The Switch

28

Tanner picked up dinner at a Chinese restaurant near the warehouse — General Tso’s chicken and moo shu pork and some kind of green beans — enough for Carl too. Just in case he hadn’t had his abstemious lonely-guy’s dinner at Subway.

“Great,” he said unenthusiastically as Tanner announced the dinner selections, handing him the white plastic take-out bag.

“You already ate.”

“No. Moo shu pork is like a thousand calories a serving, and that General Tso or whatever it’s called, that’s like fifteen hundred. It’s, like, a neutron bomb of calories.”

“There’s veggies.”

“Deep-fried in oil. No, thanks.”

“Okay,” Tanner said, amused.

“Sorry if I sound like your wife.”

“Sarah never nags me about stuff like that. Anyway, you don’t mind if I eat it in your presence, do you? I mean, I’ve got bigger problems than my cholesterol right now, know what I mean?”

Carl smiled grimly. He was wearing a T-shirt tight enough to display his eight-pack. Tanner knew that Carl, who was the protective type by nature, was genuinely worried about him. He also knew that Carl wasn’t going to admit that. It was easier for them both.

Tanner looked around the kitchen. It was compact and neat and generic-looking, with plain blond blocky Scandinavian furniture. The old 1950s sparkly Formica countertop, with aluminum edging, looked almost new. The house was a small, suburban-looking colonial on Commonwealth Avenue in Newton. Carl had bought it after he and his wife started divorce proceedings, when he had no money and was unhappy and impatient with everything, and he furnished it in a couple of hours at Ikea.

“The kids aren’t here this week, are they?” Tanner asked.

“They’re never here during the week. I have them every other weekend.”

“That’s it?”

Carl looked pained but just nodded. Tanner had a wrenching thought that Sarah might want to formalize their separation, file for divorce. God, he hoped not. He still didn’t understand what had provoked her to move out in the first place. He’d told her he wanted kids too, just not quite yet. Right? Unless he was missing something.

“I assume you’re not okay with that.”

“No, I’m not okay with that. I love having them here. Even though they’re not all that excited to spend time with me.”

“Your wife gets them during the week and every other weekend?”

Carl nodded, scowling.

“Well, you got ripped off.”

“Oh, you don’t know the half of it.”

“Yeah?”

“The judge gave Stephanie half my assets and none of my liabilities. She overinflated my income based on one boom year, five years ago. She assumed I was lying all the time. It’s not even close to being equitable. I mean, I look at her the wrong way and I’m held in contempt and fined.”

“Jesus.”

“That’s Massachusetts for you. Anti-male, anti-husband, anti-father, whatever it is. They’re famous for that.”

“After ten thousand years of patriarchy...” Tanner put in.

“All right, don’t get me started or that’s all I’ll talk about.”

Tanner popped a fried ball of General Tso’s chicken into his mouth. After he finished chewing, he said, “Do you know anybody in the Brookline police?”

“Brookline? Sure I do. I’ve trained some of those guys. Why?”

“Because I want to know if Lanny — if it’s really suicide.”

Carl shrugged. He looked weary. “The EMT guy said it was probably an overdose of pills. Which means he killed himself. Alcohol and pills.”

“So you don’t believe Lanny was murdered.”

Carl took a deep breath, then expelled it noisily. “You think he was murdered because he was — asking questions about the classified documents?”

“I do.”

“I remember how he talked about that kind of thing — he told me about some journalists who died in suspicious circumstances. But he could be kind of paranoid sometimes.”

“Right.”

“Anyway, I don’t believe that the US government would do something like kill an American reporter. I think that’s nutso. That’s like, I don’t know, something out of the Jason Bourne movies.”

“I don’t know, man. You think you can get to someone in Homicide?”

“Probably. But these investigations probably take a couple days at least. There’s toxicology results and stuff like that.”

“Lanny had a thumb drive, a USB drive, with documents on it. He might have copied them to his own laptop, but I really doubt he’d put it on the Globe’s computer system. He was too careful.”

“Paranoid, you mean?”

“So I want to know if they found that among his stuff. Was it stolen? Is it missing? And I want to know if they can tell whether he was suffocated.”

“Tanner,” Carl said, his voice quiet. “I knew the guy pretty well. Known him for years. And I say it’s definitely possible that he committed suicide. He wasn’t the most — stable, centered guy around. He lived alone, worked all the time, you know.”

“Let’s see what you find out from the Brookline police.”

“Sure. I think you’re a little on edge, T-boy.”

“Well, you did invite me to stay here, right?”

“Your house is a goddamned crime scene, Tanner; that’s why.”

There was more to it, Tanner knew. Carl wasn’t a muscle head, or wasn’t just a muscle head. He’d once been a vulnerable kid who eventually learned how to defend himself and protect others. That was probably why he loved teaching kids. “Okay, well, I appreciate it.”

“What about the senator’s laptop? Do you still have it?”

“Yeah.”

“Keeping it somewhere safe?”

Tanner nodded. “Somewhere safe.”

Carl smiled a crooked smile. “Thought about giving it back?”

Sure, he almost said, he’d considered just calling Senator Susan Robbins’s office in Washington and telling whomever he could get on the phone, no doubt some twenty-four-year-old intern, that he had the senator’s MacBook Air and they could have the damn thing back; he didn’t want it.

And then he remembered what Lanny had said. That laptop is the only reason you’re still alive.

He shrugged. “So where’s the famous futon?”

Tanner lurched awake in the unfamiliar darkness.

His phone moaned and then trilled. He reached out to silence it, couldn’t find the bedside table, suddenly remembered there was no bedside table in Carl’s guest bedroom. Why the hell was his alarm going off in the middle of the night?

It took his eyes a moment to focus, his brain a much quicker instant to realize: this wasn’t an alarm. This was someone calling.

The numbers at the top of the display were a 617 area code, which was the Boston area, and a number that ended in two zeros. Some kind of company.

A junk, robocall? At whatever the hell it was in the morning?

Underneath the phone number, in smaller type, it said “Brighton, MA.”

The warehouse was in Brighton.

He grabbed the phone, swiped it to answer.

“This Mr. Tanner?” a man’s gruff voice said.

“Who’s this?”

“Mr. Tanner, this is Lenehan in building security at 50 Mayfield Street. There seems to be a fire in the rear of the Tanner Roast offices, and you’re on the contact list.”

“Oh shit. What about—?”

“Fire department’s been called; they’re on their way.”

“Thank you. How — bad is it?”

He got out of bed, swung his feet around to the floor. The room was unaccustomedly dark.

“It’s hard to tell, but, well, just based on the smoke, it looks pretty bad. I don’t know what else to tell you.”

By now he was fully awake. “Oh my God.”

“Any special instructions you want me to give the firemen?”

“No, I — oh God — I’m on my way.”

Carl was out in the hallway outside his bedroom already, wearing a Red Sox T-shirt and a pair of boxer shorts. “Everything okay?”

“There’s a fire at my company,” Tanner said.

“Oh shit. You need help or something?”

“Fire department’s on their way. Go back to bed. I have to get out there.”