The Wrong Man

by John Katzenbach

  “It has to do with Ashley. She needs to get out of Boston for a while.”

  “But what could possibly be the matter? She’s not ill, is she? There hasn’t been an accident?”

  “No, not precisely, but…”

  “Does she need money? I have lots of money and I’d be glad to help out.”

  “No, Mother. Let me explain.”

  “But what about her graduate studies?”

  “Those can be put on hold.”

  “Dear, this is very confusing. What is the problem?”

  Hope took a deep breath and blurted out, “It’s a man.”

  When Scott first tried Ashley’s cell phone that night, he got a No longer in service recording, which pitched him into a near panic as he dialed her landline. When she answered, he felt a surge of anxiety. As he greeted her, he concentrated on keeping fear out of his voice.

  “Hey, Ash,” he said briskly, “how are you doing?”

  Ashley, for her part, was unsure what the answer to that question might be. She could not shake the sensation that she was being watched, that she was being followed, or that every word she spoke was being listened to. She was tentative when she left her apartment, wary when she walked down the street, leery of every shadow, every corner, every blind alleyway. Ordinary city sounds that she was so familiar with now penetrated her ears like some high-pitched whistle, almost painful in intensity.

  She decided that she should partly lie. She did not want to upset her father.

  “I’m okay. Things are just a bit of a mess.”

  “Have you heard from O’Connell again?”

  She didn’t exactly reply, except to say, “Dad, I’ve got to take some steps.”

  “Yes,” he said far too quickly. “Yes. Absolutely.”

  “I’ve canceled the cell phone,” she said, which explained the recording.

  “Yes, and cancel this line as well. In fact, I think you’re going to have to do far more than we ever anticipated.”

  “I’ve got to move,” she said sullenly. “I like this place, but…”

  “I think,” Scott began tentatively, “that you’re going to have to do more than just move.”

  Ashley didn’t immediately respond.

  “And there are some other steps—”

  “What are you saying?” Ashley blurted out.

  Scott took a deep breath and adopted his most reasoned, most flat and academic tone, as if he were discussing the flaws in a senior’s paper. “I’ve done some reading and research, and I don’t want to leap to conclusions here, but I’m thinking that there exists the potential for O’Connell to get, well, even more aggressive.”

  “Aggressive. That’s a euphemism. You think he might hurt me?”

  “Others, in similar circumstances, have been hurt. I’m just saying we should take some precautions.”

  More silence, before she responded, “What are you suggesting?”

  “I think you need to disappear. That is, exit Boston, go someplace safe, hide for a while, and then resume things when O’Connell has finally moved on.”

  “What makes you so sure he will move on? Maybe he will just wait it out.”

  “We have resources, Ashley. If you have to leave Boston behind for good, move to L.A. or Chicago or Miami, well, that can be done. You’re still young. Plenty of time to get where you want. I think we just need to take some significant steps, so that O’Connell can’t find you again.”

  Ashley could feel anger surging within her. “He doesn’t have the right,” she began, raising her voice. “Why should it be me? What have I done wrong? Why does he get to screw up my life?”

  Scott let his daughter fully vent before answering. This was a quality left over from her childhood, when early on he’d learned that letting Ashley bluster and complain would settle her down, and that ultimately she would listen if not to reason, then at least to something close to it. A father’s trick.

  “He doesn’t have the right. He just has the ability. So, let’s try to make some moves that he won’t anticipate. And, first among these, is getting you away from him.”

  Again, Scott could sense Ashley measuring things on the other end of the phone. He had little idea that much of what he’d said had already occurred to her. Still, what he was suggesting seemed to discourage her, and Ashley found her eyes welling with tears. Nothing was fair. When she did speak, it was with resignation.

  “All right, Dad. Time for Ashley to vanish.”

  “So, they hired a private investigator?”

  “Yes. An extremely competent and well-trained fellow.”

  “That makes sense. It also seems like the sort of reasonable thing that any modestly well-educated and financially sturdy couple would arrange. Like bringing in an expert. I should go speak with him. He must have prepared some sort of report for Sally. That’s what private investigators always end up doing. It must be available, somewhere.”

  “Yes. You are correct about that,” she said. “There was a report. An initial one. I have the copy that was sent to Sally.”

  “Well?”

  “Why don’t you try to speak with Matthew Murphy first. And then, afterwards, I’ll give it to you, should you think you still need it.”

  “You could save me some trouble here.”

  “Perhaps,” she replied. “I’m not sure that saving you time and effort is precisely my task in this process. And, equally, I think visiting the private investigator will be…how shall I put it? An education.”

  She smiled, but humorlessly, and I had the distinct impression that she was teasing me with something. I stood up to leave, shrugging my shoulders. She sighed, seeing the discouraged look I had on my face.

  “Sometimes, it’s about impressions,” she said abruptly. “You learn something, you hear something, you see something, and it leaves an imprint on your imagination. Eventually, that is what happens to Scott and Sally and Hope and Ashley, as well. A series of events, or moments of time, all taken together accumulate into a fully formed vision of what their future might be. Go see the private detective,” she said with a brisk tone. “It will add immeasurably to your understanding. And then, if you think it necessary, I’ll give you his report.”

  22

  Vanishing

  Punk was the first word that came to Matthew Murphy’s mind.

  He was staring down at an extremely unimpressive police record for Michael O’Connell, which showed a life of penny-ante and mostly insignificant run-ins with the law. Some credit card fraud, which Murphy assumed was using stolen cards, a car theft when O’Connell was slightly more than a teenager, one assault, which looked to be a bar fight that O’Connell apparently won. Of the various minor crimes that O’Connell had been charged with, none had resulted in anything more than probation, although O’Connell had spent five months in one county’s jail when he’d been unable to make a modest bail. It took his court-appointed public defender that much time to get the assault charge downgraded to a simple battery. A fine, time served, and six months’ probation on that one, Murphy read. He reminded himself to call the probation officer, though he doubted the man would be of much assistance. Probation officers tend to spend the bulk of their time on more significant criminals, and as best as Murphy could see, Michael O’Connell wasn’t significant—at least in the eyes of the legal system.

  Of course, Murphy thought, there was another way of looking at everything he had accumulated: O’Connell would do anything; he just hadn’t been caught.

  Murphy shook his head. Not precisely your master criminal.

  He looked back down at the sheaf of papers on his lap. Five months in the county lockup. Not enough time to be more than inconvenienced, if you were a small-timer like O’Connell. Just the opportunity to pick up some valuable and useful skills from some of the more experienced inmates, if you kept your eyes and ears open and managed not to get preyed upon by the tough guys in the system. Crime, Murphy believed, like any advanced degree, took some studying.

  Ther
e were black-and-white front and side-view mug shots of O’Connell. Is that where you got your start? he wondered.

  He doubted it. Those five months were just a little graduate work. He guessed that O’Connell had already learned much.

  The state police detective who’d given him the rap sheets hadn’t been able to access O’Connell’s sealed juvenile records. This made Murphy wary. No telling what might be there. Still, as he looked over the printouts, he saw only the smallest suggestions of violence, which reassured him. Just a bad guy, he thought. Not a bad guy with a nine-millimeter.

  He could glean a little background from the police documents: O’Connell was a trailer-park, coastal–New Hampshire kid. Probably didn’t have much growing up. No white clapboard house with an apple pie baking in the oven and children playing touch football in the front yard; his childhood probably consisted of dodging blows. Good enough record in high school—when he was there. There were some apparent gaps in the process. Some time in juvenile detention? he wondered. Managed to graduate from high school. Bet you gave the guidance counselors a workout, he thought. Smart enough to get into the local community college. Dropped out. Went back. Didn’t finish. Transferred credits to UMass Boston. Clever with tools—a mechanic with some expertise. Had obviously used the same capabilities to learn computers. Plenty for him to look into, he thought, if that was what Sally Freeman-Richards wanted. He knew, more or less, what he was going to find. Abusive father. Drunk mother. Or maybe absent father and seductive mother. Divorce, blue-collar menial or domestic jobs, and too-much-beer-on-Saturday-night violence.

  Matthew Murphy was parked outside Michael O’Connell’s grimy apartment on a bright, promising afternoon. Slivers of bright sky seemed to pass between the run-down apartment buildings, and from the corner he could make out in the distance the CITGO sign hanging above Fenway Park. He looked up and down the block and shrugged to himself. It was like many Boston streets, he realized. Filled with young people on their way up and old people on their way down from something better. And a few, like O’Connell, using it as a way station on the road to something worse.

  It had been easy to get a friend in the state police to run O’Connell’s name, which had provided the printout that he had in his lap, along with the modest background material and known addresses. Now he merely wanted to get a good picture of the subject. On the seat next to him was a modern digital camera with a long lens. The private investigator’s primary tool.

  Murphy was in his midfifties, right in that age that arrived before facing the anxiety of turning elderly. He was childless and divorced, and what he missed the most were the tight-collar uniformed days when he was young and had been out on the Mass. Pike behind the wheel of a cruiser, routinely working high-speed, back-to-back shifts on coffee and adrenaline. He also missed his time in the homicide division, but he was wise enough to understand that with the enemies he’d made, making it to old age might have been problematic. He smiled to himself. All his life, he’d always had the knack for getting out of whatever trouble he was in, one step ahead of the hammer coming down. A year after he’d joined the state police, when he totaled his cruiser in a high-speed chase, he’d walked away with only a scratch or two, while the EMTs fruitlessly worked on the rich and drunk kids in their dad’s BMW he’d been pursuing. In a firefight one midnight with a drug dealer coked out of his skull, the man had emptied a nine-millimeter in Murphy’s direction, only to have every shot smash the wall behind him. The sole shot he’d fired with his eyes shut had found the other man’s chest. He’d talked his way out of so many dicey situations, he could no longer recall them all, including a face-to-face with a multiple killer holding a butcher knife in one hand and a nine-year-old girl in the other, the body of his ex-wife at his feet and his mother-in-law’s on the floor of the kitchen pooling blood. He’d received a commendation for that arrest. A commendation and a threat from the killer, who had vowed to make him one of his next projects, if he ever got free, which wasn’t too damn likely. Matthew Murphy considered the number of threats he’d accumulated to be the most accurate measurement of achievement. He’d had too many to count.

  He looked down at the papers again.

  Michael O’Connell wasn’t much more than an inconvenience.

  He took a deep breath and let his eyes race through the documents one more time, searching for some indication that O’Connell couldn’t be intimidated. He couldn’t see any. That was the course that he would suggest Sally Freeman-Richards follow. A late-night visit from himself, buttressed by a couple of his off-duty state police buddies. An informal visit, but one with as much menace as they could muster, which was considerable. Rough him up a little bit at the same time they presented him with a restraining order signed by a judge. Let O’Connell think that pursuing Freeman-Richards’s daughter would be far more trouble than it could ever be worth. And make absolutely certain that O’Connell understood that trouble, in this case, was pretty much defined by Murphy.

  He smiled. Should do the trick, he thought.

  He’d seen some pretty crazed stalkers in his day, the types that wouldn’t be deterred by threats, the law, or even by brandished weapons—pit-bull types who would walk through a firestorm to get at the person they were obsessed with—but O’Connell seemed to him to really just be a petty criminal, and he had years of experience dealing with his type. What he couldn’t see, the more he read about Michael O’Connell, was why this particular piece of minor-league garbage thought he could screw around with people like Sally Freeman-Richards and her daughter. He shook his head. He’d handled more than one homicide where an estranged boyfriend or husband had taken out his anger on some poor woman just trying to make her way. Murphy had a natural affinity for anyone seeking a way out of an abusive relationship. What he didn’t understand was where the passion came from. In the cases he’d handled over the years, it seemed to him that love was perhaps the stupidest reason for throwing away one’s freedom, one’s future, or, in some cases, one’s life.

  Murphy took another look toward the apartment door. “Come on, kid,” he said out loud. “Come on out where I can get a look at you. I’ve got better things to be doing.”

  As if on cue, he saw a movement in the sally port to O’Connell’s apartment building and, when he craned forward, immediately recognized O’Connell from the three-year-old mug shots.

  He grabbed the camera and focused on O’Connell’s face. To his surprise, O’Connell lingered for a moment, almost facing in his direction. He rapidly snapped off a half dozen frames.

  “Got you,” he said out loud, but to himself. Grinning. “You weren’t hard to make.”

  What Murphy failed to realize at that moment was that the same was true of him.

  It had been an easy call for Scott to make, although the arrangements were a little more complicated. The football coach had been in his office, going over game plans with his defensive coordinator. Scott had met the man on several occasions socially and made a point of attending as many games as he could.

  “Coach Warner? It’s Scott Freeman.”

  “Scott! Great to hear from you. But I’m a bit tied up right now…”

  “Some unbelievably sophisticated defensive plan, designed to befuddle the enemy, rendering him into an ineffectual knot of incompetence?”

  The coach laughed. “Yes. Absolutely. We won’t accept anything less than a total emotional meltdown by the opposition. But surely that’s not why you called?”

  “I need a small favor. Some muscle.”

  “Muscle we have in abundance. But we also have classes and practice. The boys are pretty busy.”

  “How about on Sunday? I need two, maybe three guys. A very modest amount of heavy lifting, for which I will pay well and in cash.”

  “Sunday? That would be okay. What do you have in mind?”

  “Actually, Coach, I need to move my daughter out of her apartment in Boston and get her things put in storage. In a hurry.”

  “This is the sort of blessedl
y simpleminded task that we football types are more than capable of performing,” the coach said with a laugh. “Okay. I’ll ask for a couple of volunteers today after practice, send them around tomorrow.”

  The three young men who showed up at Scott’s office door the following morning were all huge and eager to make some extra cash. He rapidly explained that the job would consist of picking up a rental truck on Sunday morning, driving to Boston, packing everything in the apartment into cardboard boxes, and putting all the stuff in a storage facility just outside the city that he’d already arranged for.

  “Need to get this done right away,” Scott said. “No delays.”

  “What’s the rush?” one of the boys asked.

  Scott had anticipated the question. He had spent some time thinking precisely about what he wanted the three young men to know. Not the truth, certainly.

  “My daughter is a grad student in Boston. Some time ago, she applied for some sort of grant to study abroad. Didn’t think anything of it, but lo and behold, it just showed up the other day. But there’s some sort of time restriction. Anyway, the upshot of the whole deal is that she’s off to Florence to study Renaissance art for six to nine months. She’s got to be on a plane in the next few days. And I don’t want to end up paying for her apartment any longer than I already have to. I’m going to lose the security deposit, as is. Ah, well,” he sighed with exaggerated drama. “If you like all those pictures of martyred saints and beheaded prophets, I guess that’s where you’ve got to go. But I’m not imagining that the word job or the word career currently has much to do with my daughter’s approach to life.”

  This caused the young men to laugh because it was something they could identify with. They made the final arrangements, and Scott told them he’d see them Sunday morning.

  As the door closed, he thought, if anyone asks them, they will answer, gone. Out of the country. A credible story. Florence. They will remember that.

  It was just a guess on his part, but he suspected a good one, that there would be one person who, assuming he spotted the three movers, would be most interested in the story Scott had so carefully planted.