His face and hair were covered with black soot. He looked like a chimney sweep. He’d attracted double takes in the hotel lobby. “I need some new clothes.”
“Where were you?”
“Never mind that. Tell me what you found.”
“I need to show you. But where’ve you been?”
He told her some, then went into the bathroom, turned on the shower, and let it run. He came back out and began stripping off his smoke-saturated clothes. He did it without modesty; they had seen each other naked before. She didn’t look away.
“You reek of smoke.”
“Take me through what you’ve got.”
She talked to him while he showered. “The key piece was B &H Packing, that meat-packing plant. Apparently, Sculley’s Bay Group has a dozen subsidiaries and two of them have as their principal ownership a nonprofit entity called the Donegall Charitable Trust. Including a meat-packing plant in South Boston. So the paper trail points directly to Thomas Sculley.”
“All right. That’s great. That’s great.”
When he finished showering, he toweled off and he still smelled of smoke.
“Can you pull up the Cambridge Fire Department’s Twitter feed?” he said.
By the time he was dressed, she called him over to her laptop.
CAMBRIDGE FIRE DEPT. @CAMBRIDGEMAFIRE
BREAKING: fire sweeps through west Cambridge house. Firefighters respond to 284 Clayton Street for a 2 alarm fire.
“Sweeps through means the fire wasn’t contained, I assume,” she said.
“I don’t know. What about a body?”
As if the Cambridge Fire Department’s Twitter feed could hear him, another tweet rolled down the page.
CAMBRIDGE FIRE DEPT. @CAMBRIDGEMAFIRE
2 alarm fire 284 Clayton Street sadly claims 1 life.
“He’s dead.”
“Who?”
“My old fr-neighbor. Jeff. He died in the fire.”
“Oh my God.”
“Wait. They’re going to assume it’s me who died in the fire. Until Jeff’s body is identified.”
“So that buys you time, doesn’t it? How long could that take?”
He shrugged. “Maybe a day. Maybe less. I don’t know.”
She noticed his eyes were wet. “He tried to kill you. If you hadn’t stopped him, that would have been your body in the house.”
“Still. I killed a man.”
“He torched your house and tried to kill you because they offered him a better deal than splitting the proceeds from the sale of your house.”
“I need to get over to the FBI,” he said.
63
This time he met Special Agent Donovan in the reception area of the FBI’s Boston field office, on the sixth floor of 1 Center Plaza in the big ugly sixties building complex called Government Center.
“I can’t take you back to the bullpen,” Donovan said. “Should we go out for a cup of coffee?”
“No,” Rick said. “This is official. Put me in an interview room.”
Donovan sniffed. “You been camping?”
Rick surrendered his iPhone and his driver’s license to the woman behind the glass, as required. Jeff’s Nokia he held on to. “This is for you,” he said, clapping it into Donovan’s hand.
“What is it?”
“It’s text messages and probably phone calls from the guy who hired Jeff Hollenbeck to kill me.”
Inside the secure area, Donovan got Rick settled in a small room that had a small table and four chairs. There was nothing on the walls. Then he went off to hand the Nokia to a tech. He came back five minutes later with two cups of coffee. “I put cream in yours. I wasn’t sure. That okay?”
“That’s fine.” Rick started to tell him about Jeff and the fire, but Donovan interrupted after a few minutes. “Hold on, Rick. We have to get a few procedural things clear first. If I’m opening a new case, I need to set up a preliminary investigation.”
“This is attempted murder and arson. You should have enough evidence here to present a case to the US attorney’s office and get the authority to make an arrest.”
Donovan looked as if he was about to scoff and then thought better of it. He knew Rick well enough at least to know that he didn’t make things up. They’d shared information in the past. They respected each other. “Let’s hear what you have.” There was a knock at the door. “That was fast,” Donovan said. He got up and keyed the door open.
A thin, wan man in his forties, balding on top, nerd glasses, handed Donovan a sheet of paper. The tech knew his role in the organization and dressed the part. “Holy crap,” Donovan said. “Thanks, John.” He closed the door.
Still standing, he folded his arms. “This was fast for a couple of reasons. The Nokia flip phones download to Cellebrite in a matter of seconds. Also, this is a Sprint phone, and Sprint has a portal exclusively for law enforcement, so tracing the calls was fast.”
“The texts?”
“They took precautions. The texts came from a spoofed number. It’s easy to do and just about impossible to crack. Takes forever, anyway. Two phone calls came in from the same blocked number.”
“What’s ‘holy crap’?”
“The number belongs to a guy we have a closed case on. One Emmet Boyle of Lynn, Mass. An Irish illegal.”
He wondered if that was the guy with the shamrock tattoo. “A closed case?”
“Any number of reasons. Not enough evidence. Priorities. Who knows. But this is a bad guy.”
“What do you have on him?”
“Unsubstantiated accusations of arson, murder for hire. He comes from Belfast, Ireland. Believed to be part of a gang of Irish immigrants formerly associated with the Provisional Irish Republican Army.”
“The terrorists.”
“One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter,” Donovan said. He was Irish, too, Rick had to remind himself. The politics are fraught.
“But all that IRA stuff is done, I thought.”
“The IRA ended its armed campaign a decade ago. Which left some fairly skilled killers looking for work.”
Rick shook his head. “Meaning-what? They’re contract killers?”
“Contract muscle.”
“Hired by who?”
“If we had that, we’d have an open case.”
“Where’s the phone?”
“In the tech lab. It’s evidence.”
“Evidence for what?”
“I’ve got at least enough now for a preliminary investigation.”
“Like I said, you have enough for an arrest. I need my phone back.”
A line creased Donovan’s brow. “What do you want, Rick-the phone or an FBI investigation?”
“The phone and an arrest. I didn’t officially give the FBI the cell phone, so I’d like it back.”
For a moment, it looked as if there’d be a standoff. But Donovan knew Rick was right. “I’ll see what I can do.”
He returned more than ten minutes later. There had probably been a discussion with a superior. Donovan handed Rick the phone. “You’ve got a text.”
He opened the phone.
Meet at 7 as arranged
Rick’s stomach clutched. They still thought he was Jeff, but he couldn’t convincingly be Jeff if he didn’t know the prior arrangements. After a moment he texted back: Can’t appear where I know anyone. Change meet to Dunkin Donuts South Boston.
He held his breath waiting for a reply. It came a few minutes later.
Which location?
Relieved, he texted: Old Colony Ave.
64
The Dunkin’ Donuts on Old Colony Avenue in Southie was perched in the middle of a big parking lot, which made it a useful place to meet. It was a busy street, another advantage. Or so he was told. Rick was no expert.