Dead Line Read online

  Also by Brian McGrory

  The Nominee

  The Incumbent

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2004 by Brian McGrory

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Atria Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  ISBN: 0-7434-8034-1

  First Atria Books hardcover edition January 2004

  ATRIA BOOKS is a trademark of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Visit us on the World Wide Web:

  http://www.SimonSays.com

  To Carole and to Colleen, for being there, always.

  Prologue

  Friday, September 19

  L ife shouldn’t be this complicated. That’s what Hilary Kane was thinking as she took another sip of overpriced red wine at the bar at Jur-Ne, a pretentiously slick lounge in the newer Ritz-Carlton Hotel in downtown Boston. Well, she was thinking of that and exactly what had made it so complicated.

  On either side of her, two coworkers, Amanda and Erica, prattled on about the energy and emotions that go into raising only mildly maladjusted kids. Men in suits coming from their jobs with mutual fund companies and white-shoe law firms jostled past for much-needed drinks. The too-cool bartenders were taking their time serving $13 Dirty Martinis.

  None of it had the slightest effect on Hilary, who continued to sip her wine at a rapid clip and stare out the movie screen–size windows at the fading light of the city streetscape.

  She had become a bad cliché, she told herself, queuing up the scene yet again in the videocam of her mind. She had been in Phoenix the week before on a rare business trip, a legal conference that her boss had sent her to. She had called her fiancé, Chuck, at 11:00 P.M., Boston time, eight o’clock her time, to wish him good night. She had said she’d see him when she arrived home the next evening, Saturday, his birthday. They’d have a nice dinner at a restaurant where she had already made a reservation. She didn’t tell him that she planned a morning surprise.

  And that’s what she did. A few hours after her call, she climbed aboard the redeye flight from Sky Harbor International to Logan Airport. She took a cab to their Beacon Hill apartment. As she walked into the building foyer with her luggage in her hand, she had this vision that she’d find him standing before the bathroom mirror, shaving, the stereo playing Clapton or maybe B. B. King. She could picture the wide grin that would break out across his handsome face, the deep, familiar hug, the I-missed-yous and the happy birthdays as the two tumbled into their king-size bed.

  She put the key into the hole and turned the lock. She nudged the door open with her shoulder. She walked into a silent apartment, and immediately, she knew something was wrong.

  The first thing she smelled was Chinese food, and she looked over to her left at her loft-style apartment and saw open containers sitting on the coffee table next to a pair of used plates and two empty wineglasses. When she moved closer, she saw one of the glasses was smeared with lipstick. One of Chuck’s shirts was tossed haphazardly on the floor.

  She looked slowly to her right, toward the rear of the apartment, her open bedroom area, her stomach churning so hard she thought she might throw up. She had known him a year and a half. When they first met, he was a high-flying software entrepreneur, about to sell his company to one of the giants for an obscene amount of cash. He was magnetic and charismatic and justifiably confident. It took him about an hour to have her completely charmed.

  Then the sale fell through. His company washed out in the receding high-tech tide. He went from expectations of a hundred million dollars to barely having bus fare, so he moved out of his penthouse apartment and came to live with her.

  He’d get up every morning, read the papers from front to back, then sit at her computer in the bay window and plot out the next big thing. She went off to her sometimes grinding job as a government lawyer. It wasn’t great, but it was a life. They were due to be married in six more months.

  As she walked toward the back of the apartment, she heard her cat, Hercules, crying for help. Someone, she saw to her disgust, had shut him inside his tiny airline carrier. She looked at the rumpled bed, at the shoes—men’s and women’s—that were tossed haphazardly around it, at the clothing that littered the hardwood floor.

  Then she focused on the closed bathroom door and listened for a moment to the pale sound of cascading water that came from within. She moved toward it, slowly, quietly, steadily, as if she were sleepwalking. She allowed her hand to rest for a moment on the brass knob. Then she pushed the door open, not forcefully, but decisively.

  Instantly, she was met by humidity, the sound of the streaming water, the smell of lathered soap. She stood in the doorway staring through the floor-to-ceiling door of the glass-paneled steam-shower at her boyfriend having sex with a woman she had never previously seen, the shower jets pelting against their hair, the big droplets of water streaming down their respective bodies.

  She stood watching them for an awkward, agonizing moment, as if they were an exhibit at a zoo, not out of any curiosity, but because neither of them had noticed her enter the room. Finally, she picked up a tube of toothpaste from the vanity and fired it at the shower door. Chuck whirled around and, in a voice muffled by the glass and water, called out, “Honey, no!”

  She heard the woman ask, “Is that her?” At least that’s what she thought she heard. Chuck turned off the water. He flung open the door and grabbed two towels that were hanging on a nearby hook. He handed one to the blonde woman, who began unapologetically drying herself off as if she didn’t have a worry in the world.

  “We need to talk, Hil,” Chuck kept saying as he tamped his body dry.

  Standing in the doorway, she thought for a moment about retrieving the Big Bertha driver—his birthday gift—hidden in her closet and bashing in both of their skulls.

  Instead, she looked at the floor and said, “Get out. Both of you.” What else, she wondered to herself, could you say?

  She watched the blonde wrap the towel around her body and step out of the shower. Chuck stood there in the middle of the bathroom giving Hilary a pleading stare. Hilary walked back into the apartment and toward the front, setting herself down on a stool at the breakfast bar in her kitchen. A few minutes later, the woman walked wordlessly out of the apartment, Chuck about two minutes behind her. Hilary dissolved into tears and fury, and hadn’t seen him since.

  “Over at the Whitney School, they make the parents take a psychological test. If your kid gets in, it’s $18,000 for kindergarten. That’s when they should give you the damned test, to figure out if you’re crazy for paying it!”

  That was Erica, the coworker, a chinless, thirty-something woman in a Talbots’ suit who was racing uncontrollably toward an early middle age.

  Amanda, who seemed to sport not only her chin, but Erica’s as well, said, “Well, Hilary will live all this soon enough.” She looked at their younger, far more attractive coworker and asked, “What is it, six months until the big day?”

  The big day, Hilary thought to herself. Right. The big day was last week, the day that changed her life, the day that would forever leave her jaded.

  But to them, she nodded halfheartedly and said, “Yeah, six months.” She hadn’t told anyone yet of her relationship’s horrific demise.

  As Amanda launched into another question, the young bartender in black delivered Hilary another glass of wine. At that moment, a familiar man in a dark blue suit approach
ed the three women, and Amanda and Erica greeted him as if they were in junior high, the former even shrieking his title—“Mayor!”—as she placed both hands on his wrist. Hilary, no great fan of the mayor’s, turned toward the bar and rolled her eyes. This was not shaping up to be the escapist cocktail hour she had hoped it would be.

  At that point, the night became a case study of one thing turning into another. Specifically, two glasses of wine turned into six, Amanda and Erica eventually, reluctantly, turned and headed for the door. Mayor Daniel Harkins turned from a loathsome egomaniac into an emotional crutch, and still later, a potential conquest, someone who could make a tattered psyche feel whole again, even if only for a moment.

  All of which explains how Hilary Kane and the mayor ended up at his apartment on the twenty-eighth floor of the Ritz-Carlton at 2:00 A.M., drunkenly and awkwardly pulling off each other’s clothes. She wanted to be desired, to be able to look in the mirror the next morning and know that this man absolutely had to have her.

  After fifteen minutes of remarkably mediocre, alcohol-inhibited sex, Harkins placed a meaty forearm across his eyes and began to snore. Hilary climbed out of his bed, slowly and delicately, not out of any sense of courtesy, but for fear that if she woke him up, she’d have to spend another minute in his conscious presence. She pulled on her clothes—far quicker, she thought to herself, than the slutty blonde the week before.

  She tiptoed outside his bedroom with her shoes in her hand, then sat on a high-back leather chair at a desk in his living room and looked at the blinking light on his computer. On the walls all around her were pictures of the mayor with various governors, senators, presidents, movie stars, and heads of state. She felt cheap in a way that she had never felt before: pathetic, insecure, and needy. She thought for a moment about quickly logging on to her email account to check one more time if Chuck had sent her a note of apology and explanation. She thought better of it, slipped her clogs on, and swiveled away from the desk.

  But in a moment of weakness, standing before the desk, she flicked the computer mouse with her hand and the monitor came alive with light. Rather than a desktop, she was staring at a Word document, a file called Toby. She began scanning, and her hand instinctively rose to her mouth in fascination. She scrolled down, gripped by its contents, listening intently for any sounds from the bedroom. As she reached the second of what looked to be several pages, she struck the Print button.

  The printer emitted the labored sounds of warming up, then began slowly churning out pages. As it did, Hilary clicked the Window field, saw another file called TOBY 2, and clicked on it. A new document, loaded with facts and names, filled the screen. She hit Print again.

  She began collecting pages from the printer, when it suddenly froze up. A box appeared on the computer screen telling her she was out of paper. She looked in the printer basket and estimated she was about one page shy. A sound came from the bedroom, Danny the dolt rising to his drunken feet. She rolled the papers up in her hand, clicked on “OK” on the “Out of paper” box, and made for the door. The lights on the printer continued to blink a warning.

  She pulled the door slowly shut behind her and bolted down the long hallway. What she needed was a taxicab. What she wanted was a shower. What she didn’t know was that the beginning of the end was upon her.

  Chapter One

  Monday, September 22

  T he moment, or rather, the episode, might be the ultimate proof of that old sports axiom that only fools try to predict the future in that little jewel box of a ballyard called Fenway Park. The fool in this case: Me. I was sitting in a field box, third row behind the visitors’ dugout, great seats courtesy of my editor, Peter Martin. Well, okay, it wasn’t actually Martin’s courtesy as much as my bribery that got me the seats. I offered him dinner at any restaurant in town for the company tickets, and Martin, having absolutely no appreciation for the consequences of this great athletic event, grabbed the bait. I’ve always believed it’s food, not love, that conquers all.

  So it’s one of those crystal clear late September nights when Boston seems to be the absolute epicenter of the entire world. Suntans have faded. People have stormed back into town refreshed from a summer spent in Vermont, or Maine, or on Cape Cod. The city is filled with men in dark suits and red ties handing fistfuls of cash to young valets in front of swank restaurants with front doors lit by gas torches. Half the women on Newbury Street look like they just came from a Cosmo photo shoot. I swear, you could strike a match off their calves, if they let you, though they probably wouldn’t, not, at least, until making more formal acquaintance.

  Ahem, anyway. The leaves were just showing their first hint of color. The air had a slight nip to it, and the breeze a bit of an edge—enough of one, as a matter of fact, to take Nomar Garciaparra’s lead-off line drive in the bottom of the eighth inning and turn it from a sure-thing home run to a sliding double that bounced hard off the left field wall, the famed Green Monster.

  So Nomar’s on second. The Sox are playing the Yankees. Need I say more? Well, yes, I do. They trail the Yankees 3–1 in the game, and they lag two games behind them in the East Division of the American League, with only a handful of games left in the season. To say this was an important game is like saying Jack Flynn only covers major stories. You don’t need to; we’re all too sophisticated for it; it’s just one of those things in life that’s automatically known among those accustomed to being in the know, and even those who aren’t.

  With Nomar taking a short lead, Manny Ramirez, batting cleanup, draws a walk, putting men on first and second, nobody out, David Ortiz coming to the plate.

  Here’s where the prediction stuff comes in. I turned to Elizabeth, my girlfriend, the brilliant, gorgeous one on my left with the pouty lips and the legs so achingly long it actually hurts her to fold herself into these seats, and I said, “My bet is, he bunts.” I mean, of course he’s going to bunt. Not only do you put both men in scoring position, but you take out the prospect of a late-inning, rally-dousing double play.

  Elizabeth doesn’t say anything, not because she doesn’t have thoughts on this exact issue. I’m sure she did. But she’s not there. I vaguely remember her telling me something about the women’s room and heading out to look for a couple of those delightful Cool Dogs with the warm chocolate topping.

  Instead, I’m looking at a short, middle-aged guy with stubby legs in loose-fitting jeans and a bored expression on his ruddy face. He looks like he took a wrong turn at the $2 window over at Suffolk Downs. I mean, he’s the only guy within 200 miles of Fenway Park who’s bored on this night.

  “That seat’s taken,” I tell him.

  He doesn’t reply. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Rivera wind up and deliver. I turn back to the game, watch Ortiz lower his bat like he’s going to bunt—I knew it—and the ball zip past him and into the catcher’s mitt. Strike one.

  “I said, that seat’s taken.”

  Still, no answer. He’s just kind of looking at me out of these deadened eyes, not even paying attention to the most pivotal game of the season, but hardly paying attention to me, either. Again, Rivera winds up, but this time Ortiz swings away—what the hell’s he doing?—and misses. Strike two.

  I watch Ortiz in disbelief. I look at the third base coach to see if maybe a signal was crossed or missed. Then I remember the clown beside me.

  “Sir—” I begin. I hear the crack of a bat. Two men in the seats in front of me scream in unison. The entire crowd rises to its collective feet. The ball, a simple gleam of white, soars high into the air on its path toward nirvana, which in this case, is the right field bullpen. It’s going, it’s going, it’s, it’s—well, out of reach of the right fielder, bounding off the wall, squirting wildly around the turf. The damned wind knocked it down again.

  Garciaparra scores from second. Ramirez comes chugging into third like he’s running from a burning building with twenty-five pounds of firefighting equipment draped across his back. Ortiz stops on second: 3–2, nobody out,
two men in scoring position.

  I’m thinking that Elizabeth’s going to be furious she missed all this. Then that thought is replaced by my abiding hope that she found the Cool Dogs. And finally it occurs to me that I’ve sat with her for three hours, seven-and-a-half innings, and the Sox scored a single run, and on a throwing error at that. This mute’s been sitting next to me for five minutes and we’re about to blow the game open. Now I don’t want to sound superstitious or anything like that, but just to make sure he was in no unnecessary rush to leave, I turned to him and said, “Jesus Christ, pal, what a game, huh?”

  He still didn’t reply. The entire stadium is up on its feet, everyone clapping in an audible frenzy, and he’s just sitting there looking at me, but really looking at nothing at all.

  Undaunted, I said, “Great seats, no?” Read: Don’t be rushing anywhere, there, MVP. You may be the entire reason for this turn of fortune.

  Trot Nixon comes to the plate. He takes the first pitch for a ball. The crowd calms itself down and everyone takes their seats. Elizabeth is still down in concessions hell—exactly where I want her right now, bless her heart, not to mention the rest of her gorgeous body.

  I leaned back in my seat, casually turned to my silent friend, and said, “Truth is, I think Trot’s the best clutch hitter on the club.”

  He replied, “You Jack Flynn?”

  Ding, ding, ding. I knew this was some sort of Christ figure, or maybe Christ himself, descending from the heavens to push the Red Sox to their first World Series win in 85 years, and he’s about to let me in on his secret.

  Nixon swung and missed. I turned to my seatmate and stared him up and down, allowing some of my reporter’s skepticism to take hold. I asked, “Why do you ask?”

  He was just sitting there, his eyes so dull we might as well have been sitting in the last pew of the Holy Name Cathedral on a Sunday morning rather than the box seats of Fenway Park during a one-run game against the Yankees in the middle of the best pennant race we’ve had in this city in twenty years.