Her guy had his hands on the edges of the door, trying to keep Jenn from closing it on his leg. I slammed the heel of my hand onto his fingers and he let go with a yell. I opened the door and grabbed him by the lapels with one hand, and patted him down with my other. No gun. His wallet was in an inside pocket of his leather jacket: Kevin Walsh, a Boston address, somehow made it to twenty-six dumb years of age.
“Your partner’s out, Kevin, so you’re going to have to do all the talking.”
“About what? We were just taking a shortcut here and you attacked us, man, you’re crazy.”
“You were following us. And you and your friend tried to grab a man named David Fine two weeks ago. On Summit Avenue with this van. You hit a cyclist and he got away.”
“You’re crazy!”
“Where is David Fine?”
“How should I know!”
I added my weight to Jenn’s on the car door and he cried, “Ow. Christ. Okay. you’re right, you’re right.”
“About what?”
“We tried to grab him. Please.”
“Then what?”
“Let go my leg!”
“Then what?”
“Aargh! He got away, like you said.”
“Where?”
“Fuck!”
“Just tell me where.”
“Down those steps. Down that path. I don’t know what the fuck it’s called. He ran down them and we couldn’t find him with the van.”
I nodded at Jenn and we took just enough weight off the door to keep his leg pinned without pressure.
“Who hired you?”
“He did,” Walsh panted, pointing to his driver’s seat. “He said we had a job to do, didn’t say who hired him. Didn’t say why.”
I looked at Jenn. “Do you believe him?” He saw the look in my eyes and tried to pull his leg inside the car but Jenn was too fast. She threw herself against it again and he screamed as it trapped his leg, lower this time, closer to the ankle.
“Christ!”
“Who wanted him? Who wanted David!”
“No fucking way,” he said. “Break my leg, go ahead. I ain’t saying fuck all.”
I could tell he was too scared to talk, whether I broke his leg or not, and one of these shitheads had to drive the other one out of that alley. I picked up the GPS and went back to our car, got the digital camera and took shots of both pretty boys. I also took close-ups of both drivers’ licences and the van. I banged the mud off the front plate and shot that as well. Then I helped Walsh swing his limp partner into the back seat so he could drive them both to a hospital, if they so chose. I figured they would head for Sinai. If they’d been following us for any amount of time, they knew where it was.
We had a message from Colin MacAdam when we got up to my room. Karl Thompson had cracked David’s password and had sent us a link to a ghost drive where we could look at his email and Internet history. Jenn started on that while I booted up my laptop, uploaded the pictures I had taken of our assailants and called Mike Gianelli in Brookline.
“How would you like to see a photo of the guys who tried to abduct David Fine?”
“You serious?”
“Give me an email address, you’ll have them in a second.”
“All right, Geller,” he said, and gave it to me. “I’ll circulate them here and with some of my old guys in Boston. We come up with something, I’ll call you. Jesus Christ,” he said, “maybe turning you loose wasn’t such a bad idea.”
When I called Adath Israel and asked to speak to the rabbi, the woman who answered said they didn’t have one. “We will, shortly,” she said. “Certainly for the High Holidays. Our search committee is almost done. Are you thinking of joining?”
“No, I’m from out of town,” I said. “I was hoping to ask the rabbi about a member named David Fine. I was told they’re close.”
“Oh, you want Rabbi Ed,” she said. “Ed Lerner. Yes, he and David were close, I’d say. But he’s not with our congregation anymore. He stepped down last month.”
“Can I ask why?”
There was a pause and then she said, “Personal reasons. That’s all I can say.”
“Could you put me in touch with him?”
“His number is unlisted,” she said. “So, no.”
“It’s very important,” I said. “David is missing and his family has hired me to find him.”
“Missing?”
“More than two weeks.”
“But he’s such a lovely young man,” she said, as if that were some kind of shield against trouble. “No wonder he hasn’t been at services lately. All right, you leave your number with me,” she said. “I’ll get Rabbi Ed to call you. And you didn’t hear it from me, but his daughter might be in the book under S for Sandra.”
“She’d be listed?”
“She’s single, I heard. She’d be crazy not to.”
“David is here on a very limited visa, right?” Jenn asked.
“Yeah, a J1.”
“Can’t work anywhere, can’t moonlight.”
“No.”
“So he probably can’t vote, right?”
“No. No way.”
“So why did he spend so much time checking the website of Marc McConnell, congressman from the Eighth District?”
“Which is where?”
“Let me check. There’s a map on McConnell’s site. Hmmm. Mostly downtown Boston, Cambridge, parts of Brookline-but not where David lived. Curves right around it.”
“The same city line that kept the Boston PD out.”
“Right.”
“So someone who can’t vote and can’t even ask for a favour because he’d be asking the wrong guy … how much time was he on the site?”
“In hours or minutes, I don’t know, but he visited it more than once. Bookmarked a number of pages. And searched McConnell on Google.”
“We should do the same.”
“Wait. He also emailed him a few times.”
“Saying what?”
“Slow down there, hombre. Let me get this open. Okay, he wrote February 23, asking for a meeting with McConnell.”
“Did he say why?”
“No. But he does say it’s urgent.”
I crowded in over her shoulder and read along with her.
“Any reply?”
She checked and found a formulaic response from someone named Tim Fitzpatrick, an adviser to McConnell, who thanked David for his interest in the congressman’s work and asked if he wanted to be on his mailing list. “Okay, then two days later, David emails again, saying-”
“ ‘I really need to meet with Mr. McConnell,’ ” I read. “ ‘It is in both our interests that we meet immediately.’ ”
“Dated February 26.”
“And two days after that he’s gone. Is this hotel in his district, by any chance?”
“This block of Commonwealth?” She glanced at the screen. “Smack in the middle,” she said.
“Then we’re constituents,” I said. “Let’s get ourselves an audience.”
CHAPTER 12
Sean Daggett and Kieran Clarke were having drinks in leather chairs facing each other across a glass coffee table. Something Kieran had found, a smooth Irish whiskey called Redbreast they were having over ice, one cube each.
“Tell me about McCudden and Walsh,” Sean said. “Are they total fuck-ups or can they not catch a break? First they lose the Jew they’re supposed to grab, now they get beaten up by Canadians. One of them a girl. That makes them 0 for 2.”
Kieran was Sean’s oldest friend from Russell Street, and his best friend left. He had the size Sean lacked, a little over six-two and 20 pounds heavier than when he’d played football-call it 240 now, but still all brick, no mortar. “Walsh says they got suckered. Says the guy rammed them in an alley.”
“What does McCudden say?”
“He ain’t talking yet. Still doped up. Took two pretty good shots.”
“From a Canadian.”
“Yeah.”
“Jesus,” Sean said, shaking his head. “What have I been saying since I started this, Kieran? What’s the one thing I repeated over and fucking over?”