“What will you do after you finish your master’s?”
“I don’t know. Apply to some of the ABCs, I guess.”
“The what?”
“Agencies, boards and commissions. There are a lot of places, public and private sector, where I can help make sure great buildings in Boston are maintained. And treasured.”
“You know, I’ve driven a ton since I got here,” I said. “To Brookline and back too many times. Somerville twice. Roxbury, the art institute, Wellington Hill. I can picture the roads and intersections and a few buildings. I normally get the hang of new cities quickly and when I first got here, I was paying attention, looking at the map and the GPS screen, working out where things are in relation to each other. But since Jenn’s been gone, I haven’t been seeing things the same way. It’s all a landscape to me now, scrolling by on a screen outside the car window. All I can think of is her, what shape she’s in.”
“You really love her, don’t you?”
“Very much.”
“Are you an item?”
“No,” I said. “She’s gay and I’m Jewish.”
Shana actually cracked a smile at that. I felt some of the tension go out of her body, which was perfect timing because seconds later McConnell’s Secret Service car pulled up to the curb.
We had to get close to him without spooking him, his wife or the two bruisers in suits, shades and earpieces who got out of the car first and opened one rear door each. I got out the camera. We had our story ready.
We weren’t the only ones who wanted to get close to Marc and Lesley. Other churchgoers greeted them with waves, smiles and handshakes. It took them a good two minutes to get from the curb to where we stood.
“Congressman,” I said.
He looked at me like a quarterback checking off his down-field reads: Did he know me? Should he? Had I given funds or other support?
“My wife is too shy to ask,” I said, “but could I take a picture of you with her? She worked on your first campaign when she was a student.”
“Did you?” he said, smiling broadly at Shana. He was a good-looking man, easily six-two, narrow-waisted but with broad shoulders. His face was likeable too, with a solid jaw line and that thick tamed hair the people loved. “Thanks for your support. Who did you work under?”
We had looked it up before leaving the hotel. “Arnie Sussman,” Shana said.
“It was a great campaign,” he said, “wasn’t it?”
“A turning point for me, sir.”
I said, “Let’s not waste his time, honey, get in there.”
Mrs. McConnell had moved off to talk to friends, shake a few hands and buss some cheeks, carefully so as not to leave traces of the heavy makeup she wore. My guess was her natural complexion would be the same waxy shade I’d seen on patients in Stayner’s waiting room.
When Shana stood next to McConnell, he stooped a little to minimize the difference in height. I took a shot, then examined the swing-out viewer and frowned. “Sir, you might have been blinking-here, what do you think? Should we take one more?”
I thumbed the review screen one frame back and came to stand next to him with the camera. He raised himself back to his full height and took in the picture of David Fine’s bloodied head and neck. To his credit, or not, the studied, serious face never changed. He didn’t even blink. He leaned in closer to me and said, “What is this?”
“The right question is who, sir, and it is Dr. David Fine, who worked under Dr. Charles Stayner. He was going to assist in your wife’s surgery tomorrow night at Halladay’s.”
“Who the hell are you?” he whispered.
“An investigator.”
“For who?”
“David’s parents. They hired me to find him and I did. And ten minutes later someone killed him. Note the time code here, sir.”
“Oh my God, that’s this morning.”
“Yes. Sean Daggett had him killed. As with JFK, sir, you’ll note most of his head and neck are gone. The crime scene is probably just wrapping up. The investigation’s only now kicking into gear. So my question for you is, How do you want to be included?”
“Included?” He looked around and saw his wife, who was breaking off from her receiving line and beckoning him to join her. He gave her the one-minute sign.
“What do you want?” he asked.
“Daggett has my partner and he’s going to kill her if I don’t find her first.”
“Jesus Christ!”
“What time is the surgery supposed to happen?”
His wife called again and he turned to her. He pasted on a smile and said, “One sec, hon,” then turned back to me and took out a leather case from his inside pocket. He slid out a card and a small pen and scrawled something on the back of the card and handed it to me. It had his home address in Louisburg Square. “Present that to the driver of my car, Mr. Steinauer, outside the house at twelve-thirty,” he said.
“While you’re in church, pray for my partner,” I said. “And that you can find a way to help get her back.”
CHAPTER 28
According to media reports, the McConnell home-or more rightly the Austin-Smith home, since Lesley had paid for it-was worth around seven million. The room I was in must have accounted for a good chunk of it. It was a parlour, I suppose, on the ground floor with a generous bay window into which cushioned seats had been built to face the morning sun. The furniture was comfortable, despite being expensive, in muted burgundy colours with spindly wooden legs. The art was pastoral, also muted.
I was alone with the congressman. Once he’d gone into the church, Shana had hailed a cab and said a curt goodbye without a look back.
“I usually have a whiskey after church,” McConnell said. “Lesley needs to rest afterward, and all that public pressing and greeting is harder on me than you think.”
“Was that an offer to join you?”
“I’m sorry, yes it was. I have some single malts, some Irish.”
“Black Bush?”
“Of course.”
“Just enough to cover one ice cube, please.”
He made my drink, using tongs to take the ice out of a bucket. His own was a single malt neat. He threw one back in one shot, then poured a second, which he sipped slowly as he arranged his long frame into a leather recliner the colour of a dark forest undisturbed.
“I have a deal to propose,” he said.
I knew he would. It was what he did for a living.
“My wife is scheduled to get a new kidney tomorrow night, as you know. If I help you, even if things don’t turn out your way, you let the operation go through. It’s a willing donor who needs the money.”
“David was murdered. The woman who found your donor through the genetic testing program has been murdered.”
“That can’t be true.”
“Check the news. Carol-Ann Meacham. Daggett was paying her to find superior donor matches for people on his list. But things have gone bad since David threatened to expose it and now Daggett is killing people who know too much.”
“He’s not killing Lesley. He’s saving her life.”
“At the cost of how many others? Work that into your deal.”
McConnell set his drink down and walked over to his desk. There was a framed photo there with its back to me. He picked it up and brought it over.
Two teenagers, both tall and gangly, their arms around each other, both wearing T-shirts and shorts and flip-flops, leaning against a split-rail fence. Marc and Lesley, summer camp sweethearts. Only Lesley had an oxygen tank trailing her on wheels, and tubes in her cute little nose.
“I’ve loved her since we were fifteen,” he said. “I thought she was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen. It didn’t matter how sick she was. And she got even sicker while she waited for her lung transplant. She watched her sister die. She went down to eighty-six pounds herself, and they wouldn’t operate until she got back to ninety. She gorged herself on shakes and preparations to put on weight to keep her spot on the list. But she made it through, Mr. Geller. She made it through. Got her transplant, followed by years of reasonably good health. She’d develop more infections than most people, outbreaks of thrush and things like that. No kids, but hey. It doesn’t happen for everyone. And then watching her get sick again … you can’t begin to understand how that felt.”