Still, Rick would take precautions, as usual, to avoid being tailed. He carried the four phone records boxes to the foot of the basement stairs and climbed the stairs, passed through the cloud of noise and plaster dust and back-and-forth chat and angry hip-hop-What you know about thumbing through them hunnits, twenties, and them fifties?-to the windows at the front of the house, and there he froze.
Across the street a car was idling.
Hear the twenties, fifties, hundreds, the money machine clickin’.
He’d noticed it an hour or so ago, a white sedan, an Audi, nothing out of place for the neighborhood. But there it still was, the driver texting on a smartphone, a plume of exhaust snaking around from the rear. Rick backed away from the window until he was out of the direct line of sight but could still see the Audi.
It was waiting for him, he somehow knew. Something about the way the driver was studiously avoiding looking out the window, or the way the car was parked just far enough down the street so as not to be too obvious, or the way the car hadn’t moved in over an hour.
But he knew it was watching the house.
Theoretically he knew the neighborhood well enough, better than any watcher, to lose anyone trying to follow him in a car. He knew which backyards led to which streets and which houses had toolsheds in their backyards. He knew places to hide better than anyone who hadn’t grown up in this part of Cambridge.
But maybe there was a better way to evade detection. He tapped Jeff on the shoulder, then asked him if it was okay if he hired Marlon and Santiago for a brief errand. Jeff shrugged. “Be my guest,” he said.
“Guys,” he said when Marlon and Santiago were standing around the file cartons, Marlon wiping his plaster-dusted brow with the back of a large hand. He gave Santiago the key to his latest Zipcar. “You guys mind carrying these boxes out to my car? It’s a blue Prius, parked a couple blocks away, right in front of 39 Fayerweather.”
Both of them seemed to hesitate a moment or two. Marlon glanced over at Jeff, who shrugged again, giving his permission. They clearly didn’t want to do it, saw no reason to do it. They didn’t have to brownnose the owner of the house, because they didn’t work for the owner. They worked for Jeff. Rick pulled out a couple of hundred-dollar bills, one new, one not so new, and handed one to each of them. Their faces lit up like kids being handed chocolate. Marlon had a full silver grill. Rick hadn’t noticed before. He was overpaying them for a simple errand, but he figured it might buy some goodwill. There was more where that came from.
“Just these right here?” Santiago asked, suspicious there had to be a catch.
“That’s all. And one more thing.”
Santiago looked at Marlon: Knew it was too good to be true.
“Could one of you move my car to that little lot next to Hi-Rise? The bakery?”
“On Concord right near where Huron comes in?” Marlon said.
“Exactly.” He didn’t bother to explain; he didn’t need an explanation. He just wanted his car moved, for some idiotic reason, to another spot a few blocks away.
Marlon looked at Jeff. “Cool, we take a break now?”
“Don’t take too long,” Jeff said.
Ten minutes after the two guys set off bearing cardboard boxes, Rick left the house. He walked up Huron Avenue toward Fresh Pond, the opposite direction from which the two workers had gone. He clocked something moving in his peripheral vision behind him, behind him and to his left, and tried not to look to confirm it was the white Audi. But it was. The driver in the Audi had waited until he’d reached the end of Clayton and turned right on Huron, when he’d be out of range. The last possible moment, so he wouldn’t be detected. Rick kept going up Huron Ave, studiously not noticing the car. Not until he reached the busy intersection of Huron and Fresh Pond Parkway did he have the chance to turn sideways, as if watching for oncoming traffic, and then he saw the Audi double-parked half a block down, waiting.
It was following him. But he was walking nowhere, with great purpose. He crossed Fresh Pond and headed into the park, where he and his friends had ridden their bikes, where he’d walked their black Lab, who’d been killed running out into traffic the same year his mother had died, the year from hell.
He walked around the reservoir. A few joggers ran past, talking. In here, within the wooded enclave of Fresh Pond Reservation, the Audi was at a disadvantage: unable to see, unable to enter. He had lost them. There were dozens of exits from the park. He chose one on the far end of the park, on Concord Avenue, flagged a passing cab.
Then he walked a few blocks down Concord Avenue to Hi-Rise bakery and looked in the small lot next door and didn’t see his Zipcar. He turned, looked around Concord. Maybe the guys couldn’t find a space next to Hi-Rise and just parked it where they could. But no Sea Glass Pearl Toyota Prius in sight. He rounded the corner onto Huron Avenue, still looking. Maybe they’d parked it as close to the lot as they could, and… But no Prius, not here.
It didn’t seem at all likely that Jeff’s crew would have stolen his car. Not a Toyota Prius, in any case. But it wasn’t here, and neither was Marlon nor Santiago. He debated heading back over to Clayton Street and was in fact on his way over ten minutes later when a Prius pulled over to the side of Concord, horn blaring.
“There you guys are,” Rick said. “What took you so long?”
Marlon, in the passenger’s seat, smiled and said, “Homey had to do an errand.”
Santiago got out of the driver’s seat and came around to hand Rick the keys. “Sorry about that, bro,” he said. “Had to pick something up.”
He knew then what had taken so long. They searched the car for cash. They thought Rick had hidden some or all the cash in the Prius, under the seats or in the glove compartment or in the trunk. They’d taken the car somewhere and pulled it apart. They’d probably searched the file boxes, too. But they’d found nothing. That didn’t mean they’d stop looking, though. The question was how far would they go. He’d thought that slipping them each a Benjamin would buy them off, neutralize their greed, but it had done the opposite. It had goaded them on. Like the mechanical rabbit at the dog track. Like giving a bloodhound an article of clothing, a scent: ready, go!
It had been a mistake he wouldn’t make again. Jeff wouldn’t do anything.
But these guys very well might.
30
He pulled into traffic and was at the offices of Back Bay magazine fifteen minutes later. He was taking a risk, appearing for a second time at the magazine. But the kind of search he had to do could be done only at the office. He needed to do an advanced search of LexisNexis by date. A conventional Internet search would take forever. You can search TheNew York Times or TheBoston Globe or TheWall Street Journal for incidents or names but not by what happened during three days in May in 1996. For that he needed to use LexisNexis on site.
The office was empty when he arrived. His badge got him in the door, though, and he flipped on the overhead lights, jittery fluorescents. He logged into the magazine’s intranet and found a nagging e-mail from Darren. How’s the Sculley Q &A coming? he wanted to know. He’ll be at the gala at the Park Plaza on Wednesday-maybe a good chance to sit down with him?
Rick didn’t bother to reply. The best strategy with Darren was just to ignore him. Rick pulled up LexisNexis. He typed in the date range, which yielded hundreds of headlines.
He groaned. He was looking at everything that had happened in Boston and Massachusetts over those three days. Politicians in trouble in the State House, town officials accused of graft… CAMBRIDGE MAN HELD IN STABBING. A guy was stabbed in the neck and chest at the Portuguese Football Club. 86-YEAR-OLD MALDEN WOMAN SUFFERS SEVERE BURNS IN APARTMENT FIRE. A sprinkling of obituaries, minor sports and medical news, the Indy 500 winner, the Fire Department’s annual ball at the Sheraton.