The Switch

36

After Will Abbott had left his office, Tanner sat at his desk and thought for a few minutes. He let the phone ring.

It had been a close call. He had almost opened the safe. Fortunately he’d been able to cover by pretending he’d gone off to get coffee, not to find the laptop. Abbott had left his MacBook Air with him.

He’d covered, too, in conversation with Abbott.

“You don’t have the senator’s laptop?” Will Abbott had said after Tanner had handed him a mug of black coffee.

“Sorry. But you’re barking up the wrong tree. I was at the LA airport and I forgot my laptop. I mean, I left it there — I was in a hurry, I guess — in the security line.”

“You don’t have the senator’s—”

He shook his head. “I wish I could help you. But I’m so glad you brought mine back. When I called TSA, they said they had loads of laptops but not mine.”

Abbott had left, clearly disappointed, but also baffled.

Tanner had thought a lot. He could never tell anyone about how he had run over the tattoo guy, but he could talk about the break-in. Though the evidence was slim — a mouse put back wrong, a broken window, a disabled surveillance camera. It was Lanny’s death, his murder. That’s what tipped things.

He needed help. It was foolish to try to go it alone. It was, in fact, dangerous. Something could happen to him. Lanny had been targeted, and he could be next. He had to tell someone in law enforcement about the swapped laptop, the classified documents. He might need some kind of protection, something more serious than staying in a friend’s house. And he wanted someone to investigate Lanny’s death.

Carl knew people in the local police, but that wasn’t the level of help he needed. He needed someone with a national reach, which meant Homeland Security or FBI. He didn’t know anyone in Homeland Security, but he did know a guy who worked for the FBI. Not a friend, really, but an acquaintance, a friend of a friend, a guy he’d played poker with.

He called the Boston office of the FBI and asked for Brent Stover. He was connected to Stover’s voice mail and left a message, asking him to call, telling him it was important.

By the time he left work, Tanner had returned calls and sat through three meetings, distractedly. He wondered about moving the laptop somewhere else. If they’d searched his house and found nothing, wasn’t it only a matter of time before they searched the office? If they did, they might or might not locate the safe. It wasn’t easy to find, but if someone opened every drawer and cabinet and so on, eventually he’d find it. But then they were dealing with a high-quality safe that was locked and presumably difficult to crack. Maybe not impossible. Not for the right people.

The problem with moving the laptop, though, was that he’d have to take it out with him, and he could easily be intercepted with it. It was still better not to move it, he decided.

At a little after six o’clock, he left the office — Sal was staying there, roasting, which he often did at night — and went to his car. The old Lexus was parked two blocks away, a Day-Glo orange ticket tucked under one of the windshield wipers. He’d parked in Brighton resident parking, though his sticker said South End. He took it off the windshield and tossed it into the car. It fluttered to the floor among the bottles and cans.

Was it paranoid to wonder whether he was being followed? Probably. But he was feeling a little jittery, and circumstances seemed to justify it. The guy with the tattoo had very likely been sent to kill him. The way Lanny Roth had been killed.

He had no idea how to evade surveillance. You see scenes on TV and in the movies of people losing a tail, but when it came right down to it, Tanner didn’t remember how it was done. He drove in a circuitous route, took a few left turns, drove through a Stop & Shop parking lot, and didn’t see any vehicle trailing him. He drove up Comm. Ave. to Newton and pulled into Carl’s driveway. He walked around to the front of the Lexus and noticed some damage to the front right quarter panel that he hadn’t seen before. That must have been caused by the collision with the tattooed guy. He wondered whether that meant there was some trace evidence on the tattooed guy’s body. It seemed like an awfully remote possibility that the police might connect his car to the death of Tattoo Man. But it remained a possibility, and it weighed on his mind.

He unlocked the front door and found Carl in the kitchen making something in the blender that looked like a chocolate smoothie.

“Anything happen at work?” Carl said.

Tanner shook his head. He knew Carl meant anything resembling the break-in.

“Everything okay?” Carl said it in a fake-casual way, pretending not to care, when the opposite was true. His eyes revealed that the question wasn’t casual to him. Tanner had seen this when Carl was training a woman with a stalker in self-defense techniques.

“Fine,” Tanner said. “Thanks.”

Carl tipped the contents of the blender into a tall glass. “Protein shake?”

Tanner shook his head. “I’m good.”

“So I told you I know a guy in the Brookline police, right?”

“Yeah?”

“I got more on Lanny.”

“Okay.”

He held the glass aloft in his right hand, as if inspecting it. “They found some stuff in his medicine cabinet.”

“Like what?”

“It sort of makes sense now.”

“What does?”

“Him, you know, offing himself. They found a bunch of meds. Lithium — something called... Lithobid. And Lamictal. And Seroquel.” He ticked them off on the fingers of his left hand. “I think I have the names right. Point is, know what those are for?”

Tanner shook his head.

Carl took a long swallow of the milk shake, a dramatic pause. “Manic-depressive. Or I think they call it bipolar now. Now his moods make sense.”

“Moods?”

“He’d get really excited and then really down. Really depressed. Last time he talked to you, he was like crazy high, right? Manic, even?”

“I guess.” Carl had a point.

“He said he’d found some big story — maybe a tip from you, do I have that right?”

“Yeah.”

“And he was superexcited about it. Like, he’s gonna win the Pulitzer Prize, that’s how big the story was. He wouldn’t tell me what it was.”

It is a big story, Tanner thought. But Carl didn’t know what it was. “That’s right,” he said. “Now that I think about it, he was really excited.” And he thought about Lanny and his moods, and it was true: the man did tend to extreme emotions, whether depressed or happy.

“Paranoia, elation, despair,” said Carl. “It’s textbook bipolar.”

“Huh.” It was not out of the question that Lanny had killed himself. He’d sounded almost paranoid when they last spoke. But that would be too coincidental. He’d been asking around about those classified documents, and he’d heard something alarming. People were after the senator’s laptop. The guy with the tattoos had probably been sent to kill him, at least threaten him, and surely to get that damned computer.

Was it possible that Lanny had killed himself? Yes, sure it was. It was possible.

But what if he hadn’t killed himself? What if he’d been somehow forced to swallow a bunch of pills, and the killers had taken pains to conceal the truth, make it look like suicide? Was that too paranoid a way to be thinking?

Perhaps.

The truth was, he didn’t know what to think anymore about Lanny’s death. Suicide was entirely possible, but he couldn’t vanquish his suspicion.

“You know he didn’t really have any family, from what I can tell,” Carl said. “His parents are gone, and he didn’t have a wife or kids, and... It’s kind of heartbreaking. I’m his executor.”

“No brothers or sisters?”

“No. He had a brother who died of leukemia in college.”

“Huh.” Tanner took off his jacket and hung it on the back of a chair.

His mobile phone rang.

“Yeah?”

“Mike Tanner?”

“Speaking.”

“It’s Brent Stover. From the FBI.”

“Oh, Brent, right, thanks for calling. I, uh—” He hesitated. Was it even safe to talk on the phone, or was that excessive paranoia? “I have something interesting I wanted to talk over with you.”