“If you want to find your brother . . .” The firefighter’s face grew calculating. “I can tell you where he’ll be as soon as he gets out.”
Not more than two hours after Grier left her client and went to the judge, she was back behind the wheel of her Audi A6 and stuck in traffic around the Boston Common. Fortunately, the pace picked up through Chinatown and then she was out the other side on Tremont Street.
Part of her rush was that she didn’t really have time to take this diversion. She had a meeting with a Fortune Fifty company at one o’clock in her office in the Financial District . . . and all those skyscrapers were at the moment in her rearview mirror and getting smaller.
But she needed to know more.
Which was the other half of her burning hurry.
As she cursed herself, she braced for Daniel to make an appearance and glanced into the backseat. When he didn’t show up, she took a deep breath.
She really didn’t need her metaphysical editorial board at the moment.
Daniel had died two and a half years ago and he first came to her in a dream the night before his funeral. It had been such a relief to see him healthy and clean and not in a heroin nod, and in her sleep, they had talked as they’d been able to before the addiction had really ground him down. The jump to “real life” had occurred about six months later. One morning, she’d been talking to him and her alarm had gone off. Without thinking twice about it, she’d reached over and silenced the thing . . . only to realize she was awake and he was still very much with her.
Daniel had smiled as she’d shot upright—like he was proud of himself. And then in his chilled-out way, he’d informed her that she wasn’t losing her mind. There was, in fact, an afterlife, and he was in it.
It had taken some time to get used to, but two years later, she no longer questioned his periodic hi-how-areyas—although she did keep his visits to herself. After all, just because she didn’t think she was crazy, that wasn’t to say others might disagree—and who needed that? Besides, if he was a hallucination and she was turning into something out of A Beautiful Mind, well . . . it worked for her, so to hell with the mental-health experts: She had missed Daniel so much and she had him back in a way.
Refocusing on the brick walk-ups that rose on either side of Tremont Street, she tracked the numbers when she could see them around the doors. On some level, she couldn’t believe she’d gotten her client bail, but then, his lack of priors and the general overcrowding in the system had worked in their favor.
Mr. Rothe, on the other hand, had seemed neither surprised nor pleased when she’d told him. He had just asked her in his polite, quiet way to go to his apartment and get twenty-five thousand dollars in cash—because there was no one he could call to make that kind of a run.
Sure. No problem. Right.
Because handling ill-gotten cash didn’t make her an accomplice or threaten her bar status in any way.
She was still shaking her head at the situation as she slowed down in front of a three-story house that had been cut up into apartments. There was no parking space for miles—naturally. With a curse, she went around the block a couple of times, wondering if she dared double-park it, when—hallelujah—someone pulled out across the street. It took her a second and a half to do an illegal U-ey and wedge her sedan into the spot. She didn’t have a residential parking sticker, but she wasn’t going to be long, and at least she wasn’t in front of a hydrant.
Getting out, she huddled into her thin wool coat. April in New England on the ocean translated into thirty days of bitter, wet wind that chilled you to the bone and wreaked havoc on your hair. And that wasn’t the worst of it—there were puddles all over the place, even when it hadn’t rained. Everything in town seemed to drip, like the city was a sponge that had surpassed its capacity . . . the cars, the buildings, the spindly trees, all of it wicking the moisture out of the air and channeling it down onto the perma-damp asphalt and concrete beneath your feet.
Definitely more L.L. Bean than Louboutin.
At the front door of the house, she craned in for a closer look at a seventies-era intercom that had three little buttons. Per Isaac’s instructions, she punched the one on the bottom.
A moment later, the ring was answered by a woman dressed in a retina-busting, retro afghan the size of a bed-sheet. Her hair was cranked into corkscrew curls the color of a Halloween pumpkin and there was a cigarette between the painted fingertips of her right hand.
Evidently, her look had gotten stuck in the same era as the intercom.
“You’re Isaac’s girl?”
Grier stuck her hand out and did not correct the statement. Figured it was better than “attorney.” “I’m Grier.”
“He called here.” The woman stepped back. “Told me to let you in. You know, you don’t seem like his type.”
A quick image of the man sitting so silent and deadly flashed through Grier’s mind: on that theory, the guy should have been dating a Beretta.
“Opposites attract,” she said as she looked over the landlady’s shoulder. Down at the end of the tight hall, the staircase loomed in the distance like a spiritual beacon, at once apparent and yet unattainable.
“Well . . .” The landlady lounged against her flocked wallpaper. “There’s opposites, like one person is a talker and the other isn’t. And there’s opposites. How did you meet?”
As her nosy stare locked on Grier’s gold necklace, there was the temptation to answer, “the penal system,” just to see how far the woman’s eyes would bug. “We were matched up.”
“Oh, like eHarmony?”
“Precisely.” The main points of compatibility being his requiring someone with a law degree to get him bail and her having a JD from Harvard. “Will you let me in his place now?”
“You’re in a hurry. You know, my sister tried eHarmony. The guy she met was a frickin’ jerk.”
It turned out that getting the landlady up the stairs took about as much effort as throwing her over a shoulder and carrying her to the third floor. However, ten minutes of question deflection later, they were finally at the door.
“You know,” the landlady said as she put her keys to work and unlocked things, “you should think about—”
“Thanks so much for all your help,” Grier said as she slipped inside and shut the woman out in the hall.
Leaning against the wood panels, she took a deep breath and listened to the grousing fade on its way downstairs.
And then she turned around . . . Oh, God.
The barren room was as wilted and lonely as an old man, proving that poverty, like age, was a great equalizer—she could have been in any tenement or drug house or condemned building in any city in any country: The old pine floors had all the gloss of a sheet of sandpaper, and the ceiling had water stains in the corners that were the color of urine. No furniture in sight, not one table or chair or TV. Just a sleeping bag, a pair of combat boots and some clothes in precisely folded piles.
Isaac Rothe’s pillow was nothing but a sweatshirt.
As she stood just inside the apartment, all she could think of was the last place her brother had stayed. At least her client’s was clean and there weren’t hypodermic needles and dirty spoons everywhere: This sparseness did not appear to be the result of an addict’s slanted priorities.
But good Lord, it was still a shocker to remember where Daniel had ended up. The filth . . . the cockroaches . . . the rotting food . . .
Forcing herself to get a move on, she went into the kitchen and wasn’t surprised to find all the cupboards and the drawers and the refrigerator empty. Bathroom had a razor, shaving cream, toothbrush, and soap.
In the bedroom, which was totally unoccupied, she went into the closet and used the penlight on her key chain to look around inside. The panel that Isaac had described was over to the left and she got it open without a problem.