The Big Dig (Carlotta Carlyle Mysteries Book 9)

by Linda Barnes

“The sister had married,” I went on, as my client gaped, struggling to find words. “Her name was no longer James.”

  “Oh my God, poor Veejay. But she never said—”

  “Poor Veejay is heavily involved in a plot to avenge her sister. And that’s where you come in.”

  “I don’t—I had no—”

  “Something made Veejay very attractive to the people she’s working with, and I’m guessing it was money, your money.”

  “I didn’t pay her. I told you—she didn’t pay rent, but that’s all. She worked.”

  “You never gave her money?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Don’t try to protect her. She’s been using you, living here, waiting for her moment.”

  “I never gave her money.”

  “You never gave her money for anything? For charity? For an old dogs’ home?”

  She leaned forward, elbows on knees, hands covering her face.

  “Tell me.”

  “Oh, God. No one can know about this. If my family—”

  “What charity?”

  “I can’t remember the name. Some fresh air camp for dogs. I mean, I give to tons of charities. Why wouldn’t I give to one recommended by a friend?”

  “I need the name.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Where’s your checkbook? You didn’t give her cash, did you?”

  I followed her upstairs, into the spotless kitchen, helped her find the purse that sat on the floor next to a flowered chair. She handed me her checkbook with a curt, “Look for yourself,” and sank onto a stool at the granite counter. I ran my index finger down the check register. The lines were close together, jammed with crabbed handwriting and the kind of sums I’ll never find in my own checkbook.

  “What has she done? How much trouble is she in?” Dana spoke haltingly, as though the words were being forced out of her mouth.

  “She kidnapped a girl.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  There were sums to Saks and Neimans, American Express, MasterCard, to well-known local charities, the Boston Adult Literacy Foundation, the Jimmy Fund.

  Camp River Ridge—river as in Charles River Dog Care, ridge as in Ruby Ridge—an echo, a statement. The check was for $30,000. To her, it must have seemed like a nickel. To them? How many “patriots” had it kept afloat?

  “What did she tell you about the place? Where is it?” If it existed.

  She raised a shaky hand to her bandaged head. “Just a minute. Please. I’m trying to think. Okay. It was in New Hampshire. Fresh air, dogs, an inner-city escape thing. I think it had just started, or they were going to start it this summer. Yes. It was starting. Veejay thought she might want to be a counselor there. I didn’t want her to go.”

  “Did she give you any literature?”

  “I don’t know. There may have been a flyer, a handout, but I haven’t seen it in months.”

  “Where were you when she gave it to you?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t remember.”

  “What color was it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I kept at her. Maybe the flyer was blue, a folded sheet of flimsy paper, two pages of sparse printing. She was sure the camp was in New Hampshire, but I couldn’t get a town, not even an area, southern or northern.

  If any of the New England states harbored western-style militias, I’d bet on New Hampshire, with its “Live Free or Die” credo. The Jaguar whose plates currently masked Dana Endicott’s Jeep had been stolen in New Hampshire. Claire Harper could find out the name of the town.

  “Do you have the cancelled check?” I asked.

  “You’re wrong about the kidnapping. Veejay’s not like that.”

  “How did she come to work for the dog care place? Did she answer an ad?”

  “She heard about it.”

  “From?”

  “I don’t know. It doesn’t make sense. Why would she tell me she was going away for the weekend? Why not just leave?”

  “Why would she leave, when she’s got a perfect setup here?”

  “Then why didn’t she say she’d be gone two weeks, a month? Why hasn’t she called me?”

  Why, indeed?

  “A change of plans,” I said.

  “I don’t buy it.”

  “Veejay’s in it up to her neck. The girl went with her, trusted her.”

  “Give me my checkbook.” She flattened it on the counter, started to write. “I’ll pay you. To keep my name out of it. To save her, to help her.”

  “She’s in too deep,” I said.

  She kept writing in spite of my protest, tore off the check, and handed it to me. Thirty thousand. The same amount she’d donated to Camp River Ridge.

  “Keep me out of it,” she said. “Try to save Veronica. I’ll do anything to help.”

  “Give me the cancelled check.”

  Within fifteen minutes, she found the small slip of blue paper in a file in the study. I couldn’t make out the signature of the endorser, but the name of a New Hampshire bank was stamped on the back.

  I took a silver pen from a holder, a sheet of stationery from a box, scribbled a few hasty lines.

  “Dana, do you recognize this mark?”

  She swallowed and licked her dry lips. In her robe, with her bandaged head, and tousled hair, she hardly looked like the polished woman who’d hired me. “Yes.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “Mean?”

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where have you seen it?”

  “On Veejay,” she said in a small voice. “Underneath her left breast.”

  Chapter 35

  The cold night air felt bracing. I’d hardly slept with Leland Walsh in my bed, but I wasn’t tired. I’d passed beyond exhaustion, had no desire to rest. I wanted to keep going, keep working, but I was stuck. The Registry had closed hours ago, and while I could reach Claire at home, how could she in turn squeeze midnight information from the New Hampshire Commission of Motor Vehicles?

  I didn’t have the clout; I didn’t have the power. But how could I sleep, knowing what I knew?

  When I can’t sleep, I drive. I took the Mass Ave Bridge across the river, Memorial Drive outbound, thinking, at first, that I’d try a circuitous route home. Instead I found myself exiting at the BU Bridge, cruising the back streets of Cambridgeport, chain-smoking three cigarettes in the Strawberries parking lot before changing my mind and heading downtown.

  Monday night is a dead night in Boston, the theaters dark, the tourists gone, the revelers sleeping off the weekend. I spotted an empty parking space on Bowdoin Street near the JFK Building, pulled on gloves and a hooded scarf. Gusts of icy wind tried to rip the scarf off as I crossed the bricks and cement of City Hall Plaza, descended the steps to Congress Street, moving closer to Faneuil Hall. I began counting my steps at the statue of Samuel Adams, pacing steadily eastward, toward the ocean and the site. Patrons drank and laughed in the marketplace. Diners lingered over after-dinner drinks in the restaurants. Lights twinkled off mica chips in the pavement and distant music welled from a hotel bar. I stopped walking before I got to Atlantic Avenue, took shelter behind a street lamp, and estimated the last twenty-five yards. I didn’t want the night watchman to notice me.

  I turned and made my way slowly back toward the hall, counting paces again to make sure I’d measured accurately the first time. The Cradle of Liberty, site of the great Patriot’s Day tribute, would be jammed at six o’clock tomorrow evening, the old meeting hall on the second floor SRO. I’d heard they were planning to hook up outdoor speakers to accommodate the overflow crowd. The honored speakers, the honored guests, would be concentrated inside the hall: the ex-presidents, the Massachusetts senators, Senator Gleason of Idaho, who’d once chaired a committee that had given the FBI a clean slate on Waco.

  The old hall looked serene and untroubled behind its shield of concrete barricades. They’d protect the national monument from a truck bomb,
an Oklahoma City bomb. But they wouldn’t protect it from explosive charges in tunnels, in old sewage or drainage tunnels widened and redirected with borrowed tools. Maybe the humming noise I’d heard the night I’d rescued Leland Walsh had come from underground machinery, from a drilling rig borrowed off another Horgan site or ordered especially for this one.

  There’s a post office inside the hall, gimcrack tourist shops on the first floor. It was always like that. Even in 1742 when it opened, there was space for a market as well as the meeting hall for town gatherings. Here James Otis, Sam Adams, Dr. Joseph Warren, the “Sons of Liberty,” gave impassioned calls for opposition to the sugar tax, the stamp act, the tax on tea that provoked the Boston Tea Party.

  “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” Jefferson had said nothing about the blood of innocent bystanders. Jefferson hadn’t lived to witness IRA bombings in London department stores, Israeli teenagers blown to bits while eating pizza in crowded restaurants.

  There was no visible police presence around the historic hall, and why should there be, with the Patriot’s Day event sixteen hours away? As I’d paced the distance from hall to site and back again, had I walked over a finished tunnel, or were patient tunnelers still digging beneath my feet? Did they live down there? Was everything ready? Were they waiting till D-day to bring in the explosives? I swallowed suddenly, hearing Liz Horgan describe the location of the locked storage shed in my memory. If it was flush along the west slurry wall, it could be a blind, positioned to conceal the entrance to the tunnel.

  Twenty-foot-thick sections of bedrock had been blasted from the bottom of Boston Harbor to make way for the harbor tunnel. When the major explosions went off, there’d been an environmental brouhaha over the inadvertent killing of fish. The solution: a fabulously expensive “fish-startle system” to keep migrating fish away from the blasting zones. After spending a million dollars to startle fish, who’d question a few hundred bucks’ worth of explosives ordered by a reputable contractor?

  I shivered and backed away. I didn’t think Krissi Horgan was down in the tunnel, in the darkness, but I didn’t know, and that was maddening. I wanted to make a move, do something. I could grab the night watchman, threaten him with Horgan’s automatic, force him to take me to the girl. If he refused, would I kill him? If he agreed, would he bring me to a spot where I’d be outgunned, outnumbered?

  I wanted to do something, but not something foolish, not something fatal. In the morning, Claire could tell me where to look. I had time. They wouldn’t blow the building till Senator Gleason was safely inside.

  Chapter 36

  They were waiting in my living room, a pair of them, like andirons flanking the fireplace, wearing dark suits and ties. Eddie Conklin was with them.

  “Geez, Carlotta, you could stay in fuckin’ touch.” Eddie didn’t look pleased. “These guys about reamed me a new asshole by now.”

  Roz, in black leather, emerged from the butterfly chair, yawning and stretching. I wasn’t sure if her I-just-took-a-little-nap routine was genuine or a put-on. She’s good.

  “Hey, Carlotta, sorry. Shouldn’t have opened the door.” She glared at the trespassers before dipping into a sarcastic curtsy. “There are some gentlemen to see you, and they pushed their way in.”

  “Miss Carlyle.” The elder unknown removed a slim leather folder from his breast pocket, followed it with his name, Dunfey, and the initials FBI.

  “Him, too?” I nodded at the younger one.

  “McNamara.”

  Both sets of credentials looked legit. It was possible that Liz Horgan, unable to cope with the tension, had sprung a leak, run to the feebs. It was possible that Gerry Horgan had felt similar misgivings and opened up. It was possible that I’d been spotted jaywalking in a federal zone or openly dining with Sam Gianelli. Eddie’s presence gave me a hint, but I wasn’t about to speculate aloud in front of special agents Dunfey and McNamara, both still standing, both trying to peel their eyes off Roz’s tight leather butt as she excused herself and rapidly disappeared upstairs.

  Dunfey, skinnier as well as older, asked whether I would mind discussing a certain matter that had been brought to their attention.

  McNamara, in the brown suit, showed even teeth. “A friend, a colleague of mine, goes way back with Eddie here,” he said. “So far back that every once in a while he’ll do Eddie a favor.”

  “I’m all for old friendships,” I volunteered when he halted expectantly. It didn’t seem like sticking my neck out.

  “This bozo will even run a set of prints for Eddie, from time to time.” Dunfey narrowed his eyes into slits. “It’s not something he ought to do, really, considering Eddie’s just a private op.”

  “Right,” I said, “but let’s not make a federal case out of it.”

  Dunfey’s ugly smile stretched. “We can visit headquarters, if you’d rather.”

  His threat meant the prints that I’d lifted from the pipe were not only on file, they were of special interest.

  McNamara showed me more teeth. “Believe me, we’d prefer your cooperation.” He was playing good cop, Dunfey his evil twin. It wasn’t a bad performance but I’d seen it before.

  I knew I had to talk or call my lawyer and dammit, the thing was I wanted to talk. I needed help, specifically the kind of help the feebs can provide. I didn’t have the clout, the power, and they had it in spades. They could haul the head of New Hampshire Motor Vehicles out of bed, track down the origin of the stolen Jag. They could trace Dana’s cancelled check in the blink of an eye, find the bank, hell, grab the clerk who’d cashed it. But I didn’t want to be shut out, and the feebs shut you out so hard you bounce. Plus I was worried they’d save the ex-presidents and the senators, and the hell with the little Horgan girl. I wanted a chance to talk to Veronica James, a chance to earn Dana Endicott’s thirty grand.

  Dunfey snapped, “Are you familiar with the term ‘obstructing justice’?”

  McNamara’s voice stayed cool. “Eddie says you didn’t tell him where you got the prints, and I believe him.”

  “So who’s the guy?” I asked.

  “You answer my questions, that’s how it goes. Where is he?” Dunfey was getting hot.

  “Is he on the ten-most-wanted? Do I win a prize?”

  “Look, we’ve heard about you. Don’t try to get cute with us.”

  “I’ve heard about you, too. About people who died because the Boston Bureau protects informers instead of citizens.” Last year two agents got indicted for helping a local Irish mobster cover crimes ranging from extortion to murder.

  “Those weren’t citizens!” Dunfey snapped.

  “Right. They had vowels on the end of their names so they deserved to get dumped in a gravel pit.”

  “Gianelli tell you all about it?”

  They’d done some checking on me.

  McNamara intervened. “Hey, it’s getting late, and we’re not making progress. This guy’s prints kicked up and we want to know where you got ’em. You used our resources—”

  “I used Eddie.”

  “Eddie doesn’t know shit.”

  Conklin roused himself. “Yeah? Well, I know this: You schmucks ain’t Boston Bureau.”

  They had to be Washington. Justice keeps files in D.C. on guys who’ve threatened public officials, on foreign-born terrorists as well. The feebs have a counterterrorism squad. Squad 5. I dropped Eddie a nod by way of thanks.

  “Listen,” I said. “Whoever matches those prints, I figure he’s got to be major, to bring you guys up from D.C. And I also figure you didn’t have a clue till the prints came in.”

  “We didn’t know this particular scumbag was in this particular area, and we’re glad to know,” McNamara conceded.

  “In other words, I did you a favor.”

  “You could put it like that. But we need to know everything you know about the man who made those prints.”

  “Favor for favor,” I said.

  “The h
ell with this! Where is he?” Dunfey was hot.

  “Does Faneuil Hall mean anything special to you?” I said. “Faneuil Hall on April nineteenth?”

  The two agents exchanged uneasy glances.

  “Listen, I don’t want to stonewall you guys. I just want to tell my story to an agent I know.”

  “You can tell it to us,” McNamara said.

  “We’re in a goddam hurry here,” Dunfey insisted.

  “Then the faster you get him here, the faster I talk.”

  “Let’s take her in,” Dunfey said.

  “Take me in, and I clam. Not a word.”

  “Shit.”

  “You guys could be heroes.” I broke the angry silence with a hint, an implicit offer.

  Dunfey brought his fist down on the mantel. “I thought the guys in the Boston office were all corrupt anti-Italian bigots. We’re not gonna fly anybody in from goddam North Dakota, for chrissakes.”

  “You won’t have to. He’s local, undercover. I don’t think it’s his real name, but he calls himself Leland Walsh.”

  “Fuckin’ A,” Eddie said slowly. “He’s Bureau, and nobody fuckin’ told me?”

  McNamara whipped out his cell.

  Chapter 37

  “When did you know about me?”

  I was ready with an answer. “From the start.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “You asked too many questions. You took too many chances. You called the morgue Albany Street. Cops do that, not civilians. When you showed me the driver’s license in your sock, you made a move toward the other sock first. Your FBI creds were in that one, right?”

  We shared the front seat of an old Ford four-by-four parked on the verge of a narrow gravel road. Leland Walsh—I was having trouble calling him by his real name, Leonard Wells—was behind the wheel and I rode shotgun. The deep green of the truck blended into the nearby pine woods. Mist covered the windshield and fogged the side windows, which was okay because that way no one could see inside. We were north of Derry, New Hampshire. It was an hour before dawn, and icy cold. I stifled a yawn and a shiver, drew my jacket closer. More than anything else, I’d found it hard to believe Walsh was Kevin Fournier’s friend.