“Fuck your plans, Morley,” Peter barked in a tone that managed to be fierce and cold at the same time. I’d heard Peter speak that way only once before. The night he’d arrested me.
“You just be there,” I heard him say very distinctly as I went back outside. “I won’t tell you twice.”
It seemed odd that Peter would speak that way to his boss. I remembered Morley watching the house. It was hard to understand.
When it was our turn to pray, Peter and I walked together over to Elena’s closed, flower-covered casket and knelt down. There was a hush in the room behind us as people realized what was going on. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched Peter remove his hat. After a moment, his face crumpled as if buckling under an unbearable interior torment, and I took his hat from him.
Peter and I became separated as he stayed and spoke with Michael Cardenas, Elena’s husband.
I shook hands with the priest beside him and some more people I didn’t know.
“Jeanine, there you are,” Gary, the chef from work, said as he scooped me up in a painful hug. “Can you believe any of this?”
“No, Gary. It’s just horrible,” I said looking around. “I don’t see Teo. Is he taking this very hard?”
“He’s gone,” Gary said, shaking his head. “It’s the craziest thing. Teo called me the night after the shooting. He said that he got a hotel job in the Dominican Republic and that he was leaving immediately. Elena’s death must have been too much for him to take. You had to hear him on the phone. I felt so bad for the guy. I went by his apartment with his check the next day, but the landlord said he was already gone. Left his clothes and everything.”
Peter’s hat dropped from my hand as I remembered the last time I’d seen Teo. It was the night I had tailed Peter. Teo had been behind the wheel of the Mazda with Elena.
Elena was dead, and now Teo was just gone?
As Gary greeted someone else, I turned toward the front of the room by the casket. Morley had arrived, and Peter was standing with him. They were speaking quietly but intensely.
“Mrs. Fournier?” someone said.
I turned around. For a moment, I panicked. Standing very close beside me was a handsome man with long, dirty blond hair and a Jesus beard. It was the Björn Borg look-alike who’d scared me outside the Hemingway Home when I was catering. That now seemed like a thousand years ago.
“Do I know you?” I said, taking a quick step back.
“No,” the man said in a voice deeper than I expected. “But I know you. Sort of.”
What the hell was this? I thought. “Are you a cop?” I said doubtfully.
“I’m actually an FBI agent,” he said, discreetly tucking a business card into my hand.
After a shocked moment, I looked at it. It had a raised FBI logo. “Special Agent Theodore Murphy,” it said, with a phone number.
“Why are you giving this to me?” I asked.
Continuing to scan the room, he shrugged his shoulders. “Nice to have help when you’re in a tight spot,” he said. He nodded at the card with his blond chin. “Hide it now before someone sees.”
“What?” I said. “Before who sees?”
Murphy looked up at the front of the room where Peter and Morley were talking. Then he shrugged again. “You need to be very careful, Jeanine,” he said, and then he turned and walked away.
Chapter 30
IT WAS SEVEN in the morning, a week after Elena’s funeral, when I heard the engine on Peter’s Stingray growl to life. Coming out of the shower, I dropped my towel and ran to the window.
Through the blinds, I saw a man rolling a large cooler across our backyard toward Peter’s fishing boat. A tall man with cropped gray hair. It was Chief Morley.
As he boarded the boat, I remembered Peter’s strange phone calclass="underline" Fuck your plans, Morley. You just be there. I won’t tell you twice.
There was a soft knock on the bedroom door.
“Jeanine! Whoa!” Peter said, poking his head in and seeing that I was naked. “You made me forget what I was going to say. Oh, right. I totally forgot to tell you that Chief Morley and I are going on a fishing trip.”
A what?
“I know, I know. I should have said something. Bad Peter,” he said, slapping the back of his hand. “It was the chief’s suggestion. He thought this would give us a chance to clear our heads after the shooting and maybe get to know each other a little better. Sounds good, right? Hanging with the boss man. Who knows? Maybe it’ll lead to a promotion. Don’t worry about my shoulder. I’ll let the old buzzard do most of the heavy lifting.” Peter kissed me on the forehead softly and let me go.
“Thank you for being so supportive this week, Jeanine. You’re the best. I can’t wait to go to the Breakers with you. Steak au poivre, a nice red. Love you,” Peter said, closing the door behind him.
“Wait,” I said.
Peter smiled as he came back in.
“What is it? A quickie?” he said, hugging me. “Sure, but we need to hit it double time. Can’t keep the boss waiting.”
“No, idiot,” I said, giving him a faux pound on his chest. “This is so sudden. What time will you be back?”
“I don’t know. The usual. Sundown?” Peter said. “We’ll grill. We badass about-to-be-promoted cops like to eat what we kill, you know.”
I nodded. “See you at sundown,” I said.
“Not if I see you first,” Peter said, pinching my butt before he left.
Chapter 31
TWO HOURS LATER, sweating not just from the rising heat, I waited on the coral pink steps of Key West’s public library on Fleming Street. At nine thirty on the dot, I finally heard the lock turning behind me, and I jumped up, lifting the couple of large Dunkin’ Donuts coffees I’d brought.
The tiny librarian, Alice Dowd, smiled in surprise as I approached the reference desk and handed her one of the coffees.
“Jeanine, bearing gifts,” my elderly friend said with a smile. “What can I do for you, my dear, on this lovely morning?”
“Actually, Alice, I needed to do some research on my late father,” I lied.
“Research, I see,” Alice said, placing the coffee I gave her onto a tissue she produced from her desk. “Well, you’ve come to the right place. Where do you want to start?”
“Do you have access to the Boston papers?” I said.
“You’re in luck,” Alice said, standing. She gestured for me to follow her through a book-lined corridor behind her desk and into a little room. “We just got these new computers with new software called Netscape. It helps you surf the World Wide Web, thousands of newspapers and magazines and databases and archives. Here, let me show you how to use it.”
After setting me up at one of the computers, I waited until Alice was back at her desk before I took a sip of my bitter black coffee and contemplated my next move.
Then I made it.
I took out the card that Björn, or Agent Theodore Murphy, or whoever he was had given me at Elena’s wake.
Then I turned it over and read what was handwritten on the back.
Boston Globe, September 22, 1988Boston Globe, October 29, 1988You’re not safe. I can help. Call me.
I’d felt disoriented and tense ever since he’d given me the card. What did the Boston Globe have to do with me? And why had I been approached by an FBI agent? Was he watching Peter? Had he been doing surveillance when I spotted him the first time at the Hemingway Home wedding? Of who? Elena? Me? Was he trying to recruit me or something?