“The Boston Tea Party.”
“Bingo,” said Harvath. “He left not long after and died in exile in England.”
“So he wasn’t killed in Boston? Never boiled to death?”
“No, not according to this,” he said, as he slid the phone back into his pocket. “But that doesn’t mean there isn’t some sort of connection to whatever it is we’re about to see.”
“Are you ready to go in?” she asked.
Harvath wasn’t even near the front door and already he could smell the horrible odor of burnt tire. Taking a last breath of semi-fresh air, he nodded and followed her inside.
CHAPTER 48
The smell of a burnt tire was worse than driving behind a bubbling asphalt truck. The smoke had left black streaks up the front of the building from where it had escaped out the front door and where the firemen had smashed the front windows.
Inside, you could trace the smoke’s path along the upper walls and ceiling straight back to the bathroom. Unless there was something terribly interesting he had to see in there, he’d put off ground zero for the tire burning for as long as he could. What he was most interested in was the victim. He followed Cordero into the living room.
Her partner was there waiting, smug as usual and looking fresh as a daisy with his hair combed, face shaved, and shoes shined. He’d probably gotten a great night’s sleep as well.
“Looks like you were wrong about the killer’s next stop being Fort Hill,” he said.
“Let’s not start, Sal,” said Cordero. “Okay?”
“I’m just saying, our golden boy here isn’t right about everything.”
“Why don’t you sit down and give your mind a rest, Sal,” Harvath said as he brushed past him.
Cordero joined him in the living room. “Can we not do this, please?” she asked quietly.
“Without looking at the body, how do you expect to figure anything out?”
She cut him a look and tilted her head toward her partner in the entry hall. “You know what I’m talking about.”
“I’ll try,” Harvath replied as he approached the gang box. As he got closer, he began to pick up another scent.
Cordero could smell it, too. “What is that?”
“Pine.”
“Like Pine-Sol?”
Harvath shook his head as he noticed a couple of stray feathers near the gang box. “Pine tar.”
“What is—” she began, but stopped when she looked into the box and saw the horrific state of the body.
Harvath stood next to her and looked at the corpse as well. For several seconds neither said anything. Then, he stated, “Pine tar was used in the colonies to preserve wood on sailing ships and to weatherize rope. It was also used for a form of physically and emotionally painful public humiliation called tarring and feathering.”
As seasoned as she was to death and murder, this one was particularly rough to look at. “Do you think he died from the tarring and feathering? Or from having his head shackled to the bottom of the box and having it filled up with pine tar? Feel it,” she said, reaching her hand out to touch the metal. “It’s still warm.”
Harvath didn’t need to feel it. He would take her word for it. What he was interested in was the message painted in red on the underside of the lid. In addition to the crossed bones with the skull and crown hovering above was a sentence, which read How strangely will the Tools of a Tyrant pervert the plain Meaning of Words! Beneath it were the letters S.O.L.
“Any idea what that phrase means?” she asked.
Harvath was unaware of its historical context, but he had a pretty good idea of why it had been chosen by the killer. Bill Wise had mentioned something about how the Fed purposefully obfuscated what they did in order to divert attention. If he had to bet, that was what he’d put his money on. As far as who said it, he had no idea.
“Sam Adams,” said Cordero’s partner, who had come into the living room to join them. He held out his smartphone and read, “From a letter to John Pitts. January twenty-first, 1776.”
She couldn’t tell if Harvath was warming up another jibe or not, but she decided to circumvent it and keep the conversation focused. “What do we know about the victim?” she asked.
Harvath had already identified him, but he wasn’t about to spill that information to anyone but Cordero. And it would be done in private.
“Right now,” replied the male detective, “we don’t have anything. He’s a John Doe. We’ll see what the ME gets prints-wise and if they turn up anything. If there’s nothing on file for this guy, we’ll have to attempt dental records, and maybe facial reconstruction.”
“How about the fire?” asked Harvath. “Any clues there?”
The man shrugged. “Go ask the arson investigators. They’re back in the bathroom.”
Harvath figured Sal had already gleaned a preliminary report from them and could have easily filled him in, but he had promised Cordero he’d try to go easy on him.
Walking to the bathroom, he stopped just short of the doorway. The lingering odor was terrible.
“What do you guys have?” he asked.
“Who are you?” one of the investigators asked tersely.
“Emily Dickinson,” he replied just as tersely, sensing that was about the only thing this guy was going to respect. “Now tell me what you’ve got.”
His partner held up a plastic evidence bag with what looked like charred and half-melted circuit board. “Pretty simple setup. A timer and an igniter. Left it sitting on top of the tire. Tire was soaked with gasoline or kerosene. Consensus right now is that he wanted to send a smoke signal, not burn the building down.”
“Think you’ll be able to trace those parts?”
“Maybe, but they look rather basic. Could have come from anywhere. I wouldn’t hold my breath if I were you.”
That was exactly what Harvath was doing, and he needed some fresh air. Passing through the apartment, he signaled for Cordero to join him.
Outside, he stepped away from the building and took in a couple of deep breaths.
“You all right?” she asked.
“I’m fine. I just hate that smell.”
She wrinkled up her nose. “It is pretty awful. Why’d you want me to follow you out here?”
“I think I know who the victim is.”
“You do? How? A huge part of the poor guy’s face was melted off and he’s covered in feathers.”
“It’s Peter Whalen from Chicago,” said Harvath. “In the file I have on him, it describes him as being five foot five. The other missing man, Renner, is six foot two. You wouldn’t have been able to fit a six foot two man in that box unless you sawed him in half. Make sure to tell the ME to look for scars on the victim’s knees once they get all the tar and feathers cleaned off. Whalen was a skier. He’d blown both his knees and had to have them repaired back before the surgery got a lot less invasive. The scars should be pretty obvious.”
“I’ll let them know.”
He took a breath and said, “This means there’s only two left now.”
Cordero nodded. “Do you think the killer plans to do them both here in Boston?”
Leaning against the side of a police cruiser that had been parked up on the sidewalk, he tried to think. “I honestly don’t know,” he said.
“Whalen went missing in Chicago, right?”
“Right.”
“Well, if the killer brought Whalen here, why not the others?”
It was a good question, except for the fact that all five missing candidates had been grabbed on the same night, which meant there had to have been teams involved. At least one of those teams had brought Peter Whalen from Chicago to Boston. Had the others been brought here, too? Anything was possible.