Dead Line

Chapter Six

I was driving up and down Mount Vernon Street in the most historic — read: priciest — neighborhood of Boston, trying not to call attention to myself, which was no easy feat, considering my aging Alfa Romeo convertible was sending up plumes of black smoke from the decrepit exhaust. All parts of my life seemed to be breaking down.

It was, as I earlier mentioned, a gorgeous autumn day, temperate, with a gentle sun giving the entire city a clean glow — all of it, every bit, in direct contrast to my gloomy mood. Dog walkers in ponytails led bunches of Labradors and poodles up and down the steep hill. A few of the patrician elderly carried sacks of groceries from DeLuca’s Market or Savenor’s butcher shop. And in front of the apartment building in question, a three-story brick town house that butted up against the narrow sidewalk, a blue-and-white police van sat double-parked. This is where Hilary Kane lived until earlier this morning, and police were inside searching for clues.

I turned to my passenger, one Hank Sweeney, retired Boston homicide detective, now a shockingly pricey corporate security consultant, and asked, “How the hell much longer will they be in there?”

“Any moment,” he replied. He said this distractedly, fidgeting, as he was, with a new Palm Pilot V he was trying to program. Actually, check that. I’m not sure if he was trying to program it, or just figure out how to turn it on.

“You use one of these things?” he asked me, his voice still uncharacteristically soft, like his mind was somewhere else.

“I’ve got a leather-bound datebook that does the trick.”

“Does it have an On switch?”

“You just open the cover and flip to the page you need.”

He said, “Yeah, that’s probably the way to go.” And he tossed his Palm Pilot down onto the carpeted floor.

Again, I drove by the apartment, and still, the van sat in the street. The outside apartment doors were closed. There was nothing to see but the clock ticking away toward my deadline.

Truth be known, I’m not sure what I was after. I had a pretty significant story unfolding on my watch, by my hand — new clues in the Gardner art heist — and here I was chasing my gut up and down Beacon Hill, waiting for a couple of numbskull cops to pack up their gear and hightail it back to headquarters with a few boxes of who knows what.

But something nagged. Actually, no, it didn’t nag; it fairly well screamed. Something about that story last night wasn’t quite right. Something about this murder this morning wasn’t quite as it seemed. The feeling was causing a minor wave of nausea through my innards.

About an hour earlier, I had taken the simple step of looking up Hilary Kane in a legal directory. It said she graduated from Boston University Law School the year before and worked in a small firm in Cambridge. When I called the firm, the line had been disconnected. I called the BU Law School alumni office, and a curt woman there told me there was no record of where anyone by the name of Hilary Kane was currently employed. A police department spokeswoman told me, off the record, that they found a Massachusetts Bar card in her purse, but nothing that indicated where she now worked. This was just another reason why the police were inside her house at the time.

Which is why I was waiting to get in there as well. I needed to know if my suspicions bled into reality, if Hilary Kane was somehow connected to the art heist.

Hank, meanwhile, needed to know how to program numbers into his new cell phone, which he had pulled from his pocket and was regarding as if it were part of an elaborate communications experiment conducted by a team of professors at MIT. At a stop sign, I took the phone and punched my own name and phone number into his memory, and then punched his name and number into mine.

“It’s like we’re sweethearts,” he said with that wry smile of his. And he tossed the phone down on the floor next to his Palm Pilot.

I drove up and down, again and again, Hank making almost unimaginably banal small talk, and me playing over the events of my life in my mind. A huge story breaks. Elizabeth and I are incapable of discussing her impending move. I inexplicably feel involved in the murder of a woman I don’t even know.

And then the apartment doors opened. I quickly pulled into a rare Beacon Hill parking space to watch. A man and a woman, each wearing golf shirts, khaki pants, and sneakers, came walking out, each one of them balancing a sizable box in their arms. Their matching dress and rigid, humorless demeanor told me they were either tourists from the Dakotas or cops from Boston. Their shoulder holsters and shields hooked to their respective belt loops confirmed the latter. The fact that they had the Boston police insignia emblazoned on their jerseys actually screamed it. You don’t need Bob Woodward here in Boston when the city is already blessed with Jack Flynn.

“Here we go,” I said to Sweeney, who was squinting out the windshield at them. “Looks like they’re cleaning her out.”

“Routine, very routine,” he replied, his voice low, flat, as if the detectives might be able to hear us.

They set the boxes down on the street, and, as the woman began placing the items in the back of the van, the man went back inside the apartment foyer and retrieved a computer monitor. He made one more trip back inside, and came out with what looked like the computer itself. They slammed the back doors, settled inside, and started the engine, the woman driving, the man shotgun. Justice for Hilary Kane was very much in the hands of the state.

Except, wait a minute. A shiny, gunmetal-black sedan came pounding up Mount Vernon Street, swerved around the van, and shot in front of it, screeching to a stop at a jagged angle that prevented the police vehicle from continuing in any direction but into the parked cars. A second car, identical in appearance, came racing up the hill seconds behind it and snuggled up close to the back of the van. Almost in unison, the driver’s and passenger doors flung open on each of the cars, and four men in dark suits jumped onto the pavement and scurried to each side of the blue van.

I couldn’t see the cops’ faces, but I did see that the driver rolled down her window.

“We’ve got a courtside seat to an honest to goodness turf battle,” Sweeney said, sounding at once interested and amused.

I looked at him quizzically.

“Feds verses Boston PD,” he said, by way of elaboration, “right here in front of you.”

This was somewhere far beyond intriguing, given that I hadn’t said a word to Sweeney yet about my suspicions of FBI involvement, not because I was holding out, but just because I had no idea where this was going.

I asked, “How do you know those guys are Feds?”

He acted angry in that way he sometimes does, even when he’s not. “Look at them, for chrissakes,” he replied, his voice louder now. “Who the hell else do you know wears a suit jacket when they’re driving in a car?”

Good point. I guess nobody. I said, “So they’re FBI.” It was as much a question as a statement of fact.

“Bet your ass,” he said, his tone still angry. Then, calmer, “Straight out of central casting.” I could all but picture him munching on a large bucket of popcorn as he watched the unfolding show.

I turned my attention back to the battle at hand. Nobody looked particularly happy. This wasn’t a collection of lawmen — and — woman — swapping war stories from the trenches, maybe giving one another the needle, talking about the fragile state of modern America when a pretty young woman can be savaged in a downtown parking garage. No, these people looked to have the personalities of professional golfers.

One of them reached into the breast pocket of his suit and pulled out — a gun? No — a sheet of paper. He deliberately unfolded it and handed it to the driver.

With that, the van doors opened. The driver got out and inspected the sheet. The second cop, the passenger, came around the vehicle, his two G-men escorts in tow. He, too, pulled a rumpled sheet of paper out of his back pocket, unfolded it in greater haste than his federal counterpart, and shoved it into the hands of a man who looked to be the FBI ringleader. For a long moment, everyone stood around reading the two sheets of paper. I wish newspapers attracted that much attention in the age of cable television. What we had was a certifiable standoff.

“What are they doing?” I asked Sweeney. Sweeney, by the way, is a man of monstrous proportions, not like a hippo, but more solid, like a bear. When I looked over at him, I saw he had a tiny pair of field glasses tucked under the bill of his Boston Red Sox cap and was peering intently at the proceedings.

“Dueling warrants,” he said, the binoculars still pressed against his black, shiny face. “This could get real interesting.”

I asked, “Why do they need warrants to get into a dead woman’s house?”

“Maybe they don’t, unless she’s living in there with someone who might be a suspect — a husband, or a boyfriend, or a roommate of some sort. You know if she’s married?”

“Don’t think so. I checked the property records online before I came over, and she’s the sole owner.”

“Then like I said, boyfriend or roommate.”

Outside, the female cop pulled the radio off her belt, turned her back on the assembled crowd, and made some sort of call, I assumed to headquarters. Not to be outdone, the FBI ringleader, virtually indistinguishable from his colleagues, pulled a tiny cellular telephone out of the breast pocket of his suit, took two steps in the other direction, and made a call to God knows where. It could have been the attorney general of the United States, the way this thing was looking. Now that would be a good story.

“Who they calling?” I asked.

“You think I read minds or lips?” Sweeney replied. Okay, good point. I just thought he might have been in a similar predicament at some point in his long law enforcement career.

Sweeney, you see, is of the Boston Police Department homicide unit, retired, a lieutenant when the gold watch finally came. I met him a year ago, when my newspaper was under a takeover threat and my publisher was shot to death. We did each other an enormous favor, and from that, I think we’re entwined for life. He moved back to Boston from a retirement home in one of those wretched little towns in Florida, and is now making a small fortune telling people things about police departments that they wouldn’t otherwise know. For me, he does it for free. He thinks he owes me. I do nothing to dissuade him of the notion.

“Here we go,” he said.

As he said this, another unmarked cruiser gunned up Mount Vernon Street and jammed on the brakes behind the FBI sedan, which sat behind the police van. A man in a shirt and tie, carrying a sport jacket over his shoulder, got out and walked determinedly into the crowd.

“Fed or cop?” I asked.

Sweeney put his glasses down and looked over at me like I had just fallen face-first off a beaten-up turnip truck.

“He’s carrying his jacket,” he said loud, his voice soaked with aggravation. “Of course he’s a cop.”

As if to prove the point, the cop in question grabbed the federal warrant, read it for all of nine seconds, and handed it back. Immediately, he began jawing with the FBI ringleader.

Do they have free refills here on the large sodas?

Then came another car from the other direction. Two guys wearing their jackets — Feds, I’d hazard a guess — got out and walked into the crowd. People were pointing fingers, raising voices, gesticulating wildly.

Sweeney said, “You mind me asking why you give a damn about this murder?”

“Can’t tell you,” I replied. “Not because I can’t tell you, but because I don’t really know. I think it’s connected to something else, and this whole scene confirms my beliefs.”

Interesting as all this was, it wasn’t getting me what I needed, which was to find out if Hilary Kane could have in some way been connected to the heist. And if she was, then did my story in that morning’s paper get her murdered? It was nearing noon. I had a lot of work to do, and the sands of time were pouring through the hourglass of life.

“I’m going over,” I said, putting my hand on the door handle.

“You’re what?” Sweeney asked me this loudly, but he was more amused than upset.

“Public street. I’m allowed.”

“Why?”

“I’m not sure.”

With that, I opened the door and stepped out. We were about ten cars down from the action, so nobody took any notice. I walked down the middle of the street toward the assembled crowd, which now consisted of precisely six FBI agents and three Boston police detectives, not to mention the two patrol officers who were at that moment pulling up in a cruiser, though I guess I just did. I had a legal pad in my hand and a pen in my pocket.

“Possession is nine-fucking-tenths of the law, and we’ve got it.” That was the Boston PD detective in the necktie, fairly shouting his lucid analysis into the reddened face of the FBI ringleader.

“The other tenth is this warrant, and that fucking trumps it.” That was the FBI agent, providing his equally lucid response.

Several of the underlings on both sides of the warrant divide looked over at me warily as I approached, probably wondering if yet another agency was about to get involved.

I gave them my most sheepish, party-crashing smile and said, “Morning. I’m Jack Flynn from the Record. Just trying to get the lay of the land out here.”

I heard an FBI agent, the late-arriving supervisor, mutter, “Fuck.” Two of the other well-dressed agents cut me off as I continued to walk, such that we were chest to chests.

I caught the gaze of the Boston supervisor, who gave me some sort of knowing look, and already, without knowing why, I was on his side.

“We’re going to have to ask you to leave,” an FBI agent, one of the guys in my face, said.

“Ask away,” I said, “but unfortunately, until I get some information, I don’t think I can really go.”

He didn’t take too kindly to that and said, “Get the fuck out of here.”

My tax dollars at work. I’m trying to remember what the good faculty at the Columbia School of Journalism advised in these situations. Of course, since I instead matriculated at the School of Hard Knocks, I had absolutely no idea.

So I said, “Sir, it’s a public street.” I said this dismissively, as if I was running out of patience, and I was. I was.

“It’s a crime scene.”

“The crime,” I replied, “occurred down the street, in the parking garage. The only crime going on here are all the bad haircuts.”

Actually, I didn’t really say that last part, not because it wasn’t true, but because if I did, I probably would have been the recipient of a deserved haymaker from this antsy agent hanging all over my space. What I did say, though, was, “The only crime going on here is the waste of public energy.”

“Move!” he screamed, drill-sergeant style, right into my ear, so that I could feel not only his bad breath, but his warm spittle, on my lobe.

I ignored that too, hard as it was becoming, and called out to the ringleader and the late-arriving supervisor, “Can I get your names, please.”

They looked at each other. The boisterous agent in front of me didn’t know what to do next. I knew, and he did too, that one push, and he’d be working the switchboard of the FBI’s field office in Omaha.

The two supervisors traded nervous glances. It’s part of the majesty of this great profession that we can make men bearing arms afraid. The senior FBI agent turned to the ranking cop and said, “We’re going to follow you to headquarters.”

The cop snorted and replied, “Well, you sure as hell ain’t getting in.”

And just like that, in seconds, actually, everyone jumped into their cars and drove off. Suddenly, I was standing in the street all by my lonesome. I walked back toward my car and said to Sweeney, “Please, call me Henry Kissinger.”

He got out, wide-eyed and said, “What in the hell did you say?”

“I told them my name and asked them theirs.”

He laughed. I added, “Come on, we have work to do.”

He followed me silently to the front door of the apartment building. We both saw four mailboxes, meaning one apartment on each floor. He pulled some tiny device out of his pocket — for all I know, it might have even been a key — and had me inside the front door in a matter of about three seconds. We walked up to the second floor, and he used the same tool to unlock the door to Hilary Kane’s condominium. This was illegal, this breakin, and nothing I found in this search could be used in print. But someone was playing dirty with me, I feared, so I needed to play dirty back.

“Get out of here before you get in trouble,” I said to Sweeney at the door. “I have my phone on vibrate. Call me if a cop or Fed is trying to get in.” He nodded, turned and silently walked down the flight of stairs.

And I opened the door in search of my own worst fears.