06 Every Three Hours

by Chris Mooney

  ‘And Karl doesn’t need anyone to connect the dots for him, knows that the Feds will leave him high and dry, so he decides to contact Rosemary Shapiro.’

  Gelfand nodded and picked a piece of stray tobacco from his lips, studying it. ‘Nothing came of it. I mean, Rosemary, from what I heard, made some meetings, but then she cancelled and kept cancelling and the thing just sort of, I dunno, disappeared.’

  ‘And now we’re to believe that, what, twenty years later, Walter Karl Torres is back for revenge?’

  Gelfand seemed to be considering how he was going to answer the question when his phone rang. He saw the number on the screen and his face momentarily brightened.

  ‘Stay here, it’s about Murphy,’ he said and answered the call.

  Darby listened to Gelfand utter ‘Okay’ and ‘What else?’ as she thought about why Walter Karl Torres, a drug dealer and murderer, would wait decades to stage a coup at Boston Police headquarters when the real enemy seemed to be the FBI’s Boston field office. Maybe the federal players were dead. Maybe Hill, Warren, Murphy and the others were involved. But what did the Sean Ellis case and the former mayor have to do with this? And why did Torres suddenly develop a conscience? Did the man have some Come to Jesus moment and decide to air all the dirty laundry – and why do it in such a gigantic public display?

  Gelfand said, ‘Murphy didn’t go home.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘At a Lowe’s in Quincy. He just parked his car and went inside. I’m guessing you and Cooper can get there in about ten minutes.’

  ‘Why us?’

  ‘Because I trust you and Cooper, and because I want you guys to question Murphy on the way back, have him tell you about Karl Torres.’

  ‘Murphy knows him?’

  ‘Not saying he does. I’m hoping he can enlighten me on something.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘What Torres is doing alive,’ Gelfand said. ‘Son of a bitch is supposed to be dead.’

  54

  +08.45

  Because new helicopters were watching and practically tracking every single car that left the campus, Gelfand didn’t want to take a chance on having Darby and Coop followed and quickly arranged for them to be driven to a nearby parking garage belonging to a hotel where, once inside the garage, they would be given the keys to an ordinary vehicle and, God willing, not be followed to Quincy.

  Face cold and her hands tucked deep in her jacket pockets, Darby made her way across the parking lot, heading for the gated entrance where a Bureau car would take her and Coop to the garage, Darby wishing she could have spoken to Rosemary Shapiro about Walter Karl Torres, see if the woman would share some information on her client, hand over the details of how and where he’d died. The only thing Gelfand could tell her, and it wasn’t much because he didn’t have access to any of the Torres information, all of the files sealed and stored in the vaults on the impenetrable fifth-floor rooms at FBI headquarters, was that Torres was shot to death somewhere in Texas and buried there in 1995, maybe later.

  People rising from the dead didn’t contain the same shock value any more. The FBI and WITSEC did it all the time, make one person die on paper, resurrect him or her with a brand-new life on new paper. Happened all the time, and when you worked in law enforcement, you heard a lot of these stories.

  What she was having a hard time wrapping her head around was the timeframe. If ‘Walter Karl Torres’ died on paper in 1995, why did he wait twenty-one years for revenge?

  ‘Darby.’

  Darby stopped and saw Rosemary Shapiro standing underneath an umbrella, the woman navigating her way through the snow and clearly unhappy that she had chosen to wear a pair of three-thousand-dollar Givenchy boots. She held a cigarette, a Virginia Slim.

  ‘Talk to you for a moment?’ Shapiro asked.

  ‘Just a moment.’

  The revolving lights from a nearby fire truck washed red across the woman’s face, Shapiro’s beauty reminding Darby of the opera singer Maria Callas.

  Shapiro inhaled deeply from her cigarette. ‘What did Howie tell you about Karl Torres?’

  ‘Not much in terms of detail. I know he was a federal informant and that he’s supposed to be dead.’

  ‘Both true.’

  ‘He enter Witness Protection?’

  ‘No. No, definitely not. He wasn’t the government-trusting type. He’d have lived as a fugitive – and could have, successfully, too. He made a lot of money in drugs.’

  ‘Are you trying to tell me that your client, Karl Torres, was the real shooter in the Sean Ellis case?’

  ‘You know I can’t say anything to implicate my client.’

  ‘But you know why he’s here, don’t you? Torres?’

  ‘Look, you know how the game is played. You know –’

  ‘Game? This look like a game to you?’ Darby threw her hand over her shoulder at all the law enforcement and emergency personnel, Shapiro giving her that dead expression all lawyers had, like either they didn’t care or give a shit. ‘You’ve got something to say, Rosemary, say it now.’

  ‘I can’t speak too much about him other than that he is a client, that I haven’t heard from him in decades.’ Shapiro’s brow furrowed, as if she was having trouble comprehending the number. ‘But I can tell you a couple of things. Number one, he’s not a good guy. A psychopath. Number two, I was told he did die by someone in-the-know. Died in Texas.’

  ‘Who killed him? Feds or BPD?’

  ‘I can’t say.’

  ‘You hear about the parking garage in Hyde Park?’

  Shapiro nodded.

  ‘That mean anything to you?’

  Shapiro licked her plump lips. ‘Hill and Murphy, and the two cops who got murdered last year, they were all involved in as many as forty homicides that are now being reviewed, based on witness intimidation and faulty and manufactured evidence. BPD knew what these guys were doing. Feds, too, I’m sure, because some of these cases overlapped with Frank Sullivan’s … goals. My point is, they closed a lot of cases back then and homicide rates declined, and Briggs had these great numbers that made Boston look like a safe city to live in and to visit, you know, spend a lot of dollars.’

  ‘You’re saying this is about tourism? That Briggs, what, went along to get more people to ride the duck boats and visit the Bull & Finch Cheers restaurant?’

  ‘That restaurant closed. Ever been there? Had great steak tips.’

  ‘I’ve got to go, Rosemary. Good seeing you.’

  ‘You should have sued. It’s a different Boston now. Donnelly, the mayor and governor – even Briggs knows all about the past problem with the BPD. Hill was the only one left from that time, and now he’s dead. The DA is probably doing an Irish jig right now because Hill was so toxic.’

  ‘Why?’ Darby asked.

  ‘The DA recently filed a request with the judge asking that the opposition be barred from telling jurors about their past – that’s reserved for a criminal with a record, not a cop.’

  ‘You’ve got something to say, Rosemary, say it now.’

  ‘What’s going on with Clara Lacy?’

  ‘I’ll deal with that later, when I come back.’

  ‘She’s dead, isn’t she? They got to her.’

  ‘They?’

  ‘Just tell me the truth. I need to make plans. Protect myself.’

  ‘She’s inside her house with her family. Bureau’s watching them.’

  ‘You need to protect yourself, too, Darby. They’ll kill you or they’ll drive you to suicide, like Fitzpatrick. You know how scared that guy was? His daughter came into his bedroom and saw him with the gun in his mouth and he still pulled the trigger. What’s that say to you?’

  ‘Fitzpatrick’s family,’ Darby said. ‘They still native or did they move?’

  ‘Wife packed the daughter up and left town.’ Shapiro shook her head then inhaled deeply from her cigarette. ‘Laura was never the same.’

  Laura.

  The same name as the pregnant
woman, the last hostage.

  Darby kept the surprise from reaching her face. ‘Laura?’

  ‘Fitzpatrick’s daughter.’

  ‘She still here?’

  Shapiro shrugged. Then her instincts kicked in. ‘Why are you so interested in a dead cop?’ she asked.

  ‘Because I want to talk to Fitzpatrick’s wife and daughter. They can help us build a case, get the truth out about what’s happening. What’s the wife’s name?’

  ‘Toni or Tori, I forget which.’

  ‘Last name?’

  ‘Levine.’

  The gunman’s voice: Ask Briggs about Levine.

  Darby felt the realization rip through her and said, ‘Okay. Thanks.’

  ‘Torres is pulling all of these strings to get to Briggs so he can kill him,’ Shapiro said. ‘If you’re in there when the bomb goes off or the shooting starts, trust me, he’ll kill you too. He’s just waiting for the right moment.’

  Darby left. She glanced once over her shoulder and saw Shapiro smoking her cigarette, looking like a woman who was waiting for a train to come and take her someplace far away.

  55

  +08.49

  Coop didn’t speak during the ride to the hotel’s parking garage, which was less than a mile away. There, he was given the keys to a black BMW, a 7 series with tinted windows.

  Darby didn’t tell him about her conversation with Rosemary Shapiro.

  An advance team consisting of three other vehicles would leave one by one to get the helicopters or anyone else that had followed her off the scent. Hopefully. They wanted everything to go down nice and quiet at Lowe’s.

  It was a clutch, and since Coop didn’t know how to drive one, Darby got behind the wheel. The car handled well in the snow. About three inches had fallen, according to the radio.

  Coop spent a good amount of time on the phone, coordinating with the agents at the Lowe’s parking lot. Murphy’s car was still there, and he was still inside the store, shopping. His shift had officially ended two hours ago.

  ‘Murphy got in some sort of accident,’ Coop said after he hung up.

  ‘You mean like a car accident?’

  ‘Don’t know.’ He pressed the heels of his palms to his eyes and made circular motions. ‘Agents shadowing him said his nose is all busted up. Splintered. Also want to talk to you about the autopsy reports for Owen and Ventura. May mean something or it could be nothing, but they both had late-stage cancer. Pathologist said the two of them only had months to live. I’m wondering if the gunman somehow found they were sick and decided to kill them, use them as a calling card but also because they wouldn’t be alive right now to see what’s going on.’

  ‘Maybe. It’s a thought. You find anything on Torres listed on NCIC?’

  ‘Yeah.’ He seemed confused for a moment, then he reached behind him and grabbed a file from the backseat. He clicked on the map light above the console and flipped through the pages. ‘Walter Karl Torres, born in Lynn, Massachusetts, was twenty-eight when he was shot to death by two unnamed gunmen while coming out of a liquor store in El Paso, Texas on February 11, 1995.’

  ‘That’s four-and-a-half months after Fitzpatrick was shot.’

  ‘And a month after Sean Ellis was sentenced for it.’

  ‘And now we’re supposed to believe Torres, who would now be fifty-eight or -nine, is the one inside that lobby. That his death was, what, faked?’

  ‘I checked Torres’s stats. Guy was five-eight, which is the same height as the gunman, give or take an inch.’

  ‘What about eye colour?’

  ‘Blue.’

  ‘Same as the gunman. You got a picture in there of Torres?’

  ‘No. Nothing listed on NCIC, and didn’t have time to Google. I don’t think Torres is dead. I think he’s inside the station.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘Anita Barnes,’ Coop said, Darby hearing the woman’s name for the first time in a while but feeling as though what had occurred this morning happened in another lifetime. ‘The duct tape we recovered from her had prints on it, and they all belonged to Walter Karl Torres.’

  56

  +09.01

  Darby had never stepped foot inside a Lowe’s. The big box do-it-yourself home improvement chain hadn’t been around when she was a kid, and by the time they were popping up in pretty much every city and town across America, she was already living in a condo in Beacon Hill, where a contractor serviced all maintenance and home-improvement issues.

  The first thing she noticed was the ceiling, how it seemed as far away as the moon. The place felt like it should have its own zip code it was so big, aisles everywhere, all of them numbered and labelled, everything placed neatly on shelves, everything you could possible need to fix, repair, replace or make something right at your fingertips. It was dizzying, all the options.

  Darby stomped her boots against the wide floor mat beyond the automatic front doors and quickly shook the snow out of her hair as a big, rumbling heater blasted hot air down on her. Bags of rock salt and Ice Melt and shovels that promised to save your lower back surrounded her and in the centre directly in front of her, a handful of leftover snow blowers for people who were either too stupid or too absent-minded not to have prepared for the winter, which was already shaping up to be one for the record books. The storm was hitting hard but just gathering its breath, and the smart play was to get inside your house and wait it out – which was why it surprised her how busy the store was, a lot of the customers were women and children wearing sour expressions at having been dragged along on Mom or Dad’s errands.

  Murphy, they had been told, was standing in aisle six, on the far left-hand side of the store. The four agents in here watching him all wore plain winter jackets so they could blend in with the other shoppers. They didn’t want Murphy to spot the agents and panic.

  They didn’t have to talk about what to do; the plan had already been discussed. Darby and Coop took the centre aisle to the left, the two agents with them taking the main aisle in the centre of the store. They all wore earpieces and wrist mikes so they could talk to one another. The entrance and emergency exits were all covered.

  Darby passed light bulbs and light fixtures and then aisles for paint and for every type of screw, nail, nut and bolt known to mankind, Darby thinking how much her father would have loved a place like this; Big Red was the type of guy who knew his way around tools, could fix or build anything.

  ‘Remember,’ Coop said in a low voice, ‘we spot him and we go up to him all nice and friendly, say we couldn’t get him on his cell. We tell him the gunman has targeted him and we need to bring him to safety, then get him out here nice and easy.’

  ‘Something I should tell you,’ said Darby.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘He was at Clara Lacy’s place.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘We had sort of an altercation and I sort of broke his nose.’

  Coop slowed his pace, looked at her for a moment. ‘And you’re sharing this with me now?’

  ‘It slipped my mind.’

  ‘How convenient.’

  ‘It wasn’t that big of a deal. He might not be in the best of moods, is what I’m saying.’

  ‘He’s not the only one,’ Coop replied, and shot her a look that clearly let her know he was pissed – and she didn’t blame him. After all, she’d kept the whole thing quiet because she wanted to be in on this, wanted a chance to take Murphy down herself, rip the truth out of him.

  They were nearing the end of the store, the place where all the lumber was kept; she could smell pine and sawdust in the cool air, someone on the overhead speakers calling for Jacob Fisher, telling him to come to the customer service desk.

  Coop subtly brought up the wrist mike to his mouth and said, ‘I’ll make the approach. Everyone standby.’

  Then, to Darby: ‘Hang back. Don’t argue with me.’

  She didn’t argue with him. She veered off to the shelving at the end of the aisle and sidled up
next to it, angling her head and looking through the gaps until she could see Murphy.

  And then she saw him in profile, saw the steel bridge placed across his nose and held down by tape, his eyes swollen with fluid. He had cleaned his face but not his clothes; she could see bloodstains on the back of his shirt and jacket collar and wondered why he had come here dressed like this, looking like this. Maybe he just didn’t care. Murphy was gripping the shoulder of another man and leaning in close like a baseball coach giving a quick pep talking to a player. Darby crept towards the corner leading into the aisle to get a better look and then saw the man’s wool tweed patchwork cap and his gaunt face and moustache. Detective Danny ‘Mr Murder’ Hill’s head was tilted down and he was listening solemnly, as though a grave secret had just been whispered to him.

  57

  +09.05

  Whether it was simply curiosity or instinct or the fact that she wanted to make sure she had Coop’s back in case the shit hit the fan, Darby moved around the corner and into the aisle, the Sig tucked in the back of the waistband of her jeans. A part of her relaxed, told her she was just imagining things because Danny Hill was dead, that Murphy had bumped into someone who looked like Hill and, no, that was wrong, it was all wrong because the man was Danny Hill, there was no question. The height was right and although he had lost a ton of weight and looked gaunt and sickly and scared – oh yes, there was no question he was scared right now – he had the same black moustache and dark brown eyes and worm-shaped scar that started just below his lip and ended an inch or so below his chin, a scar, Hill had told her long ago, at a retirement party, that he had got at eight when he was playing street hockey and got clipped by someone’s stick.

  You’re supposed to be dead, Darby wanted to say. Her feet felt welded to the floor. Your house was blown up and you were in it because they found your leg on top of a car and why didn’t you call and tell anyone you were alive?