Measure of Darkness (21 page)

W
e find Randall Shane sitting up in a comfortable armchair, looking perky and alert. His eyes are clear. He's clean-shaven, which makes him look younger and thinner, although the thinness may be the result of actual weight loss. He's been given a VIP room, obviously, complete with a small fireplace and a lovely view of the Charles, but the food still comes from the hospital kitchens and according to his doctor he hasn't developed much of an appetite.

“If you can persuade him to eat, that would be great,” Dr. Gallagher had told us over the phone. “He's a big guy, he needs his calories, especially when the body is healing.”

As a consequence Naomi arrives bearing a Tupperware container from Mrs. Beasley's kitchen.

“We heard you lost your appetite” are her first words to the patient.

He shrugs. “Not a big deal. I have weight to spare.”

“Not that much, from the look of you,” Naomi says, popping the container into a small microwave. “First you'll do me the favor of trying Mrs. Beasley's maca
roni and cheese, and then we'll sweep the room for bugs and have a conversation.”

“I'm really not hungry.”

“That's why I brought this particular dish. It has been known to stimulate an interest in food.”

Naomi carefully dishes a portion into a white crockery bowl, supplies it with a fork and hands it to the reluctant patient. Shane places it on the table beside him but makes no move to eat. Naomi, persisting, removes a small shaker of salt from her purse. “Sea salt,” she announces briskly. “It makes a difference. I checked your chart, you have no prohibition against salt.”

“Really, Miss Nantz,” he says, looking annoyed.

“Call me Naomi or Nantz, but never Miss Nantz.”

“Okay, Nantz. Thanks for the food. Maybe I'll try it later.”

“By then it will be cold and it won't reheat well for a second time. Let me describe the contents, which are exceedingly simple but nevertheless not like any similar dish you may have had in the past. Certainly not like whatever glop the hospital, or indeed most restaurants, calls macaroni and cheese.”

“Look, I appreciate everything you've done, really I do, but—”

“No buts. Allow me to finish,” Naomi says, overriding his protest. “Mrs. Beasley first makes fresh pasta according to her own recipe, in this case rotini in shape, and boils it to a precise state of al dente. The steaming pasta is then transferred to a casserole pan. Over the pasta she grates a precise quantity of truly exceptional aged cheddar, sharp but not too sharp. On the top, a crust of toasted bread crumbs moistened with drawn butter. The dish is then baked for thirty minutes at three hundred and fifty degrees so that the cheese melts and achieves a kind of
magical balance with the pasta. As a last touch the casserole is taken from the oven and the bread-crumb crust is browned with a hand torch and lightly sprinkled with select parmigiano. The result is simple, nutritious, delicious and easy to digest. I dare you to take one bite and prove me wrong.”

Shane grimaces. “You don't give up, do you, Nantz?”

“Never. Be glad of it.”

He sighs and reluctantly lifts a small forkful to his mouth. His pale blue eyes brighten. Without saying another word he adds a few shakes of sea salt and empties the bowl in about three minutes. He then heaves a sigh and says, “Oh my God. Who is Mrs. Beasley?”

“A woman of many mysteries. Shall I dish out another portion?”

“No, I'm good. You're right, it was delicious. Familiar but at the same time not like anything I've ever tasted before. Wait, wait. Changed my mind. Yes, please,” he says, handing her the bowl.

In the end he empties the Tupperware. I'm not one of those women who derive any particular satisfaction from watching a man eat, but there's something about Randall Shane that makes me want to pay attention to whatever he happens to be doing at the moment. Not my type, not my type at all, but still.
Interesting
is how I'd put it. Like watching a pacing tiger is interesting. Makes you feel sorry for the cage, if he ever wants to escape.

When he's done Shane pushes himself back in the armchair and flexes the ankle that has the plastic monitoring device attached. “We need to talk about Kathy Mancero,” he says.

Naomi stops him. “Not quite yet. Sweep first.”

She steps out of the room and returns with Dane Porter and a gentleman, a consulting expert who shall not
be named or described in this narrative, per his explicit request. Suffice to say that he's the same gentleman who designed and implemented the electronic-surveillance shielding system at the residence, and checking a hospital room for bugs is something he could do in his sleep. The process takes about fifteen minutes, wanding his detector over every square inch of the room, and in the end he pronounces the place bug free.

“Excellent,” Naomi replies.

“That being said,” the expert continues, “my concern is the windows. Glass transmits sound vibrations, which can be detected from a considerable distance by a laser microphone. Before leaving I'm going to place a small, battery-operated device on the windowsill that generates random masking vibrations, but even so I suggest you keep the conversation as quiet as possible and be sure to face the wall, not the windows. Any questions?”

Shane has several, all geeky technical stuff—he knows a lot about bugs and bug prevention—but in the interests of not boring the reader, I will refrain from mentioning anything that involves interferometers, beam splitters or microprocessors. With the geeky stuff concluded and our consulting expert having taken his leave, the conversation resumes at just above a whisper. The three of us, me, Naomi and Dane, as close to the big guy as we can get without sitting in his lap.

“Kathleen Mancero,” he begins. “You looked her up, right?”

“We have everything available from published sources. What can you add?”

“Only that her involvement is my fault. I want that to be on the record. Whatever Kathy's done, it's because I was never quite able to say no to her. Not absolutely. She desperately wanted a mission, much like the one I've
made for myself, and for similar reasons. They took advantage of that. If she's helping them with Joey Keener, it has to be because she thinks she's helping me. That's the only explanation.”

“We assumed as much.”

“You did?” He looks much relieved. “Well, good then.”

“I notice, Mr. Shane, that you're still referring to the kidnappers as ‘they.'”

“Just Shane, please, no mister. I say ‘they' because I don't know who ‘they' are.”

“Because you can't remember?”

“Because I never knew. Professor Keener believed that his son had been taken into custody by agents of the Chinese government, in an attempt to persuade him to share secrets. That was my assumption, too, until I saw the video of Kathy and the boy. That changed everything. If the Chinese were involved they'd have used one of their own, not gone prospecting for a nanny in Kansas. So it has to be domestic. One of our own spy agencies.”

Naomi nods in agreement. “Did he share?”

“Keener? You mean was he complicit in an act of treason? No, I don't think so. He said not, and in my judgment he lacked the ability to lie convincingly. Then again, I've been wrong about so much, maybe I was wrong about that, too.”

“Possibly,” Naomi says. “That has yet to be determined. Tell me what you recall of your interrogation.”

He grimaces. “Not much is clear. I was with you, in your office. There's a lot of noise and then something hits me and I pass out. When I come to I'm strapped to a gurney. Someone asks me about Joseph Keener and I tell them everything I know, but that isn't enough. They
beat me, they drug me some more and then it all gets very vague and blurry.”

“Could you identify any of your interrogators?”

He shakes his head. “Never saw them.”

Naomi sits up straight, takes a breath. “We have news to impart. As yet we have no line on who has Joey, precisely, or what they hope to gain by holding him after his father's death, but we do know who abducted you.”

Naomi delivers a succinct description of the events of the day, in particular the threat to “go chemical” on Milton Bean, and the convenience of a nearby airfield with professional interrogators on-site. Midway through the account something relaxes in Shane's expression, and when Naomi concludes, he says, “Taylor Gatling, I'll be damned. Haven't heard the name in twenty years, but that explains it.”

“How so?”

“Keener told me he was under surveillance by his own security guards, but I never made the connection between Gama Guards and Taylor Gatling, Jr. Now it all makes sense. Or some of it does.”

“Gatling is previously known to you?”

Shane shakes his head. “His father was. I had no idea his son owned a security firm. This all happened so long ago, he must have been a kid at the time. I have no recollection of him at the trial.”

“Trial?”

“The father, Taylor Gatling, Sr., was an embezzler. A very bold and clever one, too. Owned a chain of automotive dealerships, had his face all over the local television stations promoting sales.
Get the Taylor-made deal on the car of your dreams!
—that was his pitch. Very successful, but it wasn't quite enough to sustain his lifestyle, or his many mistresses, and Gatling came up with an
elaborate scheme to defraud the finance company that floorplanned his cars. I won't go into the details, which involved a confederate at the Department of Motor Vehicles, but basically he sold cars while pretending to still have them on one of his many lots. Because it was interstate fraud, the Bureau got involved. I was a newbie with a computer background and they decided to put me undercover as a car salesman, where I might get a chance to examine the paperwork, find out how he was doing it. Which was kind of a joke, me as a car salesman, since I never managed to sell a car. Not one! But I did collect VIN numbers, and figured out who was assisting at the DMV—one of his girlfriends—and we were able to put it all together and prove the fraud.”

“So you sent Taylor Gatling's father to prison.”

“I wish that was all it amounted to. Despite being a con man, or maybe because of it, Taylor was one of the most charming guys I ever met. You couldn't help but like him. But he was guilty as sin, there was no way around it, and he was eventually sentenced to five years in a federal lockup. Where he could have practiced his tennis with the rest of the embezzlers and tax cheats. Except that on the day that he was supposed to surrender to the federal marshals he shot himself.”

Naomi shakes her head. “How come we didn't run into that when we researched Taylor Gatling, Jr.?”

Shane shrugs. “Just a guess, but if he's been as successful as you suggest, he's probably had as much of it scrubbed as possible. That takes a lot of money and a lot of effort, siccing lawyers on search engines and archives, but it can be done. Plus you were researching the son, not the father.”

“Plus once we found Gatling Security Group, that's
what we researched, not so much the owner,” I chime in, defending Teddy.

“It's been less than twelve hours, for cryin' out loud,” says Dane. “Look at it that way, the kid found a lot. He was the one who made the connection, started the ball rolling.”

Naomi is having none of it, and waves me off. “Thank you, Alice, thank you, Dane, but there's really no excuse. I don't blame Teddy, I blame myself.”

She turns back to Shane, who looks puzzled at our exchange. “So let me get this right,” she says. “Taylor Gatling, Jr., blames you for his father's suicide and is taking his revenge? After all those years?”

“Looks that way. Unless someone is framing him by framing me.”

Naomi sighs. “The very thought of that makes my head hurt.”

“Wheels within wheels, Nantz.” Shane grins, as if enlivened by the idea. “Gatling and company have been working on behalf of the so-called intelligence community. Anything is possible.”

“W
ho scratched your face?” Tolliver wants to know. “Your wife or your girlfriend?”

“Not funny, Glenn.”

“Or maybe it was a threesome. Hey, come to think of it my wife might go for a threesome as long as I wasn't invited.”

Jack stands up, as if to go.

“C'mon, Jack. You want a beer?”

“Hey, sure. One beer can't hurt.”

The state police captain has something he wants to impart, supposedly, which is why Jack has agreed to meet his old friend at The Diamondback on Boylston, up the stairs to the rooftop café so Glenn can have a smoke if he wants. The D-back being approximately the least coplike bar in this part of Boston, which means they're unlikely to be overheard by colleagues. Plus Piggy likes the nachos, and the rules of the arrangement mean that Jack will be picking up the tab.

The rush of rescuing Milton, guns blazing, has gone away, leaving Jack cranky and not in the mood for macho camaraderie, but things are breaking so fast that he can't risk putting Tolliver off until tomorrow. As his friend re
turns from the bar with a couple of drafts, Jack tries to put on his game face, get into the swing of things.

“Happy hour,” he says, forcing a grin. “Look at these kids. I'm old enough to be their father.”

“Yeah? Be glad you're not,” Tolliver says, eyes roving over some of the fair young items who've come up to the roof to suck on their long white cigarettes. All bright and giggly in short skirts and makeup, primping and priming for a night at the clubs.

“Nachos on the way,” Jack says.

“Good. Great. Seriously, kid, you look like you've been running with the wolves.”

Jack shrugs. “Things are happening.”

“You're not in violation of any statutes, though, right?”

“Not in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, no.”

Tolliver gives him a look. “I never know when you're kidding.”

“I'm always kidding, Glenn. Cheers.”

They tap glasses, drink.

“Mr. Baked Alaska, the frozen croak at the Bing murder?” Tolliver says, sucking air through the gap in his teeth. “We made the ID. His prints were in the system.”

“Oh yeah?”

“No surprise, a low-level gangbanger out of Chinatown, goes by the name of Micky Lee. Muscle for a protection racket. Look familiar at all?”

Tolliver hands over a small mug shot. Jack studies and returns it. “No,” he says. “Any connection to Jonny Bing?”

“Not that we can find, no. Bing moved in more rarified circles. He might have known the banger's boss, but probably not the banger.”

“You think Bing was involved with a protection racket?” says Jack, surprised.

“No, no, I'm just saying. It's a fairly small circle, the rich, connected Chinese in Boston. Bing knew 'em all, at least socially. Liked to show off, throw shindigs on his fancy boat, appear at all the local Chinese charity dinners. So he could have crossed paths with this particular guy's boss. We're looking into it.”

“Good to hear. Whoever killed the little dude, it wasn't Randall Shane.”

“No? Why not?”

Jack lifts an eyebrow, wondering how much the trooper already knows. “Because when Bing was getting whacked Shane was being tortured by the bad guys.”

“Oh yeah? What bad guys?”

“Yet to be determined. All we have are theories at the moment.”

“Which you can't discuss.”

Jack shrugs, finishes his beer.

Tolliver scoots his chair closer. “Here's my theory. Shane knows we have him dead to rights, so he tries to put the frame on Jonny Bing somehow, only it all goes wrong when the boat doesn't burn.”

“It was more like a ship.”

“Whatever. Just because that dyke lawyer of yours has Tommy Costello all hot and bothered, and persuades him to treat the suspect like royalty and not even take him into proper custody or bring him to court for arraignment, that doesn't mean he isn't guilty of doing that weirdo professor, even if he didn't do Bing.”

“
Dyke
is an ugly word,” Jack says, dander up.

“Hey, they use it, why can't I?”

“The way you say it.”

Tolliver looks ever so slightly abashed. “Okay, lesbian
or gay or whatever. I'm sorry, no offense intended. I get it, Jack, she's a friend of yours, but it really takes the cake, our suspect getting a deluxe room with a view instead of a holding cell at the Middlesex Courthouse. All because the D.A. has political ambitions and he's afraid Naomi Nantz will embarrass him somehow.”

“The D.A. gets it that Shane was most likely framed. The gun, the bloody shirt? You said so yourself, it's way too perfect.”

“Yeah, I did. But once an arrest is made it should follow the rules.”

“A suspect confined to a hospital bed is hardly against the rules, Glenn. Half the Mafia dons spent years in hospitals, in their silk pajamas, awaiting trial. If you'd seen the guy, okay? They beat the crap out of him, shot him full of some kind of designer truth serum. For a while he thought they drilled a hole in his head, scrambled his brains. He needs to be under a doctor's care. That would be true even if he was guilty,
and he's not.
”

“That's the point,” the trooper says, truculent. “We never saw him. Cut off at the pass by lawyers. They all stick together no matter what side they're on.”

“Okay, we can agree on something.”

Tolliver clinks his glass to Jack's and makes a toast. “Dead lawyers.”

“Dead lawyers.”

They drain their glasses.

 

Kidder leaves his rental at a metered space on Newbury Street, feeds his quarters in the slot like a good doobie and places the receipt on the dash, as instructed. Sometimes it makes sense to play by the rules. Son of Sam got caught because he failed to pay the meter. Save a dime and spend the rest of your life in a concrete pod?
Dumb ass. Not that Kidder is really afraid of the local flatfoots, who arrested that moron Shane, exactly as intended, on evidence so planted it practically sprouted.

Randall Shane being a moron in Kidder's opinion because he could have made millions but didn't. What's wrong with a little reward for your efforts, all the years spent learning your craft? Which is why Kidder left the military and went mercenary, because that's where the money was—the
private
sector—and because he was sick of higher-ranking officers treating him like a three-year-old. He still had his bosses—lately just the one—but no one can assign him to the burn detail, where drums of human waste get drenched in diesel fuel and then torched. A stench he can never quite erase from his mind.

First stop, a Starbucks. Love that Mocha Frappuccino, dude. Kidder hums to himself as he stands in line. For some reason Aerosmith's “Walk This Way” is sticking in his brain this evening. A song so freaking ancient that he was barely born when it first came out. Still, when in Rome, or in this case Bean Town.

“Here you are, sir.”

Lost in thought, Kidder looks up to see a chickee holding out the tall plastic cup. Trying out a tentative smile.

“Beautiful,” Kidder says, taking the glass. “You know what they say?”

“What's that?”

“You ain't seen nothing 'til you're down on a muffin,” Kidder intones, staring into her little brown eyes as his mouth finds the straw.

Back on the street he strolls, enjoying the season. Five in the evening with hours left of daylight. Oodles of time to kill.

Kidder laughs.

On the sidewalk a young couple, arm in arm, register a brutal-looking, steel-built man chuckling to himself, and instinctively move away. He gives them a wink— Son of Sam never had such style!—and takes the vacated space with a jaunty sense of entitlement.

“Gimme a kiss,” he says to the shying-away couple. “Like this!”

He heads north on Exeter Street, bringing himself one block closer to the Naomi Nantz residence. Thinking it's about time he checked it out with his own eyes, instead of relying on images taken by a circling drone.

Street level is always best. You never know when you might want to make a personal visit, arriving unannounced, in the dark of night, with a properly silenced weapon. And before that can happen, he'll have to find a way in.