The Big Dig (Carlotta Carlyle Mysteries Book 9)

by Linda Barnes

  I shot Walters, kept firing till he went down. There were noises everywhere, running, lights and flares. But no one came inside the shed, no one tried the door. Krissi clutched the dog and moaned; she half-crawled, half-wriggled out from under Veejay, who lay motionless. I ripped off my coat, my shirt, made a bandage and applied pressure to the woman’s back, felt my shirt grow warm and wet.

  It seemed like hours before help came, but I found out later that the whole operation, from the Mayday to the round-up, took a total of eight minutes.

  Chapter 39

  Two helicopters took off from the clearing, big and black enough to furnish a thousand New World Order nightmares: First, the medical flight, airlifting Veronica and the other wounded; then the FBI chopper. I was strapped into the second bird, disoriented by the view through the Plexiglas floor, deafened by the roar of the rotor blades. Wells sat on my right. He’d been struck with the rifle butt, stunned not shot. I realized my teeth were chattering, pressed my lips together before the enamel chipped.

  Kristal Horgan, on my left, rested her forehead against the smooth body of the bird. Someone had given her a clean jumpsuit that hung off her slender frame. She gazed out the window with a thousand-yard stare.

  No one escapes, no one communicates. The FBI had cut phone lines, jammed wireless frequencies, silenced the local press so efficiently it was no wonder they were feared and hated. Despite Walters’s defiant words, they had taken prisoners north of Derry, four of them, at least, alive. Two, Erica and Harold, I recognized from Charles River Dog Care. Two were combat-fatigue-wearing strangers, both male, with shaven heads. Rogers Walters was dead.

  One of the combat-clad strangers sat across from me, handcuffed and manacled, guarded by a square-cut Fed. His slight build and callused hands had drawn immediate attention. So far he had refused to discuss the particulars of the tunnel, but I imagined pressure would be brought to bear.

  I felt Walsh’s—Wells’s—touch. He shot me a questioning glance and I nodded to say I was tracking, I was okay.

  “Where do we put down?” I yelled.

  “Not Logan. Take too long to get into position.”

  “Why the hurry?” If no one escapes, no one communicates had worked, there should be time.

  “Ops says there could be a fail-safe code. Something like if you don’t hear from us every two hours, blow it. Wham.”

  “What does he say?” I indicated the handcuffed man.

  “He says no. But whose side is he on?” Wells shrugged. “Another thing. Heywood wasn’t at the camp, and we haven’t got a line on him. Address on his employment stuff is a phony, bad phone number, too. He could be down in the tunnel, and if he doesn’t hear from Walters—”

  Wham.

  “What about Heywood’s KA’s?” KA’s are known associates. Prison buddies, cellmates, in particular.

  “What are you looking for, Carlotta? Who?”

  I shook my head and pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes. Soon, I’d have to sleep. For a moment I imagined myself inside the other chopper, watching colored lights pulsing across screens hooked to the still figure of a dark-haired girl. Veronica had been alive, barely, when they’d taken off.

  “When can I call my client?” I asked without opening my eyes.

  “I don’t know.”

  I’d given up my cell in exchange for a Kevlar vest. It hadn’t been my choice and the cell hadn’t been returned. The FBI didn’t trust me, and it’s true, I’d have called Dana, told her to meet Veejay at Mass General. It’s not like I would have phoned Hard Copy to sell some scoop about a bomb under Faneuil Hall, to tell the world that depending on the time, depending on what the Feds learned from the captured “patriots,” there were two alternative plans to deal with it.

  The favorite: Flood the tunnel, force the bastards out while neutralizing the bombs. Much of the tunnel was thought to consist of ancient watertight sewage pipes. City engineers and Dig engineers, water and sewer employees, were confident they could quickly pump in enough water to neutralize explosives and drown anyone who refused to surrender. If I’d read the signs right, correctly interpreted the rat business from the start, I thought bleakly, it would be over by now. Where had the Horgan site rats come from if not the reopened sewer tunnel?

  The fallback plan, to take the tunnel by storm, dropping agents into manholes, pouring them into the mouth of the tunnel via the locked storage shed, was favored by few. The fallback plan would cost lives. The tunnel was undoubtedly booby-trapped. One older agent, visibly shaken, had paled and left the room during a discussion that ranged from sharpened sticks to trip wires to land mines, and someone murmured that the man had been a tunnel rat in Vietnam.

  “He told me,” Rogers Walters had said. “He told me—I thought you were just a busybody PI.” I opened my eyes as the helicopter swerved, shut them as my stomach lurched in reaction. Who told him? Who had warned him about me? The night watchman? What if neither Heywood nor Walters was the lead player? Walters ran the dog care company as a blind. Heywood came in as a night watchman late in the game. Was there a “patriot” on the Dig, someone who’d recognized the Horgan site as an extraordinary opportunity? Horgan wouldn’t have kidnapped his own child, subjected her to the kind of conditions she’d survived in the camp. I considered Happy Eddie Conklin.

  “Landing! Coming in.” The intercom voice opened my eyes. Possibly I’d slept. Beside me, Krissi lifted her head and tried a smile that trembled, flickered, and went out like a broken bulb. I watched the ground tilt.

  The helipad, atop a financial-district skyscraper, was thick with men in suits. They converged with guys in coveralls and vests, a cross between an honor guard and a posse. Walkie-talkies were standard issue and so were forty-caliber automatics. Agents urged Kristal into one elevator, hustled the handcuffed terrorist into another. He—I overheard the barked commands—would be whisked directly to a waiting van in the basement garage, shuttled to command headquarters at the JFK Building.

  Time kicked into fast-forward. Wells squeezed my arm. “Stay with the girl. Her parents should be arriving in the lobby.” The brisk, order-giving atmosphere seemed to have rubbed off on him.

  “They could have been watching the house—” I protested.

  “If they were, we grabbed them.” The FBI was we now, I was other. He rejoined a group of agents. Hands slapped his back and he shook someone’s outstretched hand.

  “I’m coming with you,” I said. “I know the tunnel entrance, the—”

  “So do I. Stay with Kristal. Stay with her.”

  I hadn’t negotiated beyond New Hampshire and the woman I’d been hired to rescue, the woman who, with luck, would be in an operating room by now. Wells disappeared into the crowded elevator to the right, and I stepped into the elevator on the left, with Kristal, to avoid getting abandoned on the roof. The doors slid shut and machinery whirred.

  Machinery. The FBI machine had taken charge.

  The doors slid open onto Gerry and Liz Horgan, still as statues, flanked by agents, and Kristal fell into their arms. You say that, fell into their arms, but she really did it, taking her mother with her to the floor, where they hugged and sobbed, until Mr. Horgan joined them, kneeling, one arm around his wife, the other holding his daughter so tightly I worried about her ribs.

  “Sir.” The agent who spoke needed an inch more jaw to be a classic.

  Horgan ignored him, pressing his face into Krissi’s filthy hair.

  “Sir, an ambulance is waiting to take your daughter to New England Medical Center.”

  “But I want to go home,” the girl wailed. She’d been talking, talking, about Veronica, and her missing dog, and taking a bath, please, a bath.

  “That woman stole her?” Liz Horgan said. “The dog woman?”

  And saved her life. I wondered whether Krissi realized what Veronica had done.

  “Sir, your wife will accompany your daughter to the hospital. You’re with us.”

  “I need to stay with Krissi!” he ins
isted.

  “Sir, we brought her back. That was our part of the deal, and now we need your cooperation.” I didn’t envy Horgan. I’d heard the agents talking. Every item he’d ordered, every person he’d hired, every shift he’d made in the schedule or the plans would be mined for information about the terrorists and their tunnel.

  “Hey,” I called to the agent who was busy peeling father from daughter. “Let me ask him something. Gerry! Mr. Horgan—”

  “What? Oh—Carla—Miss—” He seemed dazed.

  “A symbol,” I said. “Wavy yellow lines over a blue moon, a tiny red star in the corner. Did you ever see a man or a woman with a tattoo like that, wearing that symbol on a bracelet or a necklace?” More than ever, it seemed to me, that symbol might have gotten Fournier killed. If he’d found his “good luck charm” on-site, thought it might be linked to some sort of illegal activity … He’d tried blackmail with Liz Horgan, maybe he tried it with someone else.

  “No. No, I don’t remember anything like that.”

  “C’mon,” the agent said impatiently. “We’re out of here. Let’s go.”

  “Take care of my daughter, my wife—”

  “We got ’em,” the agent said. “They’re okay. Let’s go.”

  “Please.” The boss tore his eyes away from his daughter and stared at me, eyes pleading.

  I nodded. I’d stick.

  “Thank you,” he mumbled.

  They bustled him off, surrounded by agents. Liz Horgan and I were left with the girl and several agents of junior rank, one an older man whose main duty seemed to be the ineffectual patting of shoulders.

  Not until we were in the ambulance on our way to the hospital, with Kristal lying blank-faced on a gurney, blankets drawn to her chin, did Liz Horgan approach. I thought she might echo her husband’s thanks, but she seemed distracted. She pushed her hair off her forehead and said, “Can I tell you something, privately?”

  I nodded, thinking either she would or she wouldn’t. She looked like the coin was still in the air, waiting to drop, heads or tails.

  “I love my husband,” she said.

  If that was the private communiqué, it was safe with me, I thought.

  “I wouldn’t want him to know. I wouldn’t want him to know where the FBI learned it. I wouldn’t want the police to know. They talk. No one can know. You’d have to give me your word.”

  “Depends on what you’re getting at.”

  She bit her lip. “You asked Gerry about—about a symbol, a—a tattoo.”

  I snapped to attention then. Inside, so it didn’t show. “I did. Yes.”

  “Is it important?”

  “Yes.” I thought about adding life and death, but let it go. I didn’t want to discourage her.

  “I know someone, a man, with a tattoo like that.”

  “Who?”

  “I wouldn’t want my husband to know. The tattoo is not someplace where, um, a casual acquaintance would happen to see it.”

  Low on the small of his back. That’s where Roz’s tat man had placed them on the men.

  “Who?” I repeated.

  The ambulance took a sharp corner and she staggered slightly. “Harv O’Day.”

  Harv O’Day, the site supervisor, keeper of the time cards. Wiry and small, a born tunneler.

  Chapter 40

  The ambulance stopped on a dime, the back doors flung wide at New England Medical Center’s emergency entrance, a mile and a half from the JFK Building where agents were gathering, preparing to drown the tunnel or take it by storm. I couldn’t run it, not with this leg.

  “My husband can’t find out about this,” Liz whispered sharply as I jumped to the pavement.

  The agents had disappeared, vanished, melted like snowflakes on hot pavement, the car assigned to tail us either lost in traffic or diverted to some other emergency. Diverted. Had to be. How can you lose a fucking ambulance? Who knows? Sam Gianelli once told me the mob has a saying: Organized crime thrives on disorganized justice.

  I gave up on the Feds and ran back to the entrance in time to see Krissi’s gurney disappear into a sea of hospital workers. Liz followed it, and I followed her, edging through the crowd, moving quickly down a wide corridor, catching my jacket on an IV stand, ignoring the attendants who asked me just where I thought I was going, until I caught up and placed a restraining hand on Liz’s shoulder.

  “Do you have your cell?”

  She thrust her hand in her bag, shoved the phone in my direction, and moved on. I punched the main number for Horgan Construction and Marian answered, no recording, a live and recognizable voice.

  “Is Harv O’Day there?” She started to babble excuses. “Just answer the question, Marian. It’s Carla. Have you seen Harv today? Is he on-site?”

  “He walked out a little while ago, Carla. Everything’s weird today. I don’t know what the hell’s going on.”

  A long-nosed man in green scrubs, stethoscope dangling from his stringy neck, approached and told me I couldn’t use a cell phone in there, couldn’t I read the signs?

  “When did he leave?” I asked Marian. “Did he get a phone call?”

  “Yeah, I think. Maybe half an hour ago, maybe longer. He just left. Didn’t say a word. Usually he—”

  “Did you see where he went?”

  “What do you mean? Why do you want to know?”

  “Marian, please.”

  The man in scrubs glared at me, and I glared back fiercely.

  “Jeez, he went off, like, in the direction of the marketplace, but he never goes out for lunch or anything. I don’t get it. Gerry hasn’t come in. Liz hasn’t come in. They’re not answering their phones—”

  “Thanks.” I hung up while Marian was still talking, reflecting that her day was only going to get worse.

  The glaring man was gone. I searched the waiting room, the hallway for a city cop, found only a vacant-eyed security guard who looked too young to shave. On the average Patriot’s Day, every available cop is busy, tapped for crowd control on the marathon course. With the additional burden of the Faneuil Hall debate, beat cops would be twice as scarce. Out of the corner of my eye I saw double doors part to swallow the gurney bearing Krissi Horgan. Liz stayed behind, slumped in a chair, pen in hand, scribbling furiously on a clipboard. I knelt beside her.

  “I have to fill in all these damn blanks and I can’t remember—”

  I took the clipboard from her unresisting hands. “Liz, where would Harv go? What’s his cell number? Do you know it?”

  She nodded and I handed her the phone. “Get him.”

  “What should I say?”

  “Find out where he is.”

  She pressed numbers, held it to her ear. “He’s not picking up. Should I leave a message?”

  “Dammit. No.”

  “Isn’t he on the site? Can’t Marian—”

  I repeated the secretary’s words.

  “He probably went to the apartment,” she said. “Give me the clipboard. I have to fill out the—”

  “What apartment? Where?”

  He had a tiny flat high above the marketplace, she told me, a perfect crow’s nest from which he liked to peer through binoculars at the busy scene below. The windows looked toward City Hall Plaza, an excellent view.

  My heart sank. With binoculars, he could watch exactly what went down at Faneuil Hall. When the routine changed, as it inevitably would no matter which plan was put into action, he would notice. With a high-powered rifle and scope, he could take out a careless agent before he could lift his walkie-talkie to his lips. She’d never seen weapons in the apartment, but he had a police scanner, kept it on most of the time, enjoyed listening in on police and fire calls, even during intimate moments.

  She had a key. She wouldn’t say when the affair had started. Since she still had the key, it hadn’t ended. She’d always been like that, always had a secret lover on a site. She wanted my guarantee that I’d say nothing to her husband. Her key would open the downstairs door, the street door; she had
no key to the apartment. Once inside, she walked up five flights, knocked in a pattern.

  “Show me, rap it out.”

  She tapped on the clipboard: one, two, rest, three, rest, four.

  “Do you show up? Do you call first?”

  “I call.”

  “Go ahead. Now.”

  “What do I say?”

  “Find out if he’s alone. If he isn’t, say you’ll see him later, and hang up. If he is, tell him you’re coming over. Keep it casual, however you do it. But if he says he’s alone, don’t take no for an answer.”

  “I’m not going anywhere. I’m staying here with my daughter.”

  “Of course you are.” O’Day would never mistake me for blonde Liz. But I’d been practicing her voice. All I had to do was get him to open a single door. “Call,” I urged her. “I’ll take it from there.”

  The long-nosed man approached, face red with anger. “I warn you. If you use that thing in here again, I’m going to call security.”

  “Don’t bother with security,” I told him. “Get a real cop or you’re gonna have a situation on your hands.”

  He wagged his finger near my face. “You’re the one who’s gonna have the situation.”

  “Shut up.”

  “What did you say?”

  “Shut up. Fuck off. Whatever!” I pressed the phone into Liz’s hand.

  She punched buttons. I clenched my hands into fists and eavesdropped. He didn’t want her to come. She kept her voice light and teasing, made kissing noises into the phone. When she hung up, I had her describe the flat. I made her diagram it on the back of a hospital form. A large room, a bath. Windows, she emphasized. Wonderful vistas of historic buildings. You could see the Faneuil Hall weathervane, the famous grasshopper.

  “After you knock, what do you say?”

  She stared at me blankly.

  “Come on. You use the key, climb the stairs. Knock. Two quick, two slow. Does he ask who’s there or is the signal enough?”