He dozed for twelve minutes. When he woke up, he wasn’t particularly refreshed. But he was back in his hometown of Providence, Rhode Island.
11
Returning to Providence always provoked mixed emotions in Justin Westwood. He genuinely loved the city. Found it beautiful and alive. He knew it well-and all sides of it. The comforting pomposity of its academia. The snobbish magnificence of its upper class. The small-town quality of its corruption. The New England backbone of its middle class. The violence and despair of its back alleys.
He was also afraid of the city. He had lost his wife and child there. Had endured excruciating pain there. Had gone through years of an unfriendly and hurtful separation from his parents.
Providence was not simple for him.
He had reconciled with Jonathan and Lizbeth Westwood about a year before, and that was a big step forward. It made him feel welcome again, not just in his childhood home but in his city. They had embraced him back into the family and he welcomed that embrace warmly. But both sides were still wary. Family ties were always capable of unraveling, he knew. For now, however, the bonds were strong. His mother and father were anxious to make amends and to try to heal old wounds. Justin suspected that some wounds could never completely heal but he was willing to play the comforted patient to help ease his parents’ guilt. And he had to admit that Jonathan and Lizbeth were capable of making things very comfortable.
He got a warm hug from his mother when he stepped inside the front door of the house. As always, he marveled at the splendor of the place in which he’d spent his youth. The cathedral-like ceilings, the enormous spiraling staircase, the exquisite detailing in the maple and cherry woodwork throughout the expansive mansion. Lizbeth followed him into the den, where his father gave him a warm pat on the back, the closest to a hug he could manage. They shared a glass of superb burgundy as they asked appropriate questions and revealed appropriate details about the past several months of their lives. His mother was saddened by the end of his relationship with Deena, but did no more than give a quick shake of her head when told it had ended for good. His father was mixed about the news of Justin’s promotion: proud of the reward yet still bothered that he’d chosen police work as his profession instead of something more substantial-which, in his father’s eyes, meant more profitable. Justin told them a little bit about why he was there, enough to pique their interest and get some valuable insight from his banker father. Jonathan Westwood said, when Justin had finished summarizing the stories of both the plane crash and Chuck Billings’s observations of the bombing, “Always look for the money.”
When Justin asked him what he meant, Jonathan cleared his throat and said, “I’ve spent my whole life as a businessman. My whole life around wealthy, powerful people. And if that experience has taught me anything, it’s that there are two reasons for all human behavior: passion and money. I don’t know anything about your line of business, Jay, but I wouldn’t imagine that criminal behavior is all that different from what I deal with in the business world. Somewhere, somehow, someone is making money. Find out who that is and you’ll find out what’s going on.”
“I don’t know if everything in life can be made that simple,” Justin said.
“Life is simple,” his father told him, finishing his last sip of wine. “It’s what happens while you’re living it that some people make so damn hard.” And then he said it again: “Find the money.”
Wanda Chinkle arrived at eight o’clock and Justin was amused to see that she’d dressed for the occasion. It was usually hard to get Wanda into anything but a pair of pants and an open-neck shirt, but tonight she was wearing a dress and a short-sleeved cashmere sweater. With pearls. And stockings. Justin had never seen her in a pair of stockings before-in fact, he thought, he might never have actually seen her legs before-and she scowled when she saw him staring and grinning.
Wanda passed on the superb red wine, had a Diet Coke instead, much to Jonathan Westwood’s horror, and then they sat down to a delicious dinner of rare roast beef, broiled new potatoes, and string beans, prepared by the Westwoods’ longtime chef, Sidney. The dinner table talk veered between professional and personal, but nothing substantive was broached between Justin and Wanda until, after coffee and a dessert of key lime pie, they settled into the den, alone, and closed the door behind them.
“You don’t seem quite as angry as you were over the phone,” Justin said.
“Don’t let appearances deceive you,” Wanda responded. “Just because I want to pistol-whip you doesn’t mean I can’t be polite in front of your parents.”
“Okay, as long as I know the affection’s still there.”
“Let’s skip the wiseass stuff, okay?” she said. “I want to know what’s going on.”
“A lot more stuff than the other day,” he said. And first he ran down everything he’d put together about the plane crash. He told her the circumstances of the crash and about Martin Heffernan’s behavior at the crash site. He said he was fairly certain that the FAA representative stole the pilot’s ID. He told her about the fake ambulance spiriting the body away and he told her, again, how he’d been denied access to the fingerprint identification. He recounted his session with the airport manager Ray Lockhardt, told her Ray’s take on how the plane was tampered with and the pressure Ray was getting from Heffernan about the accident report, clearly an attempt to circumvent any investigation. Justin gave a blow-by-blow account of his conversation on the phone with the ditzy Cherry Flynn, trying to trace the ownership of the plane through the tail number. And then he told her he was convinced that someone at the FAA knew in advance that the plane would be sabotaged, because the files were pulled prior to the crash.
When he paused to take a deep breath, Wanda said, “Are you done?”
“I’m done with the crash,” he told her.
“What else is there?” she asked.
“You have a meeting scheduled with Chuck Billings.”
She didn’t exactly do a double take. But it was close. “Jesus, does everybody know everything that goes on in my office?”
Thinking of Bruno Pecozzi, but deciding to keep Bruno’s awareness of FBI activities quiet for the moment, Justin said, “More than you might think.”
Wanda shook her head. “I’m meeting with Chuck tomorrow morning.”
“Do you know what it’s about?”
She stared at him, undecided about how to answer. Finally she decided to go with the truth. “No. I mean, I assume it has something to do with the Harper’s bombing. He was very mysterious, didn’t want to talk on the phone. Just said it was urgent.”
“It is.”
“You know, it’s starting to piss me off, Jay, that you know everything before I do.”
“I’m happy to share my info, Wanda. Although Chuck’s going to have a lot more details than I have.”
“Let’s hear what you got.”
So he told her about his disturbing conversation with Billings that morning. How Chuck felt that the FBI was not just hiding something, they were actively preventing any attempts to get to the truth behind the attack.
“It doesn’t make sense,” she said when he was finished.
“I know. But he’s very convincing.”
“What possible reason would we have for hurting the investigation?” When Justin shook his head, she furrowed her brow and rested her chin on the palm of her left hand and said, “You think the two events are connected?”
“The plane crash and the bombing?” Justin threw his hands up. “I don’t see any connection. Nothing logical jumps out at me. But suddenly we have two. . events. . and we’re not talkin’ New York City here, East End Harbor is not exactly the center of international intrigue. . and the FBI, along with God knows who else, seems to be doing their damnedest to make sure neither of them gets investigated properly.”