The Big Dig (Carlotta Carlyle Mysteries Book 9)

by Linda Barnes

  If I were wrong, I’d apologize. I’d grovel, hat in hand. I hoped I was wrong. Surely I was wrong. Boston, once the hotbed of Patriot sympathy, the tinderbox of the Revolution, was quiet Eastern liberal establishment now. Our revolutionary days were hundreds of years ago, and modern militias, groups of so-called “freemen” were a rural, Western phenomenon. I left my car at the bottom of the drive and walked. As I passed beneath the porte-cochere, I took a deep breath, pressed the bell.

  The lady of the manor answered, keeping the door chained, peering with unfriendly eyes. She looked ill and, when she realized who had disturbed her, angry.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  “Helping you out of a jam.” She started to close the door. “Let me talk! I have nothing—”

  “You can’t have your job back.”

  “If Krissi’s home, I’ll leave. Without another word.”

  “Krissi.” The name made her hands go limp. “Go away.”

  “You’re right about me, Mrs. Horgan, but you’re wrong. I’m not a secretary, but I’m not who you think I am. Let me in. I can help. It’s okay. I could just be bringing papers from the site, like last time.”

  She closed the door, but didn’t slam it. The chain rattled, the door reopened, and I stepped quickly inside. Same mess, same stepladder in the corner of the room, same broom and dustpan. They must have sent the housekeeper on vacation as soon as the horror show began, as soon as their daughter disappeared.

  “Who are you?” she whispered fiercely.

  “Carlotta, not Carla. My last name is Carlyle. I work for the inspector general, but I’m not working for him now. I’m working for myself now, and I hope for you. For Krissi.”

  “You’ve seen her?” She tried to keep her voice steady but failed.

  “I came at this from another direction, Mrs. Horgan. We need to talk. I need to know what you know.”

  “What direction? What do you mean?”

  “I was searching for a missing woman, and then I realized there were two, a missing woman and a missing girl. How did Kevin Fournier find out? Did you tell him?”

  “I never told anyone. The goddam bastard. He knew something was wrong, that’s all. Knew I should have had crews working twenty-four hours, overtime. He threatened me, said he’d kill our new contracts—”

  “Unless?”

  “Unless I slept with him, okay? I don’t know—maybe I would have, to keep Krissi safe—but he fell—”

  “Krissi’s been taken, kidnapped?”

  “Get out.”

  “Please, I can’t help unless I know.”

  “How can I trust you?” Her voice was shrill. “They said—”

  “You can’t trust her.” I hadn’t heard Gerry Horgan’s footsteps on the stairs because he wasn’t wearing shoes. Some part of my mind registered the socks, and the khaki pants and the plaid shirt, open over a white undershirt. The gun in his right hand was aimed at my heart.

  Chapter 33

  He made his way down the stairs, left hand on the railing, a 9-mm Beretta in his right. I watched for signs that he didn’t know how the hell to use it, that the gun was an unloaded toy kept in the bedside table for emergencies. His gaze didn’t waver and his finger rested easily on the trigger.

  “Careful with that.” I made my voice cool as ice water. Sweat trickled down the small of my back.

  “You carrying?” he demanded.

  My S&W .40 was locked in my bedroom closet, unloaded. I shook my head as Mrs. Horgan interrupted.

  “Please, do you know where Krissi is?”

  “Shut up, Liz.”

  “I was pretty sure you weren’t in on this deal,” I said. “I thought you were just taking orders—”

  “Neither of us is in on anything,” Liz Horgan said passionately.

  “Shut up! I’m not letting her mess this up.” Horgan spoke exclusively to his wife. “All we have to do is lie low for another day or two, and Krissi will come home. It will be like it never happened.” Now his glance included me. “Into the living room. Move!”

  He kept a wary distance as I passed. I knew I couldn’t tackle him before he got a shot off, and I remembered the last time I’d met up with a gun at close quarters. The scar on my thigh began to tingle.

  “Do you know who you’re dealing with, Mr. Horgan? Do you know who’s got your daughter?” I kept it low and businesslike.

  “I don’t want to know. Shut up.”

  “For a smart man, that’s dumb. You’d never do business with people you don’t know.” The tingle became a throb, an ache.

  “This isn’t about business. This is about my only child. Sit down.” He used the gun to point me to an armchair. “Now, who the hell are you? What business is it of yours?”

  “Kevin Fournier phoned a tip to the inspector general. I was assigned to investigate.”

  Gerry turned on Liz. “I told you to cool him off.”

  “I tried, Gerry. Jesus, I tried.”

  I said, “If the people you’re dealing with killed Fournier for making a phone call, what on earth makes you think they’ll let your daughter go? Someone’s holding a gun on her now, the same way you’re holding one on me.” I might have punched him in the stomach, the way he paled. If I moved quickly, snatched the automatic—

  “He fell,” Liz Horgan said faintly. Her words brought her husband back and I temporarily shelved the idea of a rush.

  “He fell,” her husband echoed. “We obey orders, they do what they say, we get her back.” It was a chant, a prayer, spoken with the flat inflection of repetition, like a nun telling beads.

  “You’re dealing with people who don’t give a damn about your daughter’s life.”

  “Shut up!”

  “You need the facts so you can decide what to do.”

  “Gerry, maybe we need to know. Maybe she can help.”

  “You’re giving me maybes, Liz. It’s Krissi!”

  “You’re holding a gun, Gerry.”

  “Jesus, Liz.”

  “We can’t be like this, Gerry. I can’t be like this.” She sounded ragged with hysteria, as though she might blow any minute. I was grateful she wasn’t holding the pistol.

  I pitched my voice low so they’d have to strain to listen. “Let’s talk. Put the gun down. You aren’t going to use it. Not on me.”

  “I’d use it to save my daughter,” he said defiantly.

  “Your daughter’s in no danger from me.”

  He exchanged a glance with his wife, then crossed the huge chilly living room and placed the automatic on top of the grand piano. He moved a scant two feet away and stood there, hands clasped behind his back.

  “When did they take Krissi?” The Beretta was only a short lunge away from Horgan.

  “It’s been three weeks and four days. Twenty-five days. The third Friday in March.” Liz Horgan was back in rigid control. “She took the dog to the vet.”

  “She should never have gone alone,” Horgan muttered.

  “You baby her! She’s old enough. You’d drive her around for the rest of her life—”

  “If I can,” Horgan said. “If I can. I wouldn’t have let her go alone. You shouldn’t have let her—”

  “She had Tess!”

  “She has a dog, a good dog, a real tiger.” Horgan stopped arguing with his wife long enough to inform me. “She’d never—they must have hurt Tess.”

  I could have reassured him on that count, but I didn’t. I wanted him to keep talking, to forget about the gun on the piano. “How did they get in touch?”

  “We found a note shoved under the front door.”

  “Do you have it? May I see it?”

  His eyes went to the piano, to the Beretta, to Liz. She nodded, made her way to the fireplace mantel, lifted a heavy crystal vase. The note was underneath it.

  “Your house is watched, your phone is tapped. If you go to the police or the FBI, or tell anyone, you’ll never see your daughter again.” The paper was standard-issue office bond
, the text typed with the even flow of a laser printer. The single sheet had been folded twice, to fit into a standard business envelope.

  “We’d hardly read it when we got a phone call,” Liz said softly.

  That followed, if the house was being watched.

  “Did you record the call?”

  “No.”

  “Can you describe the voice?”

  Horgan said, “Electronically altered. I couldn’t even say if it was a man or a woman, but I think it’s the same voice every time. I wrote down everything. Liz?”

  We waited in tense silence while she brought his notes.

  He moved two more steps away from the piano to take them from her hand. “First, he or she said, ‘Your daughter is safe.’ Then I said something like, ‘Let me talk to her.’ Then he said, ‘Listen carefully. She’s staying with us for awhile.’”

  “Go on.”

  “He told me we had to do certain things or we wouldn’t see Krissi again. I thought he’d demand money. I was prepared for that, but he said I had to think of this as a long-term business deal. When he said ‘long-term’ I couldn’t imagine—It started to sink in that he meant—I demanded to speak to Krissi—”

  “She’s alive,” Liz said. “She’s okay. She reads from the paper, the Herald, the ‘Ins-and-Outs on the Dig’ column. It’s different every day, and we follow along with the text. Her voice is … She sounds so scared.”

  I’d picked up Liz’s cell phone; I’d heard Krissi’s voice.

  “What else do you hear? Sounds, background noises.” I was trying to recall what I’d heard even as I spoke. “Did you ever hear dogs barking in the background?”

  “Maybe,” Horgan said.

  “I’m not sure,” his wife said at the same time.

  If I could make him take one more step. He was almost far enough from the gun for me to risk it. “Tell me about the business deal.”

  “It wasn’t any deal. There were … orders. And he said he’d know if his instructions were carried out—and if they weren’t—”

  “What?”

  “I can’t say it.”

  I waited. He ran a hand through his hair and sucked in an uneven breath.

  “They said they’d send us a piece of Krissi, an ear, a finger, and maybe that piece would be all we’d ever see.”

  Liz Horgan made a noise and pressed her hand over her mouth. Her husband turned to her with anguished eyes, and I was out of the chair like a shot. I beat Horgan to the automatic by half a step, not enough, had to knock it across the floor instead of simply grabbing it. It landed closest to Liz, but she was paralyzed, stuck to the floorboards. I shoved Horgan aside, snatched the weapon, pointed it at him while I checked the safety. Fuck, the thing was ready to fire; it could have gone off and killed me, killed anyone in the room. I set it, used the pistol to wave both of them to the sofa.

  “Sit.”

  I was breathing hard. “Okay, exactly what orders did he give you?”

  Horgan said, “Drop dead. I won’t—”

  Liz spoke. “He promised he wouldn’t ask anything too hard, or too tricky. He might tell us to order supplies, to leave a gate unlocked. Nothing worth Krissi’s life.”

  “Specifically,” I said.

  “Liz,” Horgan pleaded.

  “Gerry, we have to tell someone.”

  Horgan said, “Make her promise she won’t go to the cops. I’m not going to let Krissi get hurt. She’s just a baby.”

  There were babies at Waco, I thought, one named Zachariah Harrow. I’ve worked law enforcement in this city for years. There are Feds I wouldn’t trust to follow up on a hot tip, cops I wouldn’t trust with my wallet if my back were turned. There are a few cops, a very few, I would trust with my life.

  I said, “Here’s what I promise. The first thing is getting your daughter back alive. If that’s not the Feds’ top concern, I won’t talk to them. I won’t help them. I swear it.”

  Liz took her husband’s hand, squeezed it.

  He swallowed, closed his eyes.

  “Today!” I said. “Now!”

  His voice, when it finally came, was low and scratchy. “First, he told me to resist any pressure to go to extra shifts. When I heard that, I don’t know, I thought it was some union thing.”

  “It’s terrible,” Liz said. “We can’t explain and we’re falling behind.”

  “What else?”

  “I can’t!” Horgan protested.

  “They told you to lose the keys to a storage shed, right? Which one?”

  “In the trench, along the west slurry wall,” Liz murmured.

  “They told you to order explosives,” I said.

  Horgan, his lips pressed together in a taut line, nodded curtly. “Geldyne. I had to redirect shipments, make ‘mistakes’ on requisition forms.”

  “And after Fournier’s death, they told you to hire a night watchman.”

  “Yes,” Liz said. “They wanted us to hire him before.”

  If I called the FBI, they’d grab the night watchman, nail one of the group, squeeze him. But someone else would be watching over Krissi.

  “I’m going to borrow your Beretta, Mr. Horgan.”

  “You won’t go to the cops?”

  “Not yet. Not till I run out of other ways to do this.”

  If I take care of other people’s children, someone will take care of mine.

  I tell people—no, I tell myself—that Sam Gianelli was my first lover, but that’s a lie. When I was still a child, in Detroit, a wild child of fourteen, I had a baby. I gave him up for adoption. I never saw her. I never held him. I don’t know whether it’s a boy or a girl. I’ve never told anyone. Even when I shot and killed a man, and the brass made me see a shrink, it stayed my secret. But every kid out there is my kid. All the lost kids are mine.

  I said, “If anyone asks why I was here, tell them I wanted my job back.”

  “Did we give it to you?” Mr. H’s voice was hoarse.

  “No,” I said. “You’re a mean sonofabitch.”

  Chapter 34

  I drove by the dark and icy river. Street lamps glittered along the Esplanade and I was glad I’d taken up smoking again. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have had a pack at the ready. I’d have had to stop at a store.

  When Timothy McVeigh was arrested, he wore a T-shirt with the slogan “Sic Semper Tyrannis” emblazoned across his chest. That’s what John Wilkes Booth yelled after he shot Lincoln in the old Ford Theater. “Thus always with tyrants” is a rough approximation. The back of McVeigh’s shirt was devoted to a quote from Thomas Jefferson: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

  I’d need to tell the cops within twelve hours, or risk disaster. I could trust Mooney, knew I could trust him, but on something like this, he’d bring in the Bureau immediately. I knew who’d taken Krissi: Veronica James and her Charles River Dog Care colleagues, bent on vengeance for Waco. I knew why they’d taken her: to force her parents to give them access to the Dig site.

  Fournier had blundered in over his head, thinking Liz Horgan had her own reasons for stalling progress and limiting access—money reasons. He’d tried sexual blackmail, backed by veiled threats on the IG’s hotline. Someone had overheard a phone call, lured him back to the site, killed him. A member of the gang that had kidnapped Kristal Horgan? Or possibly Gerry Horgan? I wasn’t sure which. I ground out my cigarette butt in the dashboard ashtray. Horgan’s automatic rested uncomfortably at the base of my spine.

  Where would they hold the girl?

  I left my car a block from Dana Endicott’s brownstone in a space reserved for resident parking. A ticket was the least of my worries. I rang the doorbell, waited, willing her to be home. I knew she’d been released from the General because I’d called, but what if she’d—Someone hit the buzzer without asking who it was, an action so suspicious I almost transferred Horgan’s gun to my hand.

  My client answered the door in person, tying a robe around her wai
st. She had puffy eyes, a bandage over her right temple, an eager expression. Her face fell when she saw me.

  “You ought to use the chain.” It amazes me, the carelessness of city people who ought to know better.

  She opened the door wider and an inquisitive nose hit my crotch. She had one dog on a leash. The others frisked around her. “What is it? Have you—”

  “The neighbors don’t need to hear this.”

  “I’m sorry. Come in.”

  “Will the dogs let me?”

  She gave a hand signal, and they backed off.

  “I’d hoped it was Veejay, but Tandy would have known,” she said regretfully.

  “Is that Tandy?”

  “Yes. The one with the tail like a husky. She’s a trained hunter. Elkhounds are almost like bloodhounds.” She knelt and patted the two goldens, detaching the leash from the bigger one’s collar.

  “How are you feeling?”

  “Okay.”

  I met her eyes. “Are you alone?”

  “Except for the dogs. Esperanza wanted to stay, but I told her I’d be fine.” She led me through the opening between the fish tanks into the room with the paintings. I wondered what the dogs made of the fish swimming behind glass. “You seem—I don’t know—angry.”

  “I don’t like to be lied to.”

  “I haven’t lied,” she said. “Can I get you a drink?”

  “I know about Veronica’s sister.”

  “I’m sorry, but—which one?”

  If she knew, she was dangerous. If she didn’t, she was a gullible fool. Not a muscle tensed in her face to betray her. She didn’t seem alarmed or upset.

  I said, “Veronica’s older sister, Leslie, died in 1993 in the FBI assault at Waco, Texas. They never really figured out how many died. Some say seventy-four, some seventy-six. I’ve seen it up into the eighties. There were twenty-seven children. One was Veronica’s nephew.”

  She sat down on a deep green sofa, sinking into it abruptly as though her legs would no longer support her.