Flipping onto his left side, he planned to lash out with a kick, either to push the gun farther away or to incapacitate his attacker. As he looked up, though, he saw he was too late. Samuel had already retrieved the weapon. He had also wisely taken two steps back, once he was able to stand. He was too far away for Wise to make contact. He had had one chance and he had blown it. Samuel was back in control.
Neither man spoke. Both stood or lay where they were catching their breaths and trying to overcome the pain of their injuries. Wise could see that he had opened up a pretty good gash at the top of Samuel’s nose. It was going to require stitches. At least there was that.
Out of habit, Wise started analyzing his own injuries and then almost laughed at the absurdity of it all. He wasn’t going to live to see another hour, much less anyone who could give him medical attention.
Samuel, who must have sensed something in his expression, said, “What’s so funny?”
Just then a man stepped from behind Samuel, pressed a Taser against his jugular, and said, “This.”
CHAPTER 47
BOSTON
MASSACHUSETTS
Harvath and the Old Man spoke for more than two hours. He had gone through everything that had happened since he had arrived in Boston and then the Old Man had asked him to repeat it, twice. He asked question after question and expected Harvath to drill down to even the minutest details.
When they were done talking, Harvath not only needed aspirin, he also needed a drink, and he helped himself to a glass, some ice, and two bottles of bourbon from the minibar.
Even that, though, wasn’t enough to help him unwind. He thought about turning on the TV, but he knew it would only keep him up for hours. He also knew that pouring another drink wasn’t the right path. He might get a couple of hours of sleep, but it wouldn’t be quality sleep. Instead, he fished out one of the books Bill Wise had given to him and which he had tossed in his overnight bag on the way out of his house yesterday.
The reading did the trick and he soon found his eyes growing heavy. As soon as he couldn’t keep them open any longer, he tossed the book aside, turned out the light, and fell asleep.
Much like the night before, he felt like he had just drifted off when his cell phone rang. He snatched his Kobold off the nightstand and looked at the time. It was just after 3 A.M.
It was Cordero. “The killer struck again,” she said.
“Wait. What?” Harvath replied, as he tried to shake off the cobwebs. “Where? Boston?”
“North End. Close to where we ate dinner. I’m already in the car. Be downstairs in fifteen minutes.”
Harvath was downstairs in ten and Cordero showed up a minute and a half later.
“Tell me what happened,” he said as he got into the car and Cordero sped away from the hotel.
“Apparently, another elaborate scene like the Liberty Tree Building.”
“Who was it?”
“We don’t have an ID on the victim yet,” said Cordero as she weaved through the sparse traffic, her lights blazing and Klaxon blaring. “They’re saying it could take a while.”
“Why?”
“A lot of his flesh is missing. It sounds like he was boiled to death.”
“Boiled to death?” Harvath replied.
“That’s what Sal said. He told me I’d see for myself once I got there.”
“Who found him?”
“Fire department, apparently. The killer used a timer of some sort to start a controlled fire with lots of smoke. It didn’t do any real damage, but it scared a lot of folks. The guy lit a tire in the bathtub or something.”
If you want to get someone’s attention, that is the way to do it. Tires burned with thick, acrid black smoke. Harvath had seen more than his share of tire fires across third-world countries. It was a smell you never forgot and one he absolutely hated.
“The ME is going to need dental records from the two males on your missing persons list,” said Cordero.
“Being boiled to death is pretty unusual, so is a timed tire fire, but how can you be sure this is our killer?”
“Because,” she replied as she swerved and narrowly missed a car that had slammed on its brakes, rather than pulling over to allow her to pass, “the killer left a note, along with a picture.”
“Of a skull and bones with the crown floating above.”
“Yup.”
“Do you know anything about the address we’re going to? Any reason why it might be significant?”
Cordero shook her head. “No. It’s not one of the ones we passed last night, I know that.”
“Do you know anything about the area at all?”
“It’s near the intersection of Fleet Street and Garden Court. I think that’s the neighborhood where JFK’s mother was born or grew up or something.”
Or something . . . If that was the case, it didn’t make any sense. What would Rose Kennedy have to do with a vendetta against the Fed? And why would the killer switch tactics like that all of a sudden? It had to be something else.
When they arrived, narrow Garden Court was blocked off at each end by police cruisers and all of the buildings up and down the street were awash in the glow of emergency vehicle lights.
“We’ll end up getting blocked in if I try to get any closer,” Cordero said. “Let’s park here.”
Harvath agreed and after parking her car, they got out to walk the rest of the way.
“Did you get any sleep?” he asked as they made their way to the scene.
“A little. How about you?”
“Not nearly enough, but I’ll be okay.”
“We’ll get coffee after,” she promised.
Because it was a one-way street with parking only on one side, most of the responding vehicles had parked on the west side, many of them all the way up on the sidewalks so as not to block through traffic for the fire trucks.
Harvath and Cordero walked on the opposite side. As they drew parallel with their destination, Harvath noticed a plastic plaque on the building next to Cordero.
“You were right,” he said. “Look.”
The female detective skimmed the historical marker. “How about that? I know some Boston history after all. Four Garden Court Street. Home of John J. ‘Honey Fitz’ Fitzgerald, Boston mayor, and birthplace of daughter Rose Fitzgerald, mother of American president John F. Kennedy.”
As they slipped between two parked cars and around a fire truck idling in the middle of the street, Harvath tried to process what the Kennedy connection could be.
That train of thought, though, came to an immediate halt when they arrived in front of 5 Garden Court Street, which had an even more dramatic plaque, this one from weathered bronze, announcing the building’s, or more appropriately the site’s, historical significance.
“Here stood the mansion of Governor Thomas Hutchinson,” Harvath read aloud as he typed the man’s name into the web browser on his phone.
“Who was he?” Cordero asked.
“Apparently, one of Boston’s most hated citizens. Brother-in-law to Andrew Oliver, the man they hung in effigy from the Liberty Tree. Hutchinson was also the last royal governor of Massachusetts before the Revolutionary War. It says here that Sam Adams couldn’t stand him. For many of the colonists, Hutchinson represented everything that that they believed was wrong with Britain. He was greedy, arrogant, and a pretty big snob. A couple weeks after the Liberty Tree incident, angry Bostonians looted and tore Hutchinson’s house apart.”
“Didn’t Hutchinson have something to do with the Boston Tea Party?”
Harvath scrolled further down on his screen and nodded. “When the colonists wanted to send a large shipment of tea back to England to protest the tea tax, Hutchinson intervened. When word leaked that he was the secret distributor for the tea, people went berserk. There were city-wide protests, which grew in scope and anger until culminating in—”