”

  “Well that’s great. You’ve cracked the case; I always wanted one of those.”

  “No, that’s not…If he’s working again, he might have a map. It’ll have where he’s going next, Joe.”

  10

  We’re getting reports of an incident at the Prudential Center Mall. No details yet, but motorists may want to steer clear of that area for now. We will update you as soon as we know more.

  —Local NPR

  Corrigan used to plan out little trips in his head, back when he was working as a fixer full-time. They were his vacations, the things he would have been able to do if he had a normal job with regular hours, with someone to cover for him on days off.

  It wasn’t a regular anything, though. He was the only one who did it, so there was nobody to cover for him. No trips to an exotic island somewhere, or weekend jaunts down the coast in his private boat, or even a chance to spend time in a nice hotel a long way from the Boston area. None of those things were possible because accidents happened every day, and somebody had to be there to help.

  One of his dreams had been to own a really nice sports car. For years, he thought about getting one, even though he knew perfectly well he’d never get to really use it. Sure, he could drive it locally, but that wasn’t the place to tool around in an expensive car. It also wasn’t just a sports car; the idea of it was linked to the notion of freedom, of being able to point it in a direction on the highway and start going.

  When the messages finally stopped, and he retired, one of the first things he did was go out and get that sports car. It was a Ferrari, it was red, and he had to special order it.

  The Ferrari was beautiful. It was also utterly unnecessary.

  He’d never driven it. He didn’t even tell Maggie about it, because he was embarrassed about the whole thing. Instead, he rented a storage locker in a warehouse facility in Medford, visited a couple of times a year, and waited for the day his life and the car would make sense together.

  After what happened at the motel, he was pretty sure he wasn’t safe renting a room somewhere else, unless he intended to stay up all night waiting for someone to kick in the door. He was also afraid of reaching out to friends and didn’t think he could rely upon any of his former clients more than he already had. The storage facility was one of the few things he had a key to that Maggie didn’t know about, and the car was the closest thing around to a bed.

  It wasn’t a bed, though. The crick in his neck and the pain in his knees told him as much when he woke up entirely too early the next morning. It was a sports car, it was gorgeous, and it was not all that roomy. He made a mental note to covet extra-large SUV’s the next time he fantasized about luxury vehicles.

  He’d also gone and revisited the site of his imminent demise again overnight. Even had he recalled next-to-nothing on awakening, the fact that his chest hurt again—and now, so did his stomach—would have reminded him of the trip.

  He did remember, though, and some things had changed about the future between his trips there. Other than the stomach pain, (which he took to mean he was getting shot more than once now) there was a police presence that hadn’t been there the night before.

  Wonder what changed, he thought.

  Then he climbed out of the car, stretched, and automatically sought out the two things he usually went to first, on getting out of bed: the map, and the toilet.

  There was no toilet in the storage unit. There was also no map. He left it in the motel room.

  “I can’t believe I did that,” he said aloud.

  He wondered if the bomber was willing to reschedule.

  A quick drive—on the motorcycle—got him to the nearest public bathroom. It was a surprisingly sanitary men’s room attached to a fast food place almost nobody took seriously as a breakfast option. It was therefore nearly empty save for a number of bleary-eyed counter staff who looked unlikely to recognize close relatives, never mind a wanted man like Corrigan.

  The bathroom was the first chance he had to examine himself in the mirror. He looked pretty much exactly like someone who hadn’t shaved for a few days and who just slept in a car should expect to look.

  “Busy day ahead,” he told his reflection. “Gotta swing by the condo first.”

  The police car that had been parked directly in front of the building was replaced after the first day by an unmarked vehicle, but only after Diego complained. It was something he would have never considered doing had he not also been wearing The Jacket at the time.

  Such was the power of The Jacket. It was a large, deep blue blazer, with a coat of arms on the left breast above the heart that matched the sigil on the sign near the private entrance. The sign read: the Kensington. If you owned one of these jackets you were a certified concierge, which made you the most important person in a large building occupied by some extremely important people.

  That was how Diego liked to think of himself when he was at work: extremely important. It wasn’t really true, but pretending it was helped him keep his back straight and his eyes forward and his voice firm and measured.

  The Jacket was what gave him the authority to walk across the street, after that first day, and notify the officer
that he had to relocate his cruiser to a less visible place, because it was upsetting the residents.

  The car was on the street, so by having left the grounds of the Kensington, Diego had technically stepped outside of his kingdom, but since the police were asking Diego—and all the other concierges on staff—for an extremely difficult favor, he felt as if he had a little clout.

  It worked, anyway. The cruiser was replaced by the unmarked car, and the residents stopped having to explain to their guests why there was a policeman outside, and everyone was happy. Diego could still see the car out there—it was impossible not to, if one spent enough time looking out onto the street—but it wasn’t obvious enough to create a spontaneous conversation piece.

  There was still the matter of that favor. On the one hand, it didn’t seem like the sort of thing that would have to be executed. This was self-evidently the opinion of the police, who sent only the one police car to monitor the scene. If they were anticipating 702’s arrival they would no doubt insert a more overwhelming presence, perhaps even stationing an officer inside the condo itself.

  On the other hand, the needs of the residents was supposed to be paramount, and 702 was a resident just like everyone else. Diego could think of a dozen other residents about whom a visit from the police would be no great shock, and he liked to think that their reliance upon him—the man who decided who was, and was not, allowed onto the elevators—was one of the reasons they chose to live at the Kensington in the first place. Calling the police on one didn’t seem at all in the spirit of things. That would remain the case whether it was law enforcement or ownership telling him to make that call.

  It was likely moot, though, because 702 wasn’t going to be showing up, so Diego wouldn’t have to even worry about it.

  Then—of course—he showed up.

  “It’s Diego, isn’t it?”

  Diego looked up from the mail he’d been sorting, and there was Mr. 702, in an otherwise empty lobby, looking as if he’d just spent the night on a bench somewhere.

  The owner of condo 702 was not the sort of man to be mistaken for someone else. He looked like the person Diego might hire to unclog a toilet in the building, and not at all like someone who would own one of those toilets.

  “Yes. Yes sir, it’s Diego. How can I help?”

  To his own ears, he sounded nervous. He hoped that didn’t telegraph too loudly.

  “I need you do to me a favor, Diego,” 702 said. “I know there are some officers outside, who I think are expecting a call from you just as soon as I walk away.”

  “Sir—”

  “No, it’s okay, I don’t want you to get into any trouble. I would just appreciate it if, when you do make that call, it’s not for another five minutes. And if you could tell them I took the stairs and not the elevator, that would be great.”

  “I could just not call them,” Diego said, too fast, too loudly. He was certain this was unconvincing, but equally certain if 702 asked him to not make that call, he would probably agree not to.

  “No, if they find out I’ve been here some other way, the first thing they’ll do is check the surveillance footage and see us talking right now. But if you make the call, they might not even think to look at it. Like I said, I don’t want you getting into trouble on my behalf.”

  “It’s only, five minutes isn’t much time to get in and out, sir.”

  “Don’t worry about that. I just need a couple of minutes in the condo and I’m good. Can you do this for me?”

  “Yes, sir, of course.”

  702 extended his hand, and they shook on it.

  “They’re right out front,” Diego said. He could see the car from where he was standing. “How did you get inside without them seeing?”

  “Just lucky, I guess. Now remember, five minutes.”

  “Five minutes, and the stairs, yes.”

  As 702 ran for the elevators, Diego marked the time on his watch.

  The man in the photograph had a distinctive nose. It was the thing Maggie always ended up focused on. The nose came to an upturned point, as though he was perpetually disgusted.

  They had all sorts of facial recognition software at their disposal, and Patel was using it to within an inch of its life. He was convinced if this guy turned up anywhere with a camera, be it an ATM or in the crowd at a political rally from ten years ago, he’d find him. She didn’t trust any of the technology half as much as she trusted her own eyes.

  Check for that nose, she thought, whenever he brought in an update. We’ll find him because of that nose. Let me look.

  The picture continued to be their only live lead. There was some hope among the task force that the media outreach which resulted in four local stations broadcasting the Free Them message at more or less the same time, would result in something the team could use. But no matter how far down that rabbit hole they went, the end result was, they couldn’t get anything useful. It was received at the same time in all of the stations, in a tip line mailbox, but sent from four different IP addresses.

  Maggie was having someone who knew more about this than she did, check up on those addresses to see if any of them represented a clue, but she wasn’t holding out hope.

  As for how the stations knew the message was legitimate: they didn’t. The stations were in contact with one another, and used the fact that they all got the message as proof that it was valid. Or something. After a few minutes on the phone with one of the more sane producers, Maggie came away with the impression that they all ran it because they all assumed someone else was going to, and they didn’t want to not have the story themselves.

  Borowitz and Ledo were two possible leads, insofar as they were the people whose freedom everyone figured was being negotiated. Maggie had a couple of local (to their respective prisons) FBI agents drop in on them, to see if they were willing to talk. She didn’t expect cooperation, and ended up proven correct. Sharon Ledo had never said more than a couple of words from the moment she was arrested, and continued to be exactly that reticent. Nick Borowitz had a history of being very talkative, only not about things pertinent to his case.

  Also, he only acted friendly to certain people. Maggie was one of those people; if she had time, and thought Nick would give her something, she’d give it a try. But not yet. Too much could happen in the three days it would take her to get to Nick and back again, and she wasn’t going to risk that, when he wasn’t going to give her anything.

  Anyway, he didn’t talk to the agent the FBI sent. She—and Maggie made sure a woman was the one visiting Nick, as this was the first step in getting him to talk freely—said that all she got from him was “an undefined trepidation”. Maggie wasn’t sure how to interpret that.

  Maggie was outside, working through all of this in her head and smoking a cigarette with David, when her cell phone vibrated with a message.

  She expected it to be an update from Patel, but it wasn’t from him. It was a picture, of her own bedroom.

  “What the hell?”

  “News?” David asked.

  She scrolled down to the text that followed.

  What did he take? it read.

  “It’s Joe,” she said. Rather than play text tag all morning, she called him.

  He picked up on one ring.

  “Is there still someone in the condo?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” Joe said.

  “Have them send me as many pictures as they can.”

  Ten minutes later she was back inside and looking at a dozen half-decent photos of the condo. It was disorienting, because it felt like she was looking at a crime scene, rather than the place she called home.

  She forwarded the images to her laptop, and dialed Joe and the cop who took the photos—a Cambridge officer named Fisk—in a conference call.

  “Tell me what happened,” she said as she combed through the images. She hadn’t been to the condo since the mess began, and couldn’t remember how clean or dirty it was, or where things had been left.

  “The man at
the desk tipped us,” Fisk said. “We called in backup and headed up, but he was already gone by then. Suspect took the stairs, so he can’t have had more than a few seconds inside before he had to turn around and run.”

  “He had more time than that,” she said. She was looking at the last outfit she saw Corrigan wearing, now on the floor of the bedroom. “He changed clothes.”

  “Not much longer, then,” Fisk said.

  “He went out a fire door, Agent Trent,” Joe said. “We know what time the alarm sounded. His window was pretty tight.”

  Then your math is wrong, she thought. Corrigan was a fast dresser, but not that fast. And he couldn’t climb seven flights of stairs any faster than the next guy.

  But that wasn’t really what was important. This was a huge risk for him; she had to figure out what in the condo made that risk worth it.

  “Fisk, can you go back to the bedroom closet?” she said.

  “Sure, what are you thinking?”

  “There’s a foot locker on the floor in there, do you see it?”

  She could only see the corner of the locker in the photo Fisk sent, and was pretty sure that was where it was supposed to be. It didn’t look disturbed.

  “I see it. Should I open?”

  “What’s in there, Trent?” Joe asked.

  “A couple of things,” she said. “I keep work gear in there, and he has a strongbox with cash in the bottom.”

  “Cash,” Joe repeated.

  “He can’t use his cards, right?”

  “He probably could. We haven’t been able to get a freeze on the funds yet, to be honest.”

  “Found the strongbox,” Fisk said. “It’s locked, but it doesn’t feel empty.”

  Maggie was running through a mental list of what she would expect to find in there other than money, and came upon a terrible thought.

  “Hey, can you send me a pic of the inside of the footlocker?” she asked.

  “Sure,” Fisk said. “Hang on.”

  “What kind of things did you say you kept in there?” Joe asked.