Truth Be Told

41

“Just look at me, Mr. Ackerman, not at the camera, okay? I know you’ve done this before. TJ will make sure it looks good.” TJ’s portable minicam allowed them to bang out quick sound bites without white-balancing or searching for electrical outlets for the lights. “Now, tell me your name and title.”

Colin Ackerman’s assistant, all navy blazer and prep school attitude, had tapped a pass card on a black-box locking device, ushering Jane and TJ through massive double-paneled doors into the conference room, an homage to sleek mahogany and cordovan leather. No wonder you needed a special escort to get to the executive floor. Customers might not be pleased to discover their fees and service charges were spent on fancy chairs and lavish conference tables. Ackerman had kept them waiting for an hour, a pitiful power play, but whatever. She needed the interview.

TJ finally placed Ackerman in front of the bank’s ubiquitous anchor logo, this one in gold, wall-mounted on a navy blue suede background. Suede and mahogany. Jane remembered the shabby vinyl of the empty house on Waverly Road.

“You set, TJ?” The recitation of the name and title wasn’t only for Jane’s reference, but to allow TJ to check audio levels and camera angles. “Great. Mr. Ackerman? Tell me about the bank’s focus on customer service,” Jane said.

“Certainly, Jane. As a mortgage customer of the bank yourself, you know Atlantic and Anchor’s primary concern is for…”

The “concern” part was bull, but was Ackerman trying to telegraph that he knew her mortgage information? Creepy, and totally inappropriate, if he’d looked her up. Jane rolled her eyes, mentally at least. Public relations guys.

Ackerman continued with canned PR prattle about customers and personal relationships, using her name in every sentence. In a usual taped interview, she’d let him say whatever he wanted, get that over with, then ask the tough questions she actually cared about. But in this case, all she needed was a perfunctory twenty or so seconds for an online sidebar. She’d gotten the video, and that would please multimedia Marcotte, and if Victoria was happy, Jane was happy. And soon she could go home and take a nap.

Sleep. Her thoughts half-wandered as Ackerman continued his boilerplate. Bed. Which reminded her of Jake. Who was in Boston, not D.C. Who hadn’t called.

She’d phone Marcotte, give her the good news about this interview, and say she’d bang out the story tomorrow, plenty of time. What she wouldn’t say was-she was not about to let cleaning up Chrystal’s journalism leftovers distract her from the potential headlines she was pursuing on her own. Sandoval. Peter Hardesty. Her foreclosure story. And, perhaps, even Gordon Thorley.

A nap would have to wait. A good story trumped sleep.

“Vierra? It’s Jake Brogan. Listen, can you run an address for me at the Registry of Deeds? I need to know the owner of the house.” Jake could have run the Moulten Road address through the Registry of Deeds himself, but not while he was driving. Officer Vierra in Records had offered to help. Jake still felt weird to be on the job without DeLuca, and the empty passenger seat changed the whole atmosphere of the cruiser, making Jake feel as though he’d forgotten something. Still, he preferred working alone to warding off the nonstop rancor and “in the old days” complaining that spewed from Bing Sherrey.

Sherrey was assigned as primary on Moulten Road, with Jake as backup. So far, Sherrey seemed to be content with watching Crime Scene do its thing rather than initiate any investigation of his own. But that was not Jake’s problem. Until it was.

“Yeah,” Jake told Vierra. “It’s two-zero-zero-two Moulten Road. Let me know ASAP, okay? And one more thing-call the MBTA flak, make him give us the video from the buses that took the Moulten Street route-you know? Between say, five P.M. and ten P.M. Tuesday night. Got it?”

He paused, heard Vierra sneeze. “Bless you,” Jake said. “Got it?”

“Got it,” she said.

Jake had a thought. Probably’d go nowhere, but running an investigation of a cold case meant looking up everything, relevant or no. You couldn’t know until you found it, or didn’t. “One more thing,” he said. “Look up the name Gordon Thorley.” He spelled it. “Find out if a Gordon Thorley, he’d be around forty years old, owns any property. Start with Massachusetts, see if there’s anything.”

“Got it,” Vierra said. “Back to you soonest.”

Jake clicked off the Bluetooth, cranked the AC, grabbed the second half of the roast beef on a bulkie roll he’d gotten at Kelly’s. At least no one was there to criticize the cole slaw dripping on the upholstery.

Driving one-handed, he made the right turn onto the expressway, figuring it would be fastest, going against the already-in-progress rush hour. Somehow the five-thirty exodus from Boston now started at four thirty. With weekend inflation, three thirty on Fridays.

His phone rang mid-bite. Jake steered with one elbow as he punched on the speaker.

“Brogan,” he said. Hoping it sounded intelligible.

“Jake?”

Jake swallowed. “Yeah.”

“You don’t sound like yourself,” the voice said.

“Who’s this?” Jake felt for a paper napkin, wiped mayo from his mouth.

“Nate Frasca,” the voice said. “Listen, remember I said-”

“Yeah,” Jake said. He put the sandwich on the waxed paper he’d spread out on DeLuca’s seat. He’d been wondering about Frasca. “You said the name Thorley rang a bell. You think of the bell?”

“I did. Remember the Willie Horton case, years ago, convict who got paroled and then murdered someone? Pretty much killed the governor’s career?”

“Yeah,” Jake said. “Hard to get votes when people are convinced you set a killer free. As if anyone would do that on purpose. So?”

“Thorley’s parole was like that, controversial. I knew there was something. I tried to look it up in the online newspaper archives, but they don’t go back that far. The head of the parole board was replaced after he sprung Thorley. There was a new governor, so that might have had something to do with it. But after Thorley, with the new parole board chairman, paroles pretty much stopped. You can find the details, I’m sure.”

“So you think-” Jake turned on to Huntington, could see the lofty high-rise glass of the Prudential Tower ahead, and the flashing weather lights on the stubby old Hancock building next to it. Flashing blue, changes due.

“I don’t think anything,” Frasca said. “I just said the name Thorley rang a bell. That’s the bell.”

“Thanks, Nate.” So there was something. Or nothing. But at least an idea worth a follow-up. If Thorley’s parole was controversial, maybe someone knew something about him that was suspicious-like maybe he really was a bad guy.

Why hadn’t Richard Arsenault, Thorley’s parole officer, mentioned that?

“You burned it?” Peter tried to grasp the finality of it. He’d been hoping-a slim hope, but nonetheless a hope-that something about the note would exonerate Thorley. It was someone else’s handwriting, maybe, or revealed a fingerprint, or a mark, or was written on a unique kind of stationery. So many possibilities, so many opportunities for reasonable doubt. But now… none.

Peter couldn’t even prove the note even existed.

He tamped down his disappointment, tried to hide his anger. This was denial. And fear. Maybe panic. People weren’t lawyers, and didn’t always make the right decisions. Not that lawyers always did.

“I understand. You probably wanted the whole thing to go away,” Peter said.

“Well, I thought maybe-” Doreen Rinker’s fingers smoothed the plastic tabletop, as if she were trying to wipe away her mistake. “Thought maybe the note would get him more in trouble.”

“I see,” Peter said. The wrong decision for the right reason. So often a signpost on the road to a guilty verdict.

“Okay, then. Moving on.” No reason to make her miserable over it. More miserable than she already was. He would assume there really had been a note, since after all, that’s what started the whole thing. “Tell me again, exactly what did it say? Try to picture it, Ms. Rinker. Sometimes that helps.”

Doreen leaned against the spindly ladder back of the kitchen chair, tilted her head toward the ceiling, closed her eyes. The skin of her neck was mottled and sun-spotted: “Cape Cod skin,” they called it, unfortunate by-product of a life on the beach.

He saw her chest rise and fall as she took a breath, let it out. “White paper, like from a copier,” she said. “‘Doreen,’ it said. And then…”

Peter waited, silent.

“It said: ‘I’m sorry.’ It said: ‘I’m doing it for the family. Lilac Sunday was my fault, and I need to take responsibility.’” Doreen opened her eyes, blinked as if she’d just awakened from a nap, crossed her arms in front of her, and scratched her upper arms with those stubby fingernails. “And then it said ‘I’m sorry’ again.”

“Was it signed?”

“No.” Doreen drew out the word, remembering. He could see her picturing the note, her eyes moving up and right, retrieving the memory. “Well, no and yes. It was signed ‘G.’ But that’s what the family called him, ‘G.’” She smiled, almost. “He hated the name Gordon.”

“So it was signed, in effect. Because no one else would have known about G, correct? And it was in his handwriting? Would you recognize it?”

He was grasping at straws here, he knew. Thorley himself had accepted authorship of the note. But no harm in pursuing every angle. Even if the angle was now ashes.

“Well.” Doreen blinked, then pressed her fingertips over her eyes. “I never considered-well, I don’t know. I guess I don’t know his handwriting.”

“Did anyone else know where that key was?” More straw grasping. Thorley had admitted writing the damn note, as clear and incriminating a confession as he’d ever seen. A jury would buy into “guilty” without a second thought. But this case would never get to a jury, Peter realized. Thorley insisted he was guilty.

Peter didn’t have to prove his client innocent, of course. Likely he actually was the Lilac Sunday killer. But it was his job, his responsibility, his constitutional obligation, to make the Commonwealth prove his client guilty. If they couldn’t, Thorley should be set free, even if he didn’t want to be.

But seemed Doreen Rinker was a dead end.

Peter should head back to Boston, get the latest on the Moulten Road crime scene, see if the cops could produce any real evidence linking that to Thorley. And he needed to check on Sandoval. Poor guy. Now in custody, overnight at best, and maybe longer. He might call MaryLou Sandoval, just to touch base.

Doreen hadn’t answered him.

“Doreen? Did anyone else know where the key was?”

“Not that I know of.” Doreen tilted her head, the creases in her forehead deepening into furrows. “You think someone else might have-”

Peter shook his head. “Not really,” he admitted. “But I need to explore all-hang on. My phone.”

His phone buzzed in his jacket pocket, vibrating against his thigh. He took it out, looked at the caller ID. Jane.

“Go ahead and take it,” Doreen said. She gestured toward the hallway. “I’ll just run to the little girls’ room.”

“This is Peter Hardesty.” Peter watched Doreen walk away, her flip-flops flapping against the hardwood floor.

“Are you kidding me?” the voice on the other end said.

Jane. An unhappy Jane, from the sound of it. He almost smiled, listening to her indignation. He’d be angry, too, if he was-

“Jane? Jane?” He tried to interrupt, no point having her go on about it. “I’m sorry, really, I am, I called you though, and you never called me back.”

She didn’t stop.

“… and now, according to some police source who just called one of our reporters, Elliot Sandoval has been arrested! You didn’t even leave a specific message that-”

“I didn’t,” he admitted, interrupting. “It was kind of a crazy time.”

“Crazy?” Jane’s voice went up an octave. “Crazy? Critical, I’d call it. And what’s more, that was a specific event you’d promised to share with me, exclusively, if we promised not to run a story. Remember that? I lived up to my side of the-”

“Yeah, I know.” Peter had to interrupt again. “But what could I do? You didn’t answer the phone, and my primary concern was with my client, who at the moment was about to be arrested for murder.”

“Duh,” Jane said. “My point exactly.”

“But all is not lost.” Peter tried to advance the conversation, distract her from her sarcasm. She was so intent on this, she probably wasn’t even listening. Peter could picture her face, her frown, a pencil behind her ear, her hair coming out of that ponytail. It was-charming, how devoted she was. He was glad they were on the same side in this one. Even though she wasn’t acting like that now. “The arraignment is slated for ten A.M. tomorrow, so how about if we go from there?”

Silence.

“The detectives would never have let you in, anyway.” Peter kept trying. Somehow, it was important that she not be angry with him, that she trusted him. He’d made a battlefield decision, under pressure, and his client had to come first. Deal or not. And of course, Jane could renege on her end of it, too. She and that imperious editor could decide to make the Sandovals’ life miserable while they awaited the disposition of his case.

“Jane?”

Silence. He heard a toilet flushing somewhere down the hall. He didn’t have long for this conversation to stay private. “Jane? Are you still there?”

Jane leaned back in her office chair, phone in hand, stretching out as far as she could, balancing with practiced precariousness on the two back legs. She’d figured on writing the bank piece, then heading home for an early dinner and falling asleep in front of Masterpiece. But then, a colleague had e-mailed her the scoop from the cops. She’d read it fifteen or sixteen times, incredulous, before it actually sank into her brain.

Of all the ridiculous and double-dealing… She’d sat in Marcotte’s office with Hardesty, and against her better judgment agreed to keep things under wraps in order to get the exclusive. So much for that brilliant idea. She was surprised Victoria Marcotte hadn’t swooped in on her broom to cackle over Jane’s defeat. Although Marcotte herself agreed to the collaboration.

Jane was just-she clunked her chair wheels back onto the floor. A peon.

“Yes, I’m still here. I’m trying to keep my language appropriate.” Jane sighed, puffing out a breath of defeat. It was one local story, not Watergate. “Can you bring me up to date, then? If you tell me what happened, who said what, all that, I suppose we can go from there.”

She jammed the phone between her shoulder and cheek, clicked open a blank Word file on her computer. The e-mail had warned the Sandoval arrest was on the down-low, cops weren’t making it public, so the paper couldn’t run it anyway. Did Jake know? Had he made the arrest? She hadn’t heard from him, either. Jake. What was up with him? Jane poised her fingers over her keyboard. “Peter? I can take the info right now.”

She heard sounds on Peter’s end of the call, someone talking. “Peter? Are you there?”

“Yes, sorry, Jane,” he said. “I’m at a consultation actually, and I can’t-”

Silence. Had they lost the connection? She could feel Peter thinking, though, in the empty space on the other end. And certainly there was a clattering, like dishes. A consultation? Maybe in a restaurant? Or maybe she just thought so because she was hungry. She hadn’t eaten since-she couldn’t remember.

“Peter?” she said again. It was pushing five P.M., and she was on her last reserves of adrenaline. There was still the bank story to write, accompanied by Colin Ackerman’s canned video bites. He’d actually offered her another ball-point pen-“For being such a good customer,” he’d said. She declined. The paper’s rules said you could accept gifts if they weren’t valued over twenty-five dollars, but Jane went by her own rules. An honest reporter never takes anything free.

“Yeah,” Peter said. “Like I was saying, I can’t now. But how about tonight? Over dinner?”

Jane took the phone away from her ear, looked at it as if she could see him through the little holes in the receiver. She put it back to her ear, realizing she was smiling.

“Dinner?”

“Low-key,” he said. “I’m tired after last night, and I’m sure you are, too. But we’ve got to eat. We’ll go early, Legal’s or someplace, and I’ll give you the whole story.”

Jane took a long shot. “You didn’t happen to take photos of the arrest, did you?”

She heard his quiet laugh. “No photos, Jane. Do you ever stop? But I do have some interesting info about the case. I’m out on the Cape, though, so how about seven thirty? Grilled shrimp, white wine, and the scoop.”

Jane assessed her jeans, she was wearing good ones at least, her black T-shirt, and linen jacket, acceptably wrinkled. Black flats. She could go into the ladies’, fluff her hair, wash her face, be presentable. Not that it mattered, she reminded herself. It was a work dinner, not a date. Better to be on good terms with this guy than be angry. Nothing was ever gained from holding a grudge.

“We’ll split the bill,” she said. “You’re very persuasive.”

“Just ask my juries,” Peter said.