by Lisa Gardner
“You don’t have to sound so sarcastic, Evie. I’m merely being honest. Frankly, I’ve never understood where you get all this anxiety from.”
I stare at her empty martini glass and think that’s an ironic statement.
“For a man like your father, with his ability to see what no one else could see . . .” My mother shrugs. “What are rules for a man whose own intellect exists outside of all preconceived notions? He wasn’t just an extraordinary thinker; he was an extraordinary person. He didn’t accept limits, and he didn’t see how societal norms should apply to him. I loved him for that, just as he loved me. We were made for each other. And you”—she frowns at me slightly—“were our strange, introverted child, who never would’ve even made a friend if I hadn’t forced you.”
“I hated those damn tea parties!”
“Tough love, my dear. Isn’t that what everyone calls it these days?” My mom lifts her martini glass, realizes belatedly that it’s empty.
“Who killed Dad?” I grind out.
“I don’t know. I’d made that silly call. So once your father and I patched things up, I had no choice but to contact the man again and say I’d changed my mind about Katarina. He just laughed at me. Said there was no such thing as a renege clause. Really? All contracts can be voided. It’s just a matter of negotiation. He was rather stubborn on the subject, though, even when I promised him twice the money not to do anything. So that was it. I went back to our . . . mutual acquaintance, told him what had happened, and made him swear he’d make it right. I assumed that was the end of the matter.”
“Except Katarina Ivanova is very much alive, Mom, and Dad isn’t. Didn’t you think it was strange? Didn’t you wonder at all when you then came home and discovered your own husband shot to death on the kitchen floor!” I’m not asking the questions as much as I’m shouting them. I can’t help myself. All the anger, rage, helplessness.
My mother simply stares at me. “I don’t know what happened,” she states. “I didn’t know then. I don’t know now.”
“Who was your friend? How did you get the contact information for a hired killer?” Except in the next moment, I don’t need her to answer. I know. I’ve always known. He told me so himself. A man with a violent past. Who then went on to represent most of the major criminals in Boston. Oh, the names he would have in his Rolodex. “Mr. Delaney,” I whisper.
My mom acknowledges the name with a small nod.
“Dick had assured me everything was handled. He’d called the person directly, agreed on a payoff to go away. Of course he lectured me on being so stupid. But in the end, nothing happened, all was made right. So that day . . . Walking through the door . . .” My mother’s voice trails off. She’s no longer looking at me, but I know what she’s seeing. My father’s body, splayed against the fridge. Such a great man, brought so low. And the blood, so much blood. When she speaks again, her voice is so soft I can barely hear her. “Walking into the house . . . I honestly thought your father had had one of his bad days. We’d been fighting, obviously. Maybe it had become too much for him and, well, he did what geniuses often do. I’d worried about him in the past. Done my best to keep his world right. It’s not easy, though, being brilliant. Nor being married to one.”
I don’t believe her for a moment. Her words are too glib. Too casual. And her hand, still wrapped around the stem of the martini glass, is shaking.
“Did you ask Mr. Delaney about it? Had he really reached your hired gun? Made the payoff? Maybe your hired killer really was unhappy about you terminating his services. I mean, seriously, a hired gun? Who believes they can truly negotiate with someone like that?”
My mother thins her lips. She appears less tragic, more mutinous. “For your information, I did talk to Dick about what happened. And he assured me everything had been taken care of. Besides, I hired the person to harm that witch, not my husband!”
“Did you pay the ‘kill fee’?” I use the term ironically.
“No. Dick handled it.”
“In other words, you don’t know what happened next.”
“I know my husband was alive! I know my husband said he loved me. I know everything was good again. And then . . . it wasn’t.”
I shake my head. I still can’t believe my mother’s naïveté, or that she’d be so foolish as to contact some professional killer to handle her marital problems. Then believe a second call would make it all go away. But I’m also confused about Mr. Delaney. What he’d done, or maybe, not done, sixteen years ago. Except he was my father’s best friend. His first instinct should’ve been to help my father. Right?
I cough, feeling a tickle in the back of my throat. I try to turn all the pieces of the puzzle around in my head. Cough again.
Then, for the first time, it comes to me. What I should’ve realized before, but I’d been too intent on my mother and her ridiculous story.
“Mom,” I say, as my eyes begin to water. “Do you smell smoke?”
CHAPTER 38
D.D.
“THAT WAS FLORA,” D.D. SAID to Phil, hanging up her phone. “She spotted Rocket running across the Harvard campus with a bag full of Molotov cocktails and gave chase. She lost him.”
“So this is definitely his handiwork.” Phil regarded the firefighters marching through the snowy grounds, hitting first this trash can, then that trash can. In the chaos of students stampeding across the grounds, a few bins had toppled. Fortunately, the wintry conditions made short work of any errant flames. “Is it just me, or does this seem haphazard?” Phil continued now. “I mean, for a kid known for taking down entire buildings with gasoline-soaked structural fires, this seems more . . . child’s play?”
D.D. nodded. She was struggling with the same thought. This hardly seemed up to Rocket’s established standards.
Phil’s phone rang. D.D. let him answer the call while she stared at the various plumes of smoke wafting across campus. To give Rocket credit, he’d covered a lot of ground. Seemed like everywhere she looked there was some sort of small fire. Add to that, building evacuations, panicking pedestrians, and sorting out this scene would take the fire department the rest of the day.
“That was Neil and Carol,” Phil reported in. “They just found Jules LaPage’s ex-wife. Or rather, she found them.”
D.D. waited expectantly.
“Carol reached out to Bill Conner’s retired partner, Dan Cain. As Detective Ange had theorized, Conrad went underground almost immediately after his parents’ death, keeping in contact with Cain while he worked his father’s old cases.”
“Batman,” D.D. muttered.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“Of the leads Conrad was pursuing, he felt it was most likely that Jules LaPage had engineered his parents’ MVA. Not that LaPage had personally done it. But using his considerable financial resources had hired it out. It was one of the reasons Conrad became fascinated by the dark web. He felt whatever happened to his parents, finding the actual driver would never be enough—the person would just be one more cog in the wheel. Whereas Conrad wanted to understand the entire system, so he could use it to trace all activities to LaPage, whom Conrad continued to believe was operating a criminal empire while behind bars.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time.”
“As we suspected, Conrad was helping out LaPage’s ex, Monica. Sending her money. He and Cain both must have a way to contact her because, after Cain got off the phone with Carol, he dialed Monica direct, and she called Carol in minutes. Conrad had reached her about a week, maybe ten days ago. He believed LaPage had not only discovered her new identity, but had taken out a hit. She’s been on the run ever since, living with a burner phone, waiting to hear more from Conrad.”
“Except he never called her back.” D.D. sighed heavily. “Okay. Let’s take it from the top. Conrad has a whole second life on the internet, where he has spent more than a decade esta
blishing himself as some shadowy figure. He spends his time working his way through the dark web, learning a little bit of this, a little bit of that. Comes across a Jacob Ness or two. Maybe has been getting to know various guns for hire, because those would be the kinds of contacts LaPage would tap from prison. Till one day Conrad learns what he’s been waiting to hear: A contract has been taken out on poor terrified Monica. LaPage is once again in motion, his ex-wife in his sight.”
“He calls Monica directly, warns her.” Phil picked up the story.
“Then sits around at home?” D.D. frowned.
“Maybe he was working contacts of his own. Is knowing there’s been a transaction the same as knowing who’s going to carry out the hit?”
“He needed more information,” D.D. agreed.
“Except the hired gun must’ve found him first.”
“And what? Walked into Conrad’s own home and shot him three times with his own gun? That doesn’t sound like any professional hit I’ve ever heard of. Hang on. Conrad isn’t the only one who needed more information. We do, too.”
D.D. pulled back out her phone, dialed SSA Kimberly Quincy. She walked down the block, away from the noisy din of the firefighters. Phil followed in her wake. The air smelled acrid. Later, she figured, she’d blow soot straight out of her nose. So many fires in a single afternoon. And somehow, she had the unsettling feeling they weren’t done yet.
“Quincy,” Kimberly answered her cell.
“D.D. here. Have a question for you and Keith. Okay, you’re Conrad Carter. You’re investigating an evil son of a bitch, Jules LaPage, who’s currently locked behind bars, but who you’re pretty sure engineered the death of your parents, and given the first opportunity will strike again to take out his ex-wife. So you set yourself up on the dark web, you learn the lay of the land.”
“Does this story have a happy ending?” Quincy asked.
“I don’t know yet. Conrad finally finds what he’s been looking for: whispers of a hit being taken out. A connection to one of the hired guns bragging about a new job. I don’t know. But Conrad called Monica LaPage over a week ago. He warned her to be on the lookout. Something tipped him off.”
“Okay,” Quincy said more thoughtfully. She was following the conversation now.
“So, what would be Conrad’s next play? The whole point of the dark web is to be anonymous, right? Except it can’t be completely anonymous. Flora was talking about escrow accounts, vendor reviews. At the end of the day, it’s still people, offering services to other people. And someone has to know what’s going on. At least one real person.”
D.D. heard a muffled sound as Quincy lowered her phone, then a distant exchange of voices. The fed was obviously hashing something out with Keith.
“So,” Quincy came back over the line. “You’re on the right track. The dark web is really just technology connecting real people to other real people. And, yes, it takes many key players to make that happen. IT gurus, for one—though, according to Keith, they spend more time coding than worrying about vendors. You’d have a management team. Who are actually funding individual sites, keeping their infrastructure running and paying the IT guys while coming up with new services, new payment opportunities, and more importantly, new security guarantees, which is the primary attraction of the dark web. And you’d have sales, I guess, for lack of a better term. Real people working from their own shadowy desks to recruit new shadowy vendors. It’s a marketplace. You always have to be offering the latest and greatest.”
“So if Conrad had learned a hired gun had recently taken on a new job, he could take steps to learn the hit man’s identity. Starting with the site manager?”
More muted talking.
Quincy returned: “Conrad would probably want to make a financial offer of his own. For example, I’ll pay you twice that amount to do a job for me right now. But if that failed, his next—and I gotta admit, it’s a pretty clever play—would be to lodge a complaint against the vendor.”
“Excuse me?”
“Keith just came up with it,” Quincy said. “Remember, reviews matter. So if Conrad wanted to mess someone up, he could file a formal complaint against the hit man. I paid Vendor X and they didn’t deliver. Or better yet, Vendor X is a cop. Now the site administrator has to investigate Vendor X. The site’s credibility is shot until the matter is resolved.”
“So Conrad contacts the site administrator. Vendor X cheated me or is a rat,” D.D. filled in.
“The web manager will then have to open up a case review, just like in the real business world. Talk to Conrad. Talk to the hired gun. Sort things out.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” D.D. murmured. Forget the criminals on the dark web, what Quincy had just described was pretty much the same way complaints were handled at BPD. “In the course of this interaction, Conrad might’ve learned the hired gun’s real identity,” she guessed.
“Keith and I are only now retracing Conrad’s virtual footsteps, but from what we can tell he’d established about as deep a cover as I’ve ever seen. Honestly, a professional agent couldn’t have done as well. Ten years of lurking, Conrad didn’t just visit the dark web. He became part of the landscape.”
“Until he learned too much,” D.D. said.
“Which cut both ways,” Quincy amended. “Conrad didn’t just learn a vendor’s identity. A vendor, a manager, a customer—someone learned his.”
And just like that, D.D. got it. The piece of the puzzle they’d been missing. She clicked off her phone. She stopped walking, stared Phil in the eye. Delivered the hard truth: “Phil. We’ve been idiots.”
“Again?” he asked with a sigh.
“Investigative one-oh-one. Don’t forget what you already know. We’ve gotten so caught up in the dark web and Conrad’s mysterious double life, we forgot to factor in the basics: our crime scene.”
“You were just talking about it. Conrad was shot in his own home with his own handgun.”
“Exactly. Yet we’ve spent the past twenty-four hours spinning our wheels over hired assassins and dark-web vendors and shadowy criminals that go bump in the night. Really? How would a hit man know that Conrad kept his gun stashed in his own bedroom? How would a hit man gain access to Conrad’s house, given that Conrad lives under an alias and has been on hyperalert for nearly a decade? Then, having accessed the house, and crept up the stairs and retrieved the hidden handgun, how does this ninja simply stand in the doorway of the study and shoot Conrad three times without Conrad ever putting up a hand in self-defense?”
“Conrad would’ve been on guard.”
“Meaning Conrad never saw the threat coming,” D.D. concluded for both of them. “He let his killer into his home. He thought nothing of it when his killer joined him upstairs in his study. He knew the person, Phil. Conrad had to have known and trusted his shooter; it’s the only explanation.”
Phil stared at her. “He finally identified the gun for hire contracted by Jules LaPage, and it turned out to be someone he personally knew? That seems far-fetched.”
“Because I don’t think it’s the contract killer he identified. Or who identified him. I think Conrad stumbled upon a bigger fish. Not the vendor. The site manager. A person with a double life worth burning down the entire city to protect.”
“Who—” Phil started, then stopped. “We are idiots,” he said.
“Yep. We need to get to Evie’s mother’s house. Now!”
CHAPTER 39
FLORA
I CAN’T KEEP ROAMING HARVARD Square in hopes of spying an arsonist. For one thing, being the heart of a college campus, the area is swarming with kids in hoodies. Rocket blends right in. Also, with emergency response vehicles and news vans piling up, it’s getting hard to move.
I don’t like crowds. I don’t like the feeling of bodies bumping, jostling, hemming me in. My heart rate is too high and that’s not simply from chasing Ro
cket.
I discover a little side street and exit the teeming masses. I take a moment to breathe more easily, exhaling little puffs of steamy air. Shouldn’t all these kids be on Christmas break? It’s been too long for me; I don’t remember how my own college calendar worked, let alone what a place like Harvard does. It makes me feel old—and, for a moment, adrift. The life I used to lead. The dreams I never returned to.
Okay, time to think like an arsonist. If I can’t follow Rocket, how can I out-anticipate him?
He’ll want money. Two big jobs in one day, he’ll return to his neighborhood to pick up his cash. Phil told me the police had it under surveillance, however, so that doesn’t feel like a good use of my time.
But wait—is Rocket done for the day? The criminal attorney’s stately brownstone must have taken some finesse. No way a fancy lawyer didn’t have a state-of-the-art security system—and no way a kid like Rocket didn’t stand out in a neighborhood that upscale. So, a finesse job. Like disguising himself as pest control for the Carters’ residence. He could’ve used the same ruse for Delaney, except the police sightings of him afterward didn’t reveal any uniform.
Maybe a delivery boy? Pizza? He’d just need a cap to pull that off. In a city of twenty-four-hour takeout, no one notices delivery people either. He could’ve stashed the gasoline earlier, as many of those town houses have patios in the back. A kid as athletic as Rocket could definitely scale a fence.
Then exit the same way. Watch his handiwork. Bolt when the police presence got too high or he needed to get moving to his next job. Which took him to the T stop. A simple transfer to the Red Line and Harvard Square it is.
Where he must’ve stashed his Molotov cocktail backpack somewhere out of site. In this day and age of constant vigilance, no unattended bag could’ve been left sitting at a T stop or, for that matter, near a college campus. So he would’ve had to have scoped out everything first. Prepared his supplies, identified key drop sites. Then once the first fire started in Delaney’s house, it was all go, go, go. Moving fast, leaving a trail of fire and chaos in his wake.
