06 Every Three Hours

by Chris Mooney

  Gelfand was out the door, and Coop stole a glance at her from across the table when Big Red said, ‘Call me when Clara Lacy and her family are safe.’

  ‘Not until I speak to the hostage.’

  ‘Are you a fan of Fitzgerald?’

  The question took her completely by surprise. Darby was stunned into silence.

  ‘F. Scott Fitzgerald, the writer,’ Big Red said.

  ‘Make your point.’

  ‘He said a line that has always stuck with me: “Show me a hero and I’ll write you a tragic story.” After you’ve secured Clara and her family, when I know they’re safe, then you’re free to leave and go back to your life.’

  ‘I want –’

  Click.

  Big Red had hung up.

  40

  +05.53

  Within short order, Gelfand had coordinated the bomb location and the code needed to disarm it with the bomb commander, Ted Scott. They were rushing against time, and the bomb squad did not like to rush, not when their lives were at stake, not when they feared they could possibly be walking into a trap.

  Scott placed the call to evacuate the area. Fortunately, a Boston Fire Department station, the Ladder Company 28 and Engine Company 48, was directly across the street from the Hyde Park address the gunman had given them.

  Darby had another thought about the address and shared it with the group. ‘The mayor’s home is in Hyde Park. How far is it from this auto garage?’

  ‘About five miles,’ Gelfand replied. ‘You know anything about the garage, does it hold some special significance for you?’

  Darby shook her head.

  Gelfand quickly gave out their assignments. Grove was going to set up in conference room B. He quickly stressed the importance of not allowing the gunman to engage with Clara Lacy until they were told the fate of the hostage. And if the gunman was watching the news on his satellite phone, it might prove useful to have the media there, showing the Bureau delivering the Lacy woman and her family to a waiting car.

  Coop was to remain behind here, inside the MCP, and set up in the third and only other spare room and wait there for the evidence, which was, coincidentally, coming from the BPD storage facility in Hyde Park. Darby wondered if there was a connection there as she threaded her way through the trailer – walking, not running. She was sick of running from place to place, trying to put out fires, trying to figure out what was going on and then trying to piece everything together when the gunman pulled the puppet strings again and got them all to dance.

  She felt she had cut the strings, but she still didn’t like this coming and going. She needed to be still and think. Needed to cut out all the sirens and shouting and just be so she could think. This second wind she was experiencing right now wouldn’t last long.

  Darby was taking the APV to Dorchester; she saw the same driver from earlier sitting behind the wheel. Gelfand wanted experienced bomb personnel there in the event there was a problem. You couldn’t be too careful.

  Coop caught up with her and asked for a quick word. She knew what she wanted to talk to him about and immediately felt her stomach turn.

  The air was loud with sirens and shouting and the throbbing of big diesel engines, the entire parking lot lit up by a carnival of flashing blue and white and red lights. There was nowhere to speak privately, and it was snowing.

  They stood by the APV’s back door, away from the wind but not the snow. He leaned in close to her so she could hear him, and she saw he had a folder tucked underneath his arm.

  ‘Those numbers to disarm he bomb,’ he began.

  ‘I know,’ Darby said. The numbers were the month, day and year of her birthday.

  ‘What is this guy’s fascination with you?’

  ‘He’s read my press clippings and believes he can trust me to help him bring the truth to light. I think he included me in this because he knows I’ll keep digging even if they kill him.’

  ‘Or you. If this guy is, in fact, working alone, and if he isn’t responsible for killing Trey Warren –’

  ‘I know what it means.’

  ‘Either Howie or I will call you with instructions on where to take Lacy and her family,’ Coop said, opening the back door for her. ‘Stay safe and keep your eyes open.’

  And here she was, back in Dorchester, at not yet three o’clock, and the sky pitch black. The snow had picked up, and the flashing lights bounced off the windows of mismatched and sad-looking homes crowded together, and off the windshields of the cars parked bumper to bumper against the sidewalks. The narrow street was already clogged with unmarked Bureau cars, the grill lights flashing. All the lights inside Clara Lacy’s house were turned on, and as Darby made her way across the street she saw more lights peeking out at her from behind the curtains of falling snow – the lights belonging to TV cameras.

  Someone must have tipped off the media. Again. Was it one of the federal agents inside the MCP? Or had one of the news helicopters followed the APV here?

  The commotion had drawn the attention of the neighbours, who had put on their winter gear and come out of their homes to see what all the fuss was about, why state troopers and BPD patrolmen were trying to move families off their porches and out of their homes and bring them down the street in the unlikely but still possible event an IED had been left here by the gunman, if the man had decided to lead them into a trap.

  Clara Lacy lived in a small Cape home with chipped green paint and overgrown hedges. There were no outside lights but she could see footprints everywhere, heard one or two bomb-sniffing dogs barking somewhere behind the chain-link fence for the backyard.

  Darby was moving across the walkway and looking to her left, at a German shepherd wearing a tactical vest and sniffing at something inside the hedges, when a mountain moved in front of her and blocked her path.

  41

  +06.02

  Detective Murphy was grinning like a Cheshire cat. His hair was wet from the snow and he had a lit cigarette pinched between his stubby fingers.

  ‘Law enforcement personnel only,’ he said to Darby. ‘Please turn around and leave.’

  ‘SAC Gelfand instructed me –’

  ‘Murder isn’t a federal crime and you’re not law enforcement, which earns you a one-way ticket to “get the fuck out of here”.’

  Murder. Darby felt her entire midsection disappear. ‘What happened?’

  ‘None of your business, that’s what happened.’ He moved closer to her, grinning. The dark light worming its way into her eyes, reminding her of certain men who got off on verbally abusing women. ‘Time for you to leave.’

  Darby didn’t move. Murphy screwed the cigarette into the corner of his mouth, and when he grabbed her roughly by the arm she pivoted on her foot and used the heel of her palm to shatter his nose.

  Murphy howled and clawed at his face as he staggered to his knees, blood spurting between his fingers. Darby grabbed him by the shirt collar and leaned forward, near his ear.

  ‘Try and arrest me and I’ll say you groped me and you’ll get hit with a sexual assault change. It’ll go into your jacket, and you’ll be riding a desk until retirement.’

  Murphy couldn’t answer, even if he had been so inclined; he was too busy choking on the blood pouring into his throat.

  ‘Keep your fat ass right here, away from the crime scene, or you’ll contaminate it. Now put some ice on that nose,’ Darby said, and then threw him face-forward into the snow.

  A handful of law enforcement officers had heard Murphy’s plaintive howl and emerged from the curtains of snow to stare at her with a mix of wonderment and admiration and disgust.

  ‘Any of you Feds?’

  Two men stepped forward.

  ‘Follow me,’ Darby said, and moved up the front steps.

  She tried the front door. It was unlocked.

  ‘SAC Gelfand wants this crime scene secured,’ she told the agents. ‘That means no one is to go in there. You can’t handle that, call for backup, but under no circumstances are you
to let anyone in here.’

  Then she stepped inside a small foyer that opened up to a living room holding old and mismatched and hand-me-down furniture and decorations. The air was warm and smelled faintly of fried bacon, and the pale walls were decorated with cheap frames holding family photographs and pictures of Jesus and his mother Mary and the Pope.

  Not having any forensic equipment and not wanting to contaminate the crime scene, she slipped out of her boots and placed them on the mat by the front door. Then she took the stairs, sticking close to the side, away from any potential footwear evidence. She was halfway up the stairs when the odour of cordite mixed with blood and feces assaulted her.

  Breathing through her mouth, she carefully navigated her way to the doorway at the end of the hall. From there, she studied the murder scene.

  Slumped in the corner, near a rickety-looking TV cabinet holding a flat screen, were the bodies of a man and woman, both African American, both in their early to mid thirties and dressed in sleepwear: bathrobes and pyjamas. The man was barefoot, and the woman wore a single pink slipper. Both had been shot in the forehead, and the exit wounds in the back of their skulls suggested they had been shot with a hollow point round – like Trey Warren. The blood spray patterns on the wall behind them clearly stated they had been shot while standing.

  A single bed in here, a queen, and the African American woman lying underneath the quilt and a mound of blankets had a pillow over her head. She had bony arms and arthritic hands, and when Darby pinched the edge of the pillowcase and lifted, she saw grey hair and a gaunt face ravaged by time and disease. No gunshot wounds or blood. The woman had been smothered to death.

  Darby replaced the pillow back across the woman’s face, for the crime scene investigators, and then touched the woman’s wrist with her bare hand. The skin felt relatively warm. She lifted the arm and felt no resistance; rigor mortis hadn’t set in, which meant the murder had occurred in a three-hour timeframe, proof that the gunman couldn’t have done this.

  Someone else had killed Clara Lacy and her family.

  Someone else had killed Trey Warren.

  Someone else was killing people who were connected to the gunman’s agenda, silencing them.

  42

  +06.06

  The media had gotten wind of something going down in Dorchester. When Darby left the house, she saw half a dozen or so camera crews set up on the sidewalks, behind walls of patrolmen and state troopers working hard to keep them at bay.

  Shit. If the gunman was watching live coverage on his satellite phone …

  Darby got on the horn to Gelfand. She spoke to him from inside the back of the APV so no one could overhear her.

  Gelfand was quiet after she told him about what she’d discovered inside Clara Lacy’s home. Darby imagined Gelfand slipping a Rolaid on his tongue – probably the entire roll.

  ‘A couple of your agents have secured the house,’ she said dourly. ‘If I were you, I’d send reinforcements. Boston PD isn’t going to let this slide without a fight.’

  ‘I’m already on it.’

  ‘One other thing,’ she said. ‘The press is already here.’

  ‘I know. I’m watching the horror show right now. Someone must have tipped them off.’

  ‘It’s too late to try for a media blackout, so I suggest this: hold off on the pathologist and the Evidence Response Team in case he’s watching. Knowing Lacy and her family are dead might push him over the edge.’

  ‘Suicide?’

  ‘Maybe. The satellite jammers Ted Scott was trying to procure from the military bases, what’s their status?’

  ‘They arrived in Boston. He’s setting them up now.’

  ‘Tell him to hurry up. Howie, before I let you go, we need to get all BPD personnel out of here. Have your people do it, have them appear on TV wearing anything that says FBI on it. I want the gunman to see your people. If the news about Lacy and her family doesn’t get out, we can sell the gunman on that: the Bureau is protecting them inside the house.’

  ‘And when he demands to talk to her?’

  ‘One problem at a time.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Inside the back of the APV.’

  ‘Stay there. I’ll call you back in five.’

  Darby placed the phone on the counter. Then she propped her elbows on it and dropped her face into her hands and sat alone in the cooling dark, massaging her forehead and wishing she could find a way to slow if not completely stop the roller coaster she was on. There was no case to investigate, just pieces to find and put together. Just jumping from one crisis to another.

  Her phone vibrated against the counter. Gelfand.

  ‘Scott says the jammers are in place and working.’

  ‘Finally, some good news.’

  ‘I’ve got some not-so-great news. First is Rosemary Shapiro. I think she leaked something to the media, ’cause they’re saying that she’s on her way to see us, that she may have a connection to Big Red – you name it, they’re speculating. It’s all over the TV. Second thing is the IED in the garage. Gunman was telling us the truth – it was in there – but the bomb squad guys couldn’t get the robot in there in time to take a look at it so they decided to let the thing blow. No casualties, though, which is a relief.’

  ‘I’ve got to find the guy who drove me here and then I’ll be on my way back.’

  ‘Listen, I’ve got to tell you this now.’

  ‘Tell me what?’

  ‘Donnelly has been working the phone – along with the mayor and governor – calling people above me, and Above is telling me I’ve failed to establish a nexus of terror – God I love that phrase – and that means the ball bounces back into BPD’s court.’

  Darby had been worried about this. ‘You just served a federal subpoena to the BPD on the basis of corruption and possibly a criminal enterprise,’ she said. ‘They can’t just decide to shut it down now.’

  ‘Oh, they can – and they will. The Bureau can deal with the police corruption/criminal enterprise shit later. Right now the FBI wants Donnelly to spearhead this abortion, which is exactly where this thing is heading. Tell me I’m wrong.’

  He wasn’t. The Bureau was going to dump the gunman on Donnelly’s lap and watch from the sidelines. When this op turned to shit – and it probably would – then the blame game of musical chairs would start, with Donnelly as the ringleader, saying that the op wouldn’t have gone south if he and BPD had been given the reins earlier, when they requested operational control over the incident. The Bureau wanted to back off now and then use the corruption and criminal enterprise charges, if anything came of them, if and when Donnelly decided to go on the attack. Pure politics. As usual.

  Darby squeezed her phone. ‘How much time?’

  ‘Who knows? And, frankly, who cares? I’m about ready to go tie one on and then go home and jump in the sack with my wife, provided my prostate is still up for the job, see if I can convince her to try this new position called a “reverse cowgirl”. Maybe you can give me a few pointers on how to introduce the subject. Then I’m going to call it a day and wake up tomorrow and go see my kids, maybe take them to that indoor waterslide up north. You want to come? My son’s thirteen. He’d love to see you in a bikini.’

  ‘What about the case files and materials for Sean Ellis?’

  ‘They’re on their way here, along with Rosemary Shapiro. Is it true you hired her to sue the city?’

  ‘I met with her but I didn’t hire her.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘You know how these things go, Howie. How the case drags on for years and years, the city’s attorneys always stalling and hoping you give up or, even better, die from all the waiting. Then, if they actually do decide to settle, they make you sign documents that prevent the entire truth from coming out.’

  ‘Can I give you a piece of advice, Doc?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Sue the city. Then go and settle down with Cooper or another guy, adopt a kid or a puppy. Get off
this merry-go-round of bullshit and go and enjoy your life – I mean, suck the marrow out of it. Eat, drink and be merry, and go to bed every night next to someone who makes you laugh and has your back. That’s it, that’s the meaning of life. You’re welcome.’

  ‘Where’s Coop?’

  ‘Here, waiting for the files to be delivered.’

  ‘Tell him I’m on my way.’

  ‘Go home. Go back to your life.’

  This is my life, she wanted to say. ‘I need to see this through to the end, Howie.’

  ‘It always ends the same way, Doc, with someone’s blood painted all over the walls.’

  43

  +06.20

  It was psychologically jarring to go from the adrenaline-fuelled and life-jeopardizing moments compromising almost every minute of the last few hours to being asked to sit inside a small, cramped room and sort through paper. Darby also felt a distinct physical shift inside herself. Now that she knew she’d have to sit still, her body instinctively wanted to crash. It told her to shut off all the lights and curl up on top of the table and go to sleep. Better yet, head back to the hotel and slide into a warm, soft bed.

  Instead, she took off her jacket, draped it over the back of a chair, and chugged the Coke she’d grabbed from the galley.

  Coop wasn’t wearing his suit jacket. His tie was undone, and he had rolled up his shirtsleeves. ‘It’s too damn hot in here,’ he snapped, pulling off the top of an evidence box.

  He was right about the heat. There were no windows to open and no separate thermostat, and with the piles of boxes, almost all of them pitted with water stains, not much room to move.

  Coop pinched his temples and then massaged his eyebrows with his fingers as his gaze bounced over the room, at the staggering amount of boxes holding files and evidence for Sean Ellis and Anita Barnes’s grandson, and the pair of retired cops murdered last year, Frank Ventura and Ethan Owen.

  ‘I don’t know even where to start.’

  ‘With Sean Ellis,’ Darby said. ‘I’ll do the paper. You can –’