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  Point two: I hate when self-important secretaries and other assorted assistants ask, “May I help you?” as if my call, my concerns, must be so profoundly trivial that I couldn’t possibly warrant the attention of their boss. Let me ask you something: Are you a party to the investigation? Are you prepared to be quoted in front of a million people in tomorrow’s Record, or to leak sensitive information that will push the story along? If not, then just take a message.

  Actually, I didn’t say any of that. More politely, but not too much so, I said, “You could take a message.”

  “Is there someone else who could help you?” Okay, now this was getting rich. The night before, her boss sends a team of trained apes to pull me out of a ball game at Fenway Park. They chauffeur me to his office. He sits with me in private as the clock ticks toward midnight and provides me hitherto unknown details on the largest unsolved art heist in the history of the nation. He’s in essence, actually, looking for my help. And she’s thinking I don’t warrant his attention, because this great man must absolutely be far too important to deal with anything or anyone so trivial as the largest, most respected, and most important newspaper in New England.

  “I don’t think so,” I replied, my voice still surprisingly soft, even upbeat. “If you could just tell him—”

  “His schedule is very full today.”

  “So’s mine.” Not quite as nice. “But if you could ask him to call Jack Flynn”—I gave her my number before she cut me off again—” I’ll absolutely take the time to talk to him.” I thanked her, almost overly pleasantly so, and quickly hung up, another border skirmish in the war on government imperialism successfully fought.

  Then I proceeded to pound out another two dozen calls to various state, city and law enforcement officials who I knew or should have known or wanted to know, all in what the unkind might call a fishing expedition, but I’d prefer to describe as an informational dragnet. On a story of this caliber and magnitude, you leave no number undialed, no office unchecked. Hell, the truth is, most of the bureaucrats I was ringing up would take it as a compliment that I was even calling. Of course, all I got was equally officious secretaries and occasional voicemails, but the return calls would come soon enough.

  All along, something still wasn’t right. Intuition, while a gift, was not always a blessing. The pang in my stomach was slowly turning into a knot, and someone seemed to be tying it tighter, pulling on the strings, giving me a sickening feeling that penetrated my flesh and rattled my bones. I turned fully around and gazed out the far windows of the newsroom to see that traffic was still at a standstill. I absently flicked the On button on the portable television that sat on a corner of my desk.

  As the screen came to life, I saw a familiar reporter standing in front of the Gardner Museum, a microphone held up to his uncommonly handsome face. “Behind me,” he was saying, “is one of the world’s great art museums, but most famous not for its paintings, but for being the target of the country’s costliest heist.” From there, it kicked over to a prerecorded segment that basically reiterated the guts of my morning story, with full attribution. I turned the volume down and made a few more calls.

  Somewhere along the line, I noticed that the television image flipped from the Gardner footage to an open grassy space set against the backdrop of the Boston skyline. I quickly turned the volume up to hear a rather comely redheaded reporter saying, “Ham, police are saying that she was found at about 7:15 this morning slumped over the steering wheel of her Saab with a single gunshot wound to the left side of her head. The car doors were all closed, the doors locked, the windows unbroken. No gun was found inside. The twenty-seven-year-old victim was found on the second level of the garage. Her identity has not yet been released pending notification of her relatives.”

  The knot was starting to feel like a damned tumor. I bore in harder on the reporter. Behind her, detectives in suits came and went from a headhouse into the garage.

  Ham, as anchors are wont to do, asked a stupid question. “Kelly, any suspects yet that we know of?”

  Kelly shot him a look that melded disbelief and disdain. Then, composed, she replied, “Ham, the police are being unusually mum on this case. It has all the makings of becoming a very high-profile murder investigation, and they haven’t tipped their hand to us as of yet. There is, however, a briefing scheduled for police headquarters later this morning, and hopefully I’ll have more information to pass along after that.”

  It wasn’t Kelly’s rather colorless answer that sounded alarms, but what occurred at the crime scene as she gave it. Behind her, an enormous man in a dark windbreaker quickly walked out the glass doors of the headhouse, his mustache twitching with each step. He was in the frame for maybe two seconds, tops, but the sight sent a lightning bolt of recognition into my fragile brain.

  Tom Jankle, special agent with the FBI, hanging around a local murder scene. It made not an ounce of sense. FBI agents don’t investigate homicides, at least not run-of-the-mill ones, though I suppose none of them appear run-of-the-mill to the victims. They don’t work with local police departments, at least not very well. They don’t usually even offer their help. Cops and G-men are usually like cowboys and Indians.

  Was it really him? I only caught the quickest of glimpses. I pondered that exact question as Kelly in the field answered yet another profoundly inane question from Ham on the anchor desk, and there, in the background, was Tom Jankle, once again hurrying back into the same glass doors in the near distance that he had just exited, his head down and a cellular telephone planted against his ear.

  I snatched up my phone and called Martin’s office. He picked up on the first ring.

  “Who do we have on the Boston Common murder?”

  “For right now, Mongillo. He’s the only staffer up this early.”

  We both hung up, comfortable enough with each other that we didn’t need time-consuming salutations or felicitations. I immediately belted out Mongillo’s cell phone number, and he, too, picked up on the first ring.

  “Mongillo.”

  “Flynn here.”

  His voice brightened. “Hey, hey, it’s Fair Hair”—his nickname for me. “This is an unexpected honor. Hold on while I get rid of this call.” That’s the thing about Vinny Mongillo—he always had another call. About five seconds later, he was back on the line.

  “So why on God’s good earth would Jack Flynn, the author of the biggest story in America today, be calling a simple little reporting grunt like me?”

  This, for anyone who knows Mongillo, even in passing, was an obvious dose of false modesty. He was as tenacious a reporter as I’ve ever met. He wielded his ever-present phone like a mallet and his pen like a jackhammer, and he had this inordinate, almost otherworldly ability to convince a coat of paint to share the secrets of the damned. This he knew, and so did virtually everyone who knew him.

  “Why,” I replied with a question of my own, as newspaper people tend to do, “would the FBI be interested in that murder you’re covering?”

  “I didn’t know they were.”

  “I believe there’s at least one agent on the scene, and maybe others that I don’t know about.”

  He paused, then asked, “Why do you think they’d be interested?”

  He’s uncanny. He heard in my voice the whispery combination of faint knowledge and uncertainty, and was calling me on it.

  I replied, “Why don’t we get together.”

  “I’ll call you after the police briefing.”

  He was about to hang up when I asked, “The victim, Vinny. What’s her name?”

  “Hilary Kane,” he said, without hesitation. And then the line went dead, without so much as a good-bye.

  Chapter Six

  I was driving up and down Mount Vernon Street in the most historic—read: priciest—neighborhood of Boston, trying not to call attention to myself, which was no easy feat, considering my aging Alfa Romeo convertible was sending up plumes of black smoke from the decrepit exhaust. All parts of
my life seemed to be breaking down.

  It was, as I earlier mentioned, a gorgeous autumn day, temperate, with a gentle sun giving the entire city a clean glow—all of it, every bit, in direct contrast to my gloomy mood. Dog walkers in ponytails led bunches of Labradors and poodles up and down the steep hill. A few of the patrician elderly carried sacks of groceries from DeLuca’s Market or Savenor’s butcher shop. And in front of the apartment building in question, a three-story brick town house that butted up against the narrow sidewalk, a blue-and-white police van sat double-parked. This is where Hilary Kane lived until earlier this morning, and police were inside searching for clues.

  I turned to my passenger, one Hank Sweeney, retired Boston homicide detective, now a shockingly pricey corporate security consultant, and asked, “How the hell much longer will they be in there?”

  “Any moment,” he replied. He said this distractedly, fidgeting, as he was, with a new Palm Pilot V he was trying to program. Actually, check that. I’m not sure if he was trying to program it, or just figure out how to turn it on.

  “You use one of these things?” he asked me, his voice still uncharacteristically soft, like his mind was somewhere else.

  “I’ve got a leather-bound datebook that does the trick.”

  “Does it have an On switch?”

  “You just open the cover and flip to the page you need.”

  He said, “Yeah, that’s probably the way to go.” And he tossed his Palm Pilot down onto the carpeted floor.

  Again, I drove by the apartment, and still, the van sat in the street. The outside apartment doors were closed. There was nothing to see but the clock ticking away toward my deadline.

  Truth be known, I’m not sure what I was after. I had a pretty significant story unfolding on my watch, by my hand—new clues in the Gardner art heist—and here I was chasing my gut up and down Beacon Hill, waiting for a couple of numbskull cops to pack up their gear and hightail it back to headquarters with a few boxes of who knows what.

  But something nagged. Actually, no, it didn’t nag; it fairly well screamed. Something about that story last night wasn’t quite right. Something about this murder this morning wasn’t quite as it seemed. The feeling was causing a minor wave of nausea through my innards.

  About an hour earlier, I had taken the simple step of looking up Hilary Kane in a legal directory. It said she graduated from Boston University Law School the year before and worked in a small firm in Cambridge. When I called the firm, the line had been disconnected. I called the BU Law School alumni office, and a curt woman there told me there was no record of where anyone by the name of Hilary Kane was currently employed. A police department spokeswoman told me, off the record, that they found a Massachusetts Bar card in her purse, but nothing that indicated where she now worked. This was just another reason why the police were inside her house at the time.

  Which is why I was waiting to get in there as well. I needed to know if my suspicions bled into reality, if Hilary Kane was somehow connected to the art heist.

  Hank, meanwhile, needed to know how to program numbers into his new cell phone, which he had pulled from his pocket and was regarding as if it were part of an elaborate communications experiment conducted by a team of professors at MIT. At a stop sign, I took the phone and punched my own name and phone number into his memory, and then punched his name and number into mine.

  “It’s like we’re sweethearts,” he said with that wry smile of his. And he tossed the phone down on the floor next to his Palm Pilot.

  I drove up and down, again and again, Hank making almost unimaginably banal small talk, and me playing over the events of my life in my mind. A huge story breaks. Elizabeth and I are incapable of discussing her impending move. I inexplicably feel involved in the murder of a woman I don’t even know.

  And then the apartment doors opened. I quickly pulled into a rare Beacon Hill parking space to watch. A man and a woman, each wearing golf shirts, khaki pants, and sneakers, came walking out, each one of them balancing a sizable box in their arms. Their matching dress and rigid, humorless demeanor told me they were either tourists from the Dakotas or cops from Boston. Their shoulder holsters and shields hooked to their respective belt loops confirmed the latter. The fact that they had the Boston police insignia emblazoned on their jerseys actually screamed it. You don’t need Bob Woodward here in Boston when the city is already blessed with Jack Flynn.

  “Here we go,” I said to Sweeney, who was squinting out the windshield at them. “Looks like they’re cleaning her out.”

  “Routine, very routine,” he replied, his voice low, flat, as if the detectives might be able to hear us.

  They set the boxes down on the street, and, as the woman began placing the items in the back of the van, the man went back inside the apartment foyer and retrieved a computer monitor. He made one more trip back inside, and came out with what looked like the computer itself. They slammed the back doors, settled inside, and started the engine, the woman driving, the man shotgun. Justice for Hilary Kane was very much in the hands of the state.

  Except, wait a minute. A shiny, gunmetal-black sedan came pounding up Mount Vernon Street, swerved around the van, and shot in front of it, screeching to a stop at a jagged angle that prevented the police vehicle from continuing in any direction but into the parked cars. A second car, identical in appearance, came racing up the hill seconds behind it and snuggled up close to the back of the van. Almost in unison, the driver’s and passenger doors flung open on each of the cars, and four men in dark suits jumped onto the pavement and scurried to each side of the blue van.

  I couldn’t see the cops’ faces, but I did see that the driver rolled down her window.

  “We’ve got a courtside seat to an honest to goodness turf battle,” Sweeney said, sounding at once interested and amused.

  I looked at him quizzically.

  “Feds verses Boston PD,” he said, by way of elaboration, “right here in front of you.”

  This was somewhere far beyond intriguing, given that I hadn’t said a word to Sweeney yet about my suspicions of FBI involvement, not because I was holding out, but just because I had no idea where this was going.

  I asked, “How do you know those guys are Feds?”

  He acted angry in that way he sometimes does, even when he’s not. “Look at them, for chrissakes,” he replied, his voice louder now. “Who the hell else do you know wears a suit jacket when they’re driving in a car?”

  Good point. I guess nobody. I said, “So they’re FBI.” It was as much a question as a statement of fact.

  “Bet your ass,” he said, his tone still angry. Then, calmer, “Straight out of central casting.” I could all but picture him munching on a large bucket of popcorn as he watched the unfolding show.

  I turned my attention back to the battle at hand. Nobody looked particularly happy. This wasn’t a collection of lawmen—and -woman—swapping war stories from the trenches, maybe giving one another the needle, talking about the fragile state of modern America when a pretty young woman can be savaged in a downtown parking garage. No, these people looked to have the personalities of professional golfers.

  One of them reached into the breast pocket of his suit and pulled out—a gun? No—a sheet of paper. He deliberately unfolded it and handed it to the driver.

  With that, the van doors opened. The driver got out and inspected the sheet. The second cop, the passenger, came around the vehicle, his two G-men escorts in tow. He, too, pulled a rumpled sheet of paper out of his back pocket, unfolded it in greater haste than his federal counterpart, and shoved it into the hands of a man who looked to be the FBI ringleader. For a long moment, everyone stood around reading the two sheets of paper. I wish newspapers attracted that much attention in the age of cable television. What we had was a certifiable standoff.

  “What are they doing?” I asked Sweeney. Sweeney, by the way, is a man of monstrous proportions, not like a hippo, but more solid, like a bear. When I looked over at him, I saw h
e had a tiny pair of field glasses tucked under the bill of his Boston Red Sox cap and was peering intently at the proceedings.

  “Dueling warrants,” he said, the binoculars still pressed against his black, shiny face. “This could get real interesting.”

  I asked, “Why do they need warrants to get into a dead woman’s house?”

  “Maybe they don’t, unless she’s living in there with someone who might be a suspect—a husband, or a boyfriend, or a roommate of some sort. You know if she’s married?”

  “Don’t think so. I checked the property records online before I came over, and she’s the sole owner.”

  “Then like I said, boyfriend or roommate.”

  Outside, the female cop pulled the radio off her belt, turned her back on the assembled crowd, and made some sort of call, I assumed to headquarters. Not to be outdone, the FBI ringleader, virtually indistinguishable from his colleagues, pulled a tiny cellular telephone out of the breast pocket of his suit, took two steps in the other direction, and made a call to God knows where. It could have been the attorney general of the United States, the way this thing was looking. Now that would be a good story.

  “Who they calling?” I asked.

  “You think I read minds or lips?” Sweeney replied. Okay, good point. I just thought he might have been in a similar predicament at some point in his long law enforcement career.

  Sweeney, you see, is of the Boston Police Department homicide unit, retired, a lieutenant when the gold watch finally came. I met him a year ago, when my newspaper was under a takeover threat and my publisher was shot to death. We did each other an enormous favor, and from that, I think we’re entwined for life. He moved back to Boston from a retirement home in one of those wretched little towns in Florida, and is now making a small fortune telling people things about police departments that they wouldn’t otherwise know. For me, he does it for free. He thinks he owes me. I do nothing to dissuade him of the notion.