Next of Kin (8 page)

‘It’s got active cultures. Couldn’t hurt.’

Finn shrugged. ‘I’ll give it a shot.’

She brought over two containers with two spoons, handed one of each to him. She pulled the tin foil top off hers, licked it, and began stirring the contents with the spoon, bringing the fruit to
the surface. ‘You ever find out anything about your father?’

‘Nope.’

Finn watched her as she stirred her yogurt, her eyebrows crossed in thought like dueling swords. She was looking intently at her yogurt, and she didn’t look up when she spoke next.
‘This isn’t over for you.’ It wasn’t a question, it was an observation.

‘What isn’t over?’ he asked. It was foolish; they both knew what she was talking about. He kept forgetting that she’d crammed a lifetime of tragedy into her sixteen
years. It gave her better insight than most people in their sixties.

‘Your mother. Her murder,’ she said. ‘You’re not gonna let it drop.’

‘You don’t need to worry about it,’ Finn said.

‘Like I said, I’m not worried; I want to help. But I also want to know why.’

Finn considered the question for a moment, and realized he had no good answer. ‘She was my mother,’ he said at last. ‘I never knew who she was. I never knew where I came
from.’

‘So what?’ she asked. ‘Who cares who your parents were or where you came from? The only thing that matters is where you are now. Look at my parents: a murdered thief for a
father, and a crack whore for a mother. If people think I’m gonna let them define who I am, they got another goddamned think coming.’

Finn believed her. ‘Not knowing is different. I’ve lived my entire life with this question mark, and now there’s a chance I can get some answers.’

‘What if they aren’t the answers you’re looking for?’

‘I’d still rather know,’ he said. ‘Besides, you heard the detective. No one’s gonna lift a finger to find her murderer. He was right, I know how this works;
they’ll do some poking around, but unless something obvious pops up, this case will die before the weekend. She was my mother. I’m going to find out what happened.’

Sally scraped the last of the yogurt from the bottom of the container and licked the spoon clean. ‘I understand,’ she said.

He laughed ruefully. ‘That makes one of us.’

‘It’s pretty simple,’ she said. ‘You’re a decent guy. You think it’s the right thing to do. End of story.’

He shook his head. ‘I’m not a decent guy,’ he said.

She stood up and walked over to the kitchen and threw her yogurt cup into the trash. ‘Yeah, you are,’ she said. ‘Doesn’t mean you’re perfect. But a bad guy
wouldn’t take care of a pain-in-the-ass daughter of a dead client just because it’s the right thing to do.’ He looked up, but she was already headed out of the room, back toward
the hallway. ‘I’ll see you in the morning,’ she called back over her shoulder.

‘Yeah,’ Finn called. ‘See you in the morning.’

Coale sat in the dark on the street outside the lawyer’s apartment. He’d watched Long pull away after taking a pull from the empty bottle. That, at least, was a
good sign. The more the detective unraveled, the less dangerous he became. Coale knew from his contacts that Long was barely hanging on in the department. If they discovered he was drinking, the
BPD would have the legitimate grounds they needed to dismiss him. It was what everyone wanted.

It would solve some of Coale’s problems, too. Drunk or not, Long had put Elizabeth Connor together with the lawyer. It looked as though his skills as an investigator were not as impaired
as Coale might have hoped.

He frowned. The lawyer added additional challenges to the equation. He knew about Scott T. Finn, Esquire. The lawyer had a colorful past. He had a reputation for being stubborn. That
wasn’t what Coale needed at the moment.

He reached for his phone and dialed the number. Eamonn McDougal picked up on the second ring. ‘It’s me,’ Coale said. ‘I’m in Charlestown. Long just left the
lawyer’s apartment.’

‘That was fast,’ McDougal said. ‘Not surprising, though. I can use it to my advantage.’

‘How?’ Coale asked.

‘It’s not your concern.’

‘You hired me to do a job,’ he said. ‘Everything is my concern.’

‘Just stick with Finn. Let me know what he does.’

Coale bristled. ‘I don’t take orders. If you don’t like it, hire someone else.’

‘You know that’s not an option,’ McDougal said. ‘I’ll double your rate.’

Coale considered the offer. ‘I’ll keep an eye on the lawyer,’ he said. Realistically he didn’t have a choice.

He closed his phone, opened it again. He had another call to make.

CHAPTER NINE

Long stared at the paperwork on his desk, trying to rub the pain between his eyes away with his thumb and index finger. It wasn’t working. If anything, the pain seemed to
grow and spread out from the bridge of his nose to the rest of his skull like an oil spill. Mornings were the worst, he was finding.

Elizabeth Connor’s life was spread out before him. Bank records, utility bills, phone records, credit reports. Even when the interview notes from her neighbors and co-workers were added,
it painted a thin, watery picture. From all appearances, the woman had lived on the edge, constantly in debt and falling further behind. She worked at a place called Rescue Finance, which was
little more than a legal loan-sharking business that advanced cash on future paychecks for those in trouble at a twenty-one percent interest rate. Probably a money laundering racket for the mob, as
well. It was a three-person office operation, the actual ownership of which was obscured in a corporate gopher warren. Her fellow workers seemed to know little about her; they described her as
distant. Her neighbors described her as unpleasant. No one described her as a friend.

Digging through the woman’s life depressed Long. It all seemed too familiar. Few would mourn the passing of Elizabeth Conner, and it struck Long that that probably put her in a solid
majority of the population. Nobody really cared about anyone else in the end. You were born alone, and you died alone. At least that was how Long saw it through the lens of Elizabeth Connor’s
existence. All she’d left behind was a broken trail of paperwork.

He glanced at the yellowed sketch artist’s drawing on the corner of his desk. He’d taken it from the bulletin board downstairs earlier in the morning. It had been hanging there for
years, and he had passed by it every day without taking conscious note of it. And yet it must have penetrated his brain at some level, because there on the sheet was the image of a middle-aged man
with gray hair pulled back from his forehead, revealing a light v-shaped scar. The man’s eyes were bright, and his expression in the image was cold. It was probably a coincidence, but the man
in the picture looked exactly like the man he’d seen in the crowd outside Elizabeth Connor’s apartment.

‘That the Mass Avenue job?’ a voice behind him asked.

Long looked up. Captain Townsend was looking over his shoulder. He was short enough that he had to stretch his spine to see the desk. His interest seemed feigned. ‘Yeah,’ Long said.
‘Not much, is it?’

‘Anything worth following up on?’

Long shook his head. ‘Probably not. Lab came back – no fingerprints, not even any from the murdered woman. Departed had a kid. Gave him up for adoption. He’s a lawyer now in
Charlestown. I went over there last night to check him out, but I don’t think there’s anything to it. He said he didn’t know who his mother was, and I believe him. He wrote an
angry letter back in the nineties, but there’s no indication she ever responded. I can’t find anything that ties them together other than the birth itself.’

‘Nothing else?’

‘Not really. There’s a bar nearby where she worked, she used to go there a lot. Not the happy-go-lucky drinking type. More hardcore. Word is she had a little bit of a rep when she
was younger, but that was a long time ago.’

‘Explains how she ended up with a kid.’

‘It does,’ Long agreed. ‘I’ve run her records and I haven’t come up with anything solid to suggest she was a pro, but it wouldn’t surprise me if she was a
hell of an amateur for a while when she was young. There are a few phone numbers that I have to chase down, but I don’t expect to find much. Chances are it’s just a random
robbery.’

‘What’s with the picture?’ Townsend asked, looking at the sketch.

‘Probably nothing,’ Long replied. ‘When I was outside Connor’s apartment the other day I saw a man in the crowd who looked like this guy. Same hair, same eyes, same scar.
I pulled this off the board this morning just to look at it more closely.’

The captain picked up the picture, laughed in a short, clipped grunt. ‘He’s not real,’ he said. ‘He’s a ghost.’

‘A ghost?’

‘That’s what we used to call him. This is a description given by a witness to four murders back in the nineties, before you were on the force. Ugly business, after the Winter Hill
gang collapsed, and people were trying to fill the vacuum. There was a group run out of New York that was trying to move in. Some of the more established local players decided to send a clear
message, so four guys from the New York contingent were targeted. They were picked off one by one in some of the grimmest murders we’d seen around here in a long time. The New York guys
stayed away after that.’

‘And this guy was behind it?’

‘It was never clear. A snitch named Toby Shilow claimed he’d seen the guy who did it. He’s the one who gave us the description. Said the guy was a freelancer hired by some of
Whitey Bulger’s crew. To hear Toby tell it, he was the coldest killer anyone had ever seen. The kind of a guy no one would fuck with. He did piecework as a cleaner and a button pusher. We
looked hard into it, though, and we came up with nothing.’

‘You think the snitch was trying to throw you off the real killers?’

‘That’s what we figured,’ Townsend said. ‘We’ll never know for sure, though. A couple weeks later we found Toby in a suitcase. He’d been cut into about ten
pieces. His eyes and tongue were missing. Doc was pretty sure they’d been cut out before Toby was killed.’

‘Nasty.’

‘Yeah, it was. We went back to looking for this guy, but we never found anything. If he ever existed, he disappeared. We started calling him the Ghost. For a while, whenever we came across
a murder we couldn’t solve, we blamed it on the Ghost.’

‘Sounds melodramatic.’

‘It was. He’s more of a myth than an actual suspect in anything. Like Keyser Söze or Bigfoot. We only keep the picture up for our own amusement.’

‘Well, like I said, it’s probably nothing. Just my imagination.’ Long’s neck was starting to ache from looking behind him, so he turned back to his desk. He expected
Townsend to leave, but it didn’t happen. He turned around again. ‘Something else, Captain?’

‘Yeah,’ Townsend said. He wouldn’t meet Long’s eyes. ‘In my office.’

Long looked down at the papers strewn across his desk. There was a flask in the drawer; he was tempted to pull it out and have a drink. He could feel his arm reach in that direction, but
reconsidered. No point in making matters worse. Not yet, at least. ‘Sure, Captain,’ Long replied. He’d known this meeting was coming at some point.

Tom Kozlowski listened as Finn described his meeting with Long from the night before. When Finn finished, Kozlowski sat back and thought for a moment.

‘Did he tell you you’re a suspect?’ he asked.

Finn shook his head. ‘No. But he wasn’t particularly subtle when he said that I’m pretty much the only person they’re following up with. Apparently the woman didn’t
have very many people in her life. And the letter I wrote . . .’ Finn didn’t finish the thought.

‘Not good, I take it?’

‘It explains the visit,’ Finn said. ‘I wasn’t in the most loving frame of mind when I wrote it.’

‘Did you make any actual threats in it?’ Kozlowski asked. He was working the issues like a cop. ‘Did you say anything that would suggest that if you found her, you’d do
her harm?’

‘Not directly,’ Finn said. ‘I told her I thought she was going to hell, and I said I hoped really bad things happened to her, but I never made any direct threats.’

‘That’s good, at least,’ Kozlowski said. He stretched his feet out from his body, looked at his toes. ‘In the end, you didn’t have anything to do with her death;
you didn’t even know her, so you’ve got nothing to worry about.’

‘Yeah, you’re probably right,’ Finn said.

‘But you’re not going to leave it alone, are you?’

‘No,’ Finn replied. ‘I’m not.’

Kozlowski sat forward. ‘No, I didn’t figure you would.’

‘Would you?’

He shook his head. ‘Doesn’t matter one way or another what I would do. She wasn’t my mother, she was yours.’

‘I still want your advice.’

‘Bullshit,’ Kozlowski said. ‘You don’t want my advice, you want my help. You don’t listen to my advice when I give it to you.’

‘I listen to it,’ Finn corrected. ‘I just don’t always follow it.’

‘Ever. You don’t
ever
follow it.’ Kozlowski let his head hang down between his knees. ‘I swear to God, keeping your ass safe is becoming a full-time goddamned
job.’

‘Yeah, but it pays okay.’ Finn leaned forward and looked at Kozlowski. ‘You’ll help me, right?’

‘Have I got a choice?’

Long sat in Townsend’s office. The captain was uncomfortable; most people were around Long these days. He wondered whether that would ever change.

Townsend shifted in his chair, a big black leather beast that swallowed him up, making him look even smaller against the huge dark backdrop.

‘So,’ Townsend began. He stopped, not seeming to know in which direction to take the conversation. ‘We’re still trying to figure out who to partner you with,’ he
said. ‘It may take a little while.’

‘That’s not surprising.’

‘No,’ Townsend said. ‘It’s not.’ He cleared his throat and shifted in the giant chair. ‘I want to be clear with you here, Long. You’ve been one of the
best detectives we’ve had on the squad. Your record speaks for itself. Three months ago, I would have pegged you as being a guy who was gonna sit in this chair someday.’

‘Not anymore,’ Long said with a sardonic smile.