by David Hosp
“I’d rather keep my eyes on you,” he admitted. Sexual innuendo was new to him, and he felt clumsy with it, like trying on someone else’s shoes, but he kind of liked it.
She smiled at him. “When all this is over, I’ll be sure to treat you to a little show. For now you need to stay sharp.”
He looked at his watch. It was one o’clock in the morning. “You go get some sleep. I’ll make sure he survives the night.”
“Okay,” she said. “Just make sure you’re both being careful. I don’t want anyone taking a shot at him and hitting you by mistake.”
“Couldn’t happen. Bullets bounce off me.”
“Right,” she said. “Just don’t start believing your own bullshit.”
“Good advice.”
She kissed him once more, then turned and walked down the hallway to the elevator. He watched her, admiring the slight sway to her hips and the way her arms brushed her sides as they swung confidently with every stride.
He laughed softly to himself as the elevator door closed. It had actually happened, he realized. It had taken nearly half a century, but for the first time in his life, he was in love. He wiped his mouth discreetly and realized he could still taste her.
It had been worth the wait.
Chapter Twenty-nine
Lissa had left her car at the office, and she should have taken a taxi home from the hospital. The snowstorm had intensified, and while it still wouldn’t qualify as a blizzard in the minds of most New Englanders, it was falling hard enough to blur her vision; even in the spots where the city workers were making the effort to keep up with the snowfall, there were several inches of accumulation. A cab would have been the best way to get to the Back Bay. But when she walked out of the main entrance of the hospital, she could see several people already huddled in a line at the empty cabstand. On a snowy night, that would mean at least an hour’s wait. Looking up at the sky, she judged that the storm was likely to let up soon, and in any case, her apartment was under a half mile away. Even in the snow, it shouldn’t take more than fifteen minutes to walk, and there was a reasonable chance that she might be able to hail down a cab on Charles Street at the foot of Beacon Hill. So she bundled her scarf around her throat and headed out without a second thought.
She loved to walk the city, in part because the application of the word “city” always seemed ambitious to her. She had been raised in Manhattan, and as a consequence, she viewed Boston as more of a small town than a city. More than once, she had walked the entirety of Boston in a day, while she was quite sure she could live an entire lifetime in New York and never experience every part of it. That was the attraction of the Hub for her, though—its intimacy.
She rounded the angular corner at the traffic circle where Cambridge and Charles streets met in a brackish transition from modern urban redevelopment to ageless brownstone tradition. The snow had piled up even higher than she had anticipated while she had been at the hospital, and she struggled slightly to pull her feet from a couple of knee-high drifts. At least it was cold out; the ground cover was light and fluffy in spite of its depth. A few people moved about on the brick sidewalks, hurrying home from dinner or a late evening’s work, or heading out for a night of cozy drinks at one of the local pubs, but they moved like ghosts in the night, their footsteps and voices swallowed in the snowfall.
Her own feet crunched softly in the uneven snow, losing traction on every third or fourth step. But she was accustomed to the necessary duck walk of moving about in the winter, and like most Bostonians, she kept her dress shoes tucked into her oversize purse, opting for clumsy tractor-soled hiking boots as outdoor wear. Nonetheless, she had to concentrate so hard on keeping her balance that twice she nearly collided with other pedestrians coming the opposite way, appearing out of the storm and taking her by surprise.
When her eyes were not on the snowy, uneven sidewalks, they darted about in search of a taxi, but what few she saw were already engaged by souls luckier than she. Had she known how hard it was snowing, she would have waited it out at the cabstand at Mass General, she thought, but there was nothing to do for it now. She put her head down to gut out the second half of the walk.
She was halfway down Charles Street toward Beacon before she caught a sense that she was in danger. The feeling grew quickly from no particular seed she could identify, but she had an overpowering certainty that was impossible to ignore. She looked around her and saw no one. Still, the fear grew—a fear that most women who have lived in a large city would have recognized. It was the fear and vulnerability of being alone on a quiet street, and the terror that, were an attack to come, no one would hear the screams.
Lissa shook her head, trying to rattle the premonition loose; after all, she was in one of the safest areas of the city. However, no section of town was entirely free from danger. She tried laughing at herself. “C’mon, Lissa,” she said under her breath. “You’re being a fucking pussy. Since when have you been afraid of anything?” The nervous sound of her own voice failed to reassure her. Even if it had, the relief would have been short-lived.
He was standing in a doorway, smoking a cigarette. She didn’t notice him until she was even with him on the sidewalk, close enough for him to reach out and touch her. His sudden appearance startled her, and she gave a light shriek. She spun to face him, and her left foot slid in the snow, throwing her off balance. In trying to keep from falling, she caught her right foot on an uneven brick concealed under the buckets of white. Without anything on which to brace herself, she went down hard on her knees.
The man reached down and grabbed her elbow.
“Get the fuck away from me!” she yelled, pulling herself to her feet and grabbing her bag, readying herself to run.
“I am only trying to help,” the man said. He had a slight accent she couldn’t place, and his smile made the ice that caked her knees seem warm by comparison. “Your knee is bleeding.”
She looked down and saw it was true, but that seemed the least of her concerns. Looking back up at him, she started to back away slowly.
“Please,” he said, moving forward. “I have a car. I can help you.”
She turned and headed up the block, away from him, without saying a word. Turning back briefly at one point, she could see that he was following her, calling out to her, though his words were lost in the storm.
The fear pounded in her ears as she thought quickly. Hurrying as fast as the footing would allow, she turned right on Chestnut Street and ducked into an intimate bistro. The place was empty except for a bartender, who was busy cashing out his register.
“Sorry, ma’am, we’re closed,” he said to her, hardly looking up. His voice was polite but firm.
“Please,” she said, “there’s a man following me.”
His eyebrows raised with real interest. “A stalker?” he asked.
She looked at him closely. He was tall and heavy, but the kind of heavy that hinted at solid, indestructible muscle underneath a comfortable layer of padding. He looked like he might be more at home bouncing at one of the rowdy college bars in the Fens instead of tending bar in a swank restaurant on Beacon Hill. She thought perhaps he was encouraged by the prospect of delivering a beating in her defense, and she was more than happy to encourage the notion.
“I think so,” she said honestly, though she realized the man on the street hadn’t actually done her any harm. She quickly dismissed any notion of guilt in favor of self-preservation and hardened her response. “Yes.”
The bartender patted the bar in front of one of the stools, inviting her to sit. “He comes in here, and he’ll be sorry,” he said. Then he extended his hand. “I’m Ian.”
“Lissa,” she replied, shaking his hand and taking a seat, turning her body to the side so she could see the door.
“Can I get you anything to drink while you wait this out?” he offered. His eyes, too, were on the door.
“You look like you just closed out.”
“On the house.” He gave her a w
arm, nonthreatening smile. “You look like a wine drinker.”
“Scotch.”
He seemed impressed. “Okay, then. I’ll pour us both a glass of the good stuff, and if no one shows by the time we’re done, I’ll call you a cab. How’s that sound?”
She smiled back at him. “Deal.”
z
When Kozlowski came back into the room, Finn could sense that the armistice was uneasy, as it often is with friends after an argument. They would get past it quickly, he knew. The trick was to return to normalcy as quickly as possible, no matter how strained it seemed.
“How does the arm feel?” Kozlowski asked. He, too, was trying. That made it easier.
“Hurts like a bitch,” Finn replied. “And that’s with half a bottle of Percocet in my system.”
“I’d take a bullet over a blade any day when it comes to pain. Most people don’t realize that knives tend to be more deadly than guns.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Finn said. “I’ve never been shot. I’ll have to wait for that merit badge.”
“What were you doing out there, anyway? What were you thinking you’d learn?”
“I wanted to see where Steele was attacked. I needed to. Something about it didn’t fit, and I couldn’t figure it out by staring at words on a police report or on a trial transcript. I had to be out there myself.”
“Did you figure it out?”
“I think so.”
“And?”
“I think she was on the job that night. I remember what that neighborhood used to be like. There’s no way she was just hanging out up there off duty. She had to be working a case.”
Kozlowski appeared to consider this but said nothing.
Finn pressed on. “She lived in Southie, and I can’t find anything to tie her personally to that area of Roxbury. That leaves only the possibility that she was out there for work. But there’s nothing in the record about what she was working on. Neither the prosecution nor the defense even bothered to ask her. I find that very weird.”
“Does it matter?”
Finn was appalled by Kozlowski’s disinterest. “Does it matter ? Of course it matters. It may be the thing that matters most, for all we know. If we can figure out what she was working on, maybe we can figure out who else might have had a motive for trying to kill her. Don’t you see? It could be the key to this entire case.”
Kozlowski looked as though he were chewing on his cud. “Maybe,” he said. “Then again, maybe not. Seems like it’s all speculation.”
“Of course it’s all speculation,” Finn agreed, getting frustrated. “Every investigation starts with speculation. Mix in a few hunches and a bottle of luck, and sometimes you actually figure out what the fuck is going on. What the hell is wrong with you?”
Kozlowski shrugged. “I guess it’s our best lead at the moment.”
“Damned right it is. So?”
“So what?”
“What do you think she was working on at the time? What do you think brought her out to Roxbury that night?”
“How would I know?” Kozlowski asked.
“I don’t know,” Finn said. “You were friends with her. You two worked out of the same station house. I thought she might have told you.”
Kozlowski shook his head. “I know she was on that illegal immigration task force with the INS joint effort. Other than that . . .” He held up his hands to show they were empty.
“Nothing else?” Finn asked.
“Nothing else.”
Finn thought. “Okay. Then we’ll have to go straight to the source. We have to talk to Steele again.”
Kozlowski laughed. “She’ll shoot you if you go near her again. I’m not even kidding.”
“Then I’ll get that merit badge. Besides, if a bullet hurts less than this”—Finn held up his arm—“then I’ll be fine.”
“She’s not going to talk to us,” Kozlowski said.
“She’s going to have to,” Finn replied, and his voice was firm. “I don’t care how many times she tries to shoot me. I’m going to find out what she was doing on the street that night.”
z
The taxi dropped Lissa off in front of her apartment. She gave the driver a seven-dollar tip on a three-dollar fare and asked him to wait until she was inside before pulling away. He nodded wearily, and his cab was still there when she closed the door behind her, safe within the lobby of the brownstone apartment building.
She had stayed at the restaurant on Chestnut Street for a little over half an hour, looking nervously out the front door the entire time. Twice she thought she’d caught sight of the man who had accosted her. Well . . . not accosted her, but frightened her. She’d sipped two Scotches with Ian, the protective bartender. As the time passed, he seemed to lose interest in her pursuer and gain a more direct interest in her. He even offered to give her a ride home himself, an offer that she was tempted to accept, but she thought better of it and politely asked him to call her a taxi. He seemed disappointed, though not offended, and she left him a twenty-dollar tip for the drinks. By the time she left the bar, she was almost convinced that the man on the street had just been overly solicitous and had not intended any harm. All he had done was offer her a hand up off the sidewalk and a ride home. All the same, she was relieved to be home.
She walked to the elevator and pressed the button. From the familiar humming of the gears, she judged that the ancient elevator car was several floors up and headed in the wrong direction. It was an old building, and the lift moved with the speed of a constipated tortoise; it could be several minutes before the car returned to the ground floor. Her apartment took up the entire sixth floor, and the walk up was no
minor aerobic commitment, but she was in good shape, and she figured the exercise wouldn’t kill her.
As she trudged up the stairs, she thought about what had happened to Finn that evening. She’d been skeptical about Salazar’s innocence from the beginning. Hell, “skeptical” hadn’t even begun to describe her attitude; she’d genuinely thought Finn was crazy to pursue the case. But the attack on her boss had shaken her more than she cared to admit. For the first time, her mind was open to the possibility that Salazar was actually rotting in prison for a crime he hadn’t committed, and the notion made her sick. She tried to imagine what it must be like to sit in an eight-by-ten cage while your family and friends went on with their lives. You would be, for all practical purposes, dead; suffocating in a tiny steel coffin, looking out on a world that couldn’t help but forget your existence. She couldn’t fathom it.
She rounded the stairwell on the fifth floor, and the door to one of the apartments below hers cracked open, a single eyeball staring at her through the slit. It was an eyeball that had viewed Lissa with disdain since the day she had moved into her apartment.
“Good evening, Mrs. Snowden,” Lissa said without trying to hide her annoyance.
The door opened a little more, until the chain lock caught. “More like morning, by my clock,” the woman said. Her gray hair was locked into some sort of complicated sleeping apparatus designed to allow her to wake to a perfect, if somewhat less than stylish, coif.
Lissa looked at her watch. “Goodness, you’re right, Mrs. Snowden. It’s after midnight. I can already feel myself turning back into a pumpkin. If you see a glass slipper on the stairway, make sure it gets back to me, okay?” She walked past her neighbor’s doorway and around toward the last flight of stairs up to her apartment. She was in no mood to deal with her nosy neighbor.
Mrs. Snowden sneered at her. “Will you be having company again tonight?”
Lissa turned and glared at the older woman. “That’s really none of your fucking business, Mrs. Snowden, now, is it?”
Mrs. Snowden looked as though she’d been slapped, but she held her ground. “It most certainly is, young lady. Every time you bring one of your male acquaintances into the building to do . . . whatever it is you do . . . you put everyone in the building at risk. Who knows who these men are—clearly not you
.”
“You want to know what I’m doing up there with them, Mrs. Snowden? Fucking them. All of them. Every man in Boston, okay?”
Mrs. Snowden gasped.
“That’s right. Sometimes ten or twenty of them at a time—there are so many to get through, you know? You should try it sometime; it might even loosen up that hair of yours.”
Mrs. Snowden shook her head. “Harlot.”
“Good night to you, too, Mrs. Snowden. I’m going to try to get a good night’s sleep, so if you could keep your vibrator on low, it would be helpful.”
Lissa heard the door slam shut as she started up the stairway to her apartment.
z
Kozlowski could see that Finn was nodding off. He was putting up a valiant battle, almost as though the prospect of slipping into slumber and allowing the dreams to come frightened him.
“Seriously,” Finn slurred, “next time I’ll let you know where I’m going.” It was apropos of nothing; they hadn’t said a word to each other in twenty minutes. Kozlowski figured the painkillers were taking over. He just nodded. “Remind me in the morning,” Finn continued, “that we have to talk to Steele again. There’s something there. We just have to find out what it is.”
Kozlowski said nothing.
“We’re going to win this one.” Finn’s eyelids were sliding down, with only a thin line of his eyes visible. Then they closed altogether. “I swear we’re gonna get this guy off,” he mumbled, barely audible.
Kozlowski got up and walked out of the room. He went down to the cafeteria to get a cup of coffee, his mind churning. It was time to come clean, he knew, and that knowledge felt like dawn on the day of reckoning. He had no idea how bad it would be, but he was running out of options. He thought about Lissa and wondered how she would react. The thought of losing her, or even losing any little part of her respect, was as real as the blade that had been held to Finn’s throat earlier in the evening. It was paralyzing. Still, he could see no other way.
He walked back up to Finn’s room, and as he turned the corner into the doorway, he nearly collided with a young orderly coming out of the room. Kozlowski struggled to keep his coffee from sloshing out onto the floor.
