Boston Cream

CHAPTER 22

It wasn’t far to Upham’s Corner, the neighbourhood where Carol-Ann lived. The GPS map showed a straight route along Dorchester out of South Boston and into Roxbury. But not too deep into it: just a few lights past the I-93 overpass.

Jenn had been gone about five hours now. The outside world became a blur as rain began to fall and my fear for Jenn clouded my mind. Sean Daggett was a predator, not above harming her if it profited him or filled some coarse dark appetite.

Traffic slowed, then stopped as orange construction cones closed off the right lane. After a moment of silence, Ryan said, “Cara was not strictly pleased I came down here.”

“I can imagine. You picked up and left pretty fast.”

“It wasn’t that,” he said. “It’s what coming here meant.”

I looked over at him, saw the strong set of his jaw. There’s a scar that creeps along the other side that gets darker when he’s angry. I couldn’t see it now but I’d bet it was livid. “That you might have to kill someone.”

“I tried to leave it behind last summer, you know I did.”

“Yes.”

“Then I went to Chicago in the fall to help you and Jenn out. I was ready to kill if I had to but it never came up. That cop pulled the trigger first. Now I’m here again, I’m armed, I’m gonna do what I have to do to get Jenn back and deal with the fucker who took her. I couldn’t live with myself if something happened to her and I didn’t do everything to stop it. But for Cara, it’s like I’m a drunk who keeps walking into a bar. Will he or won’t he slip? Is this thing she hates so much coming back into our lives? What if I kill someone here and it leads to some kind of retribution against Carlo? That’s what it always comes down to. That’s why she left me last year.”

“I remember.” He’d been living in an airport hotel when I met him, thrown out by Cara as the Calabrian Mob family he worked for descended into a murderous fight for spoils as their patriarch lay dying.

“But she threw me another question today, one of her nasty curves in the dirt. Something I know she’s always wondered about but never asked out loud: Did I actually like killing or had it always been just business. We never talked about this shit before, never discussed my work once since we took our vows. But now she’s hammering me over the phone, this is while I’m in the cab on the way to the airport, she’s asking me if I’m looking forward to getting back in action. Was there a thrill to the hunt or something like that in it for me?”

“What’d you say?”

“I said I can’t discuss it right now, I’m in a taxi with a driver has ears like a spaniel. We’ll have to talk about it when I got back. So all the way down here, I really thought about it. About every life I took. I didn’t count things I did in self-defence, or defence of you, for that matter, just the contract hits. And it wasn’t easy. As you can imagine, I’ve never exactly been given to reflection.”

“What do you think now?”

“That I did enjoy the hunt. When I was given a contract, I spent a lot of time following the target around, learning his routine. And it was always a him, right? Never killed a woman. Following another man allowed me to become someone else. As I walked behind him, I’d find myself falling into his walk, and the more I assumed it, the more I knew about him. Did he slouch or stand tall, stride or shuffle? Was he heading somewhere or wandering? Driven or aimless? I could sense his mood, how he felt about himself. How his shoes struck the street, which way his heels would shave down over time. I was on the road a lot, on my own, answering to no one, free of all other responsibility other than to prepare, for however long I needed.”

“Ryan unbound.”

“Exactly. But the actual killing? Ending someone else’s life? No. I had nothing personal against any of these people. All I knew was they had fucked up beyond repair. It was over for them, no matter what. I was always grateful when I could use a gun. But there were times when I couldn’t and I had to use a knife or a wire or my hands. And it disgusted me. Whatever a serial killer is, getting a weird kick out of it and doing all these rituals and collecting shit, I’m the opposite. I hated getting close to them, smelling their breath or their BO. Sometimes their piss or their shit if they freaked. A couple of times I used my hands and had to look in their eyes the whole time. Saw them bulge, and then saw the lights go out. I wanted it over as fast as I could and got out of there. The only person I wanted to be close to physically was Cara, and then Carlo when he came along. My mother when I see her. Not these other people. Not these losers.”

“So you have your answer.”

“Except the minute I got it, bam, I fell into an immediate contradiction.”

“How so?”

“If I have to kill someone to get Jenn back, I won’t hesitate. And if I get a chance to kill the cunt that took her, this Daggett fucker, I’ll enjoy it.”

“Talk like that around Carol-Ann,” I said. “She’ll sing like a bird.”

Upham’s Corner was a pocket in east Roxbury, a decent neighbourhood a few streets wide bordering a larger territory that was hostile and predatory. Gianelli had told me that every other kid fourteen and up in parts of Roxbury was armed. “Boston has a miserable record of juvenile deaths by gunshot,” he said, “and an even worse solution rate. It’s one of the reasons their homicide cops get touchy. All they get is grief over the unsolveds. Some kid gets killed, everyone’s out there laying down wreaths and teddy bears and lighting candles and screaming, ‘Where were the cops?’ But not one of them picks up the phone and calls ’cause that’d be snitching.”

You’d never know any of this on Carol-Ann’s street. It was just off Dorchester, two blocks in length. She lived on the second block in a tidy two-storey house with a small garden fenced off with black wrought iron. The rest of the front had been given over to two parking spots, one for Carol-Ann, I assumed, and one for her upstairs tenant. All the neighbouring houses looked well-kept, free of litter, with gardens being prepped for spring planting.

There was only one car in the parking area, a small blue hatchback. Carol-Ann’s car was a white Camry, Jenn had told me.

“Not home,” I said.

“What do you want to do?” Ryan asked.

“We could sit awhile, see if she comes back.”

“Or break in. Be there when she walks in. Watch her wet herself.”

“That does sound better than sitting around.”

We drove down to the end of the block and left the car there. Ryan walked down a narrow concrete path between Carol-Ann’s house and her neighbour’s to see about a way in the back. I walked up to the front door and knocked. There was a decal on the front door saying the house was alarmed and monitored by SecuriGuard. It figured a single woman living in a pocket on the edge of despair would have an alarm. Suddenly sitting and waiting seemed like the better scenario. We weren’t smash-and-grab artists willing to take the risk that we would get in and out with a laptop before the police arrived. At the least, I wanted to search the house; at best, wait for Carol-Ann to get home. Now it seemed neither was a good idea. I followed the concrete path to the rear to warn Ryan off busting his way in. Turned out I didn’t have to. There was a decal on the back door too. He was peering in through the glass, hands cupped on either side of his face.

“See anything?” I asked.

“I was just wondering if the alarm was for real. Some people are too cheap to install one. They just get the decal and paste it on.”

“And?”

“She’s got the system. I can see contacts on the door frame and window.”

“All right, back to the car. We wait her out.”

We were heading back toward the street when a steel-grey Ford pulled up to the curb and two men got out, both in suits and overcoats and short haircuts. One lit a cigarette. Neither looked happy.

“Fuck,” Ryan said.

“Cops?”

“Gotta be. And by the cut of those suits, I’d say Homicide. They’re usually the snappiest dressers in a squad.” We turned and ran down the path into the backyard. There was a chin-high wire fence all around. Neither of us even stopped. We clambered up the fence, scrambling for toeholds, and vaulted over into the yard that bordered Carol-Ann’s at the rear. Ryan landed clear on the grass. My right foot hit a muddy patch and my legs went out from under me. I landed hard on my back, winded. I was trying to catch my breath when a glass door at the back of the house slid open and an unshaven man in a bathrobe stuck his head out and said, “What the fuck you doin’ in my yard!” My yad.

“You seen a grey tabby cat?” Ryan asked. “It got out of the house and jumped the fence.”

“Bullshit,” the guy snarled. “I seen the woman who lives back there. I never seen a cat there and I sure as hell never seen you.”

“Stay cool,” Ryan said. “We’re just trying to find the cat.”

The guy reached behind him and stepped out brandishing a red aluminum baseball bat.

Another beefcake with a bat. I’d fucking had it with all of them. I got to my feet and pulled the Beretta from my holster and said, “Get back in your house, asshole.”

He put up his hands so fast the bat fell at his feet. Then he backed up into his house and slid the glass door shut. As we moved toward the side of his house I saw him drop a security bar down and turn the blinds closed.

It didn’t take long to get the details on an all-news radio station. An unidentified Roxbury woman had been found beaten to death in Franklin Park, which the news anchor called a “troubled area.” Her name was being withheld until next of kin were notified, but witnesses who saw the body before it was bagged described the victim as a white woman in her thirties. The police refused to comment on whether it was a sex slaying but a spokesman said they were following several leads. I wished I could just phone them and say, “Daggett did it,” and hang up and have it mean something.

“What now?” Ryan asked.

“We bypass her and go straight to Stayner,” I said. “He knows more than he told me.”

“You know where he’d be on a Saturday?”

I opened my cell and scrolled through my recent calls, and selected Tania Hutchison. She answered on the second ring.

“Tania, it’s Jonah Geller, the investigator.”

“Hi,” she said. “What’s up?”

“If I needed to speak to Dr. Stayner today, where would I find him?”

“On a Saturday? I have no idea. It’s not golf season yet or beach weather.”

“Do you know where he lives?”

“Yes, he had us all out there for a barbecue last year. But I can’t tell you that, it’s-”

“Tania, please. I wouldn’t have called if it weren’t urgent. This isn’t just about David anymore. My partner’s been abducted.”

“Oh my God. That’s-I–I don’t know what-”

“Dr. Stayner can help me find her. She’s a woman your age, and she was taken by a man who will kill her if I don’t find her first.”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes you do, Tania. You want to find out what happened to David too, don’t you? You told me that. You need to know how you got your new position. Just tell me where Stayner lives. He’ll never know it came from you.”

I heard her take a deep breath in and blow it out. “Do you know Concord at all?”