Brothers and Bones (2 page)

Of course he wasn’t. Really, he wasn’t. And Dr. Fielding would have confirmed that for me if he had been there.

But now I definitely wanted to get a better look at the guy’s face…his eyes. I realized that, all the times I’d seen him before, I’d never once looked him in the eye. I’d barely glanced his way, actually, other than to register the sight of him as a curiosity carrying on his half of a heated debate with an unending river of commuters flowing past him. I’d certainly never spent this long in such close proximity to him. I doubted many people did. But now I had to see his eyes.

As the train ground to a slow stop with a piercing, sustained, metal-on-metal shriek, I took the quarter from my pocket and started to bend down to look into his face. Then the doors of the train shushed open and the commuter crush began. I dropped the coin into the Dunkin’ Donuts cup just as I was pushed forward, and I found myself twisting around, trying to get a look at the man’s eyes.

And then it happened. As I was swept onto the train by the human tide, I heard the homeless man say in a dry, sharkskin-rough voice, “Thanks, Wiley.”

A harsh bell was certainly sounding on the train just then—it had to be, because it always shrilled long and loud just before the doors closed. There undoubtedly was a din of voices all around me. A subway worker might have told the crowd remaining on the platform to stop pushing, that another train would be along soon. I heard none of it. All I heard were those two words in my head, spoken by a tangle-maned man in rags who certainly had a tighter grip on his change cup than he did on reality.
Thanks, Wiley.

My name isn’t Wiley. It’s Charlie Beckham. And the only person who ever,
ever
called me Wiley was my brother, Jake. And Jake went missing thirteen years ago.

TWO

I botched it in court. The first day of the most important trial of my career and I booted it like a shortstop kicking a groundball. And Andrew Lippincott was there to see it. As I sat at my desk afterward, my head in my hands, just beginning to wonder with hope whether I was being a little hard on myself, a voice came from the doorway to my office.

“How come you crapped the bed today, Charlie?”

I looked up. Standing at my office door was Angel Medina, a lawyer one year behind me at the U.S. Attorney’s office and the junior member of the Organized Crime Strike Force Unit. Since being hired four years earlier, Angel had adopted me as his unofficial mentor and become my closest friend. He had also been assisting me on the Redekov case, had sat with Lippincott and me at counsel’s table in court that day, and had therefore witnessed my staggering incompetence. I shot him the bird and dropped my head back into my hands.

“I mean, what the hell happened?” Angel asked. “You choked.”

And I did. I was terrible. The case was huge and I’d blown it so far. I didn’t even crash and burn in spectacular fashion. Rather, I made mistake after mistake, took misstep after misstep. Death by a thousand cuts.

For four years our office had been part of a joint task force with the FBI and local law enforcement focusing on Vasily Redekov. As an underboss, his conviction would send a powerful message to organized crime in Boston. Our office had even tried him once before, without success. But this time, our case was stronger. We’d gotten a few dozen quality tips and the task force had done a terrific job of gathering evidence, from surveillance video to authorized wiretaps to eyewitnesses. Redekov himself helped us out by losing his cool, personally and sloppily shooting a snitch, as well as an eyewitness to the shooting, and arrogantly doing very little to conceal the crimes. His problem was that the witness survived, though the six bullets Redekov put into him led me to believe that he hadn’t let the poor sap live out of a sense of compassion. Despite having pretty good evidence and an eyewitness to the murder, however, our case against Redekov for murder, attempted murder, and various racketeering-related charges, wasn’t a slam dunk. His mob mouthpieces were good at what they did, and one of the bullets he’d left in the eyewitness’s skull had scrambled the poor bastard’s thoughts a little, leaving him with fewer of his faculties than I normally like my witnesses to have. But I was optimistic, as was everyone in the Organized Strike Force Unit. In fact, we were hoping for an even bigger prize than Redekov. If I did my job in court, showed him what a strong case we had against him, he might get nervous about his chances and cut a deal, roll over like a good boy and deliver us the rest of the big dogs in the Russian family, including, we hoped, the biggest dog of all, the head of the whole organization. That was our hope, anyway, and it would all start with me demonstrating how capable I was, how airtight the government’s case was, how deep the shit Redekov was wading in was.

Instead, I performed miserably. I stumbled through my opening argument, then had to sit beside a silently seething Andrew Lippincott as we listened to Redekov’s lawyer strike the perfect tone of self-assurance and indignation at the government’s attempt to besmirch the good name of his client. He was smooth, well spoken, likable, prepared, and everything else I should have been but wasn’t. Then, after a short recess during which Lippincott reminded me of the importance of the case and during which, I think, he kept looking into my eyes to see if I had, perhaps, downed a six-pack before arriving that morning, I stood up again and began to set forth the government’s case-in-chief. And I wasn’t any better. I forgot critical facts, which is highly unusual for me. I have something akin to an eidetic memory, which some people call a photographic memory—that is, the ability to see something and recall it later in extraordinary detail. Frankly, I’m not sure the phenomenon truly exists. But I will say that, all my life, I’ve been able to look at something briefly and remember it later with great accuracy. It’s just something I could always do. Some people have blue eyes, some can hit a baseball a mile, some can engrave the Gettysburg Address on a single grain of rice. I can do this.

But that first day in court I couldn’t even depend on my somewhat freakish recall. Not only did I forget facts, but most of the ones I remembered I presented in a disjointed way, failing to impress upon my audience their proper significance. I stammered, mumbled, backtracked, lost my train of thought, and twice nearly threw myself out a window in frustration. The best thing that could be said about my performance was that I didn’t break wind during it. I’d been hoping to use this case as a springboard to even bigger cases. After today, I’d be lucky even to retain my position on the Organized Crime Strike Force Unit. In fact, I supposed it wasn’t entirely out of the question that Lippincott would ask for my resignation.

I was beginning to compose my résumé in my head and to consider where I would send it when Angel Medina spoke again from my doorway. “Charlie, you going to say anything? What gives?”

“Like you said, Angel, I choked.”

“That’s obvious. But why?”

I’d always loved Angel’s tact. “I wasn’t on my game, I guess. I had trouble concentrating. Must have been nervous. What can I say? I got flustered.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you nervous, Charlie, and I’ve definitely never seen you flustered.”

He also hadn’t seen me on the subway that morning, just after the homeless guy called me Wiley, a nickname known only to my brother, missing for thirteen years, finally declared legally deceased six years ago. At first, I’d stood still and dumb, like I’d been poleaxed. I don’t even know what that means, frankly, but I’ve seen cowboys in Westerns who the other cowboys say look like
they’d
been poleaxed, and that’s just how I felt I must have looked. But as the subway-car doors began to close, I snapped out of my stupor and struggled to get back to the platform, where I could see the homeless man watching me from the crowd. However, my pushing and shoving and banging people with my briefcase succeeded only in making me unpopular after the doors closed with me still inside the train. I ignored the people around me, though, and simply watched the homeless man through the window until he was lost to my sight as the train rounded a bend in the tracks and I was looking at the black tunnel wall.

I could feel my heart fluttering in my chest, a nervous parakeet banging around in its cage. Who was that guy? How did he know my brother’s secret nickname for me? Had he known Jake? Did he know what happened to him?

And as I stared blankly at the subway-tunnel wall rushing past the train’s windows, a thought struck me with hammer force. I hadn’t gotten a great look at the homeless man. I closed my eyes and tried to summon his appearance in my mind’s eye—his height, his build, his coloring. It was hard to imagine what he looked like under that hermit hair and city grime. Was it possible? The guy stooped so much it was difficult to estimate his true height, but it seemed close enough. So did his build, though it was hard to tell with the man’s many layers of clothing. His coloring was something of a mystery, as it was largely hidden by shadows. The age, at least, seemed about right, though. The big question remained. Was it possible?

My eyes had snapped open along with the train doors at the next stop and I’d forgotten all about the Redekov trial as I pushed my way through the struggling mass of commuters and out onto the platform. I dodged and danced around people as I ran up the stairs and over to the outbound platform, where I waited four anxious minutes for a train to take me back to where I’d seen the homeless man in the Harvard sweatshirt. I was panting and sweating and wild-eyed. If the looks on the faces of the people near me were any indication, I looked like a lunatic. People had begun to clear out a few feet of space all around me. A small girl staring at me from nearby actually whimpered and jammed her face between her mother’s knees. I barely registered these things.

When the train came, my psycho-killer vibe garnered me my own private corner of a subway car. When we reached Kendall Station, I exited onto the platform and waited for the train to pull away, then looked across the tracks to where I’d seen the homeless man. He was nowhere in sight. The platform was still busy, though a little less so, and I definitely would have seen him if he’d still been there. I bolted up the stairs again and out onto the sidewalk, where I stood scanning in all directions for him. No luck. I gave his description to a few people walking past and asked if they’d seen anyone who looked like him come out of the station within the past few minutes. The most helpful response I received was, “You’re blocking the stairs.”

I dropped my head and exhaled loudly. There was nothing for me to do but to go to work and…oh, no. I looked at my watch and had to choke back a little bile.

As I expected, it wasn’t pleasant when I finally appeared in court twenty-one minutes late. Fortunately for me, the court reporter and the judge’s own clerk had been a little tardy themselves because of the subway delays—though both arrived before me by a good ten minutes—and their experiences had paved the way for my excuse.

Still, it had been a terrible start to a terrible day in court. Despite my best efforts to focus on the case, my mind spent the day wandering through the Boston subway system instead of being in the courtroom where it belonged. And it showed. I did my distracted best, though, ignoring the poisonous silence of Andrew Lippincott at my side as I plodded through the beginnings of the government’s case. In the afternoon, I lamely wrapped things up for the day, pasted on a self-deprecating smile, and promised the court that I’d be on time from now on. It was Thursday, and the judge had announced after the lunch recess that he wouldn’t be on the bench the following day for personal reasons, so the next time I had to make sure upon penalty of death that I was on time would be Monday morning.

After court adjourned, Lippincott told me he needed some time to think, so I left him sitting at counsel’s table and slunk from the courtroom. I ignored Angel, whom I sensed trying to catch up with me. Outside, I “no commented” my way through a thick forest of media microphones and cameras and began the depressing walk back to my office.

Inside the building, as I rode the elevator up to the ninth floor, which houses the Criminal Division of the U.S. Attorney’s office, I half wondered if Lippincott had called ahead and given the order to have my office cleaned out before I got there and security sent up to escort me from the building.

It turned out that Lippincott had not, in fact, called building security yet. Now, an hour later, as Angel stood at my office door, I said to him, “I hope our association won’t taint you here at the office after I’m gone and have been reduced to hanging around emergency rooms, handing my business cards to people with newly found limps.”

Angel was kind enough to smile at my gallows humor. But he wasn’t kind enough to contradict my vision of my future.

My phone rang and I lifted the receiver and heard the voice of doom.

“Lippincott?” Angel asked as I hung up.

I nodded. “He wants to see me.”

As I walked past Angel, he said, “Want me to start cleaning out your desk for you?”

I nearly shot him the bird again, then realized I probably could, in fact, use his help packing up my office later.

THREE

The John Joseph Moakley United States Courthouse, in addition to housing several federal courtrooms, also houses, on the ninth and tenth floors, the offices of the United States Attorney for the District of Massachusetts and his staff. From the street, the courthouse is a fairly typical, unimpressive federal building—all brick and right angles. From the back, however, you can see where the tax dollars really got busy back in the 1990s. To begin, the building is on Boston Harbor, close enough for you to lob a baseball into the water from its back door. This side of the building is semicircular, its concavity facing a panoramic view of the harbor and the Atlantic beyond. It’s covered by huge glass windows that follow the curve of the wall, and which sweep steeply, majestically up and back from the ground, nearly all the way to the top of the building ten stories above. On the ground below, snuggled against the curving base of the building, is a small, nearly circular grassy area dotted with trees and surrounded by a brick walk. It’s easily the most aesthetically pleasing federal building I’ve ever seen. That may not be saying much, but it really is a great building.