A Fine Line (20 page)

I figured I had better take him seriously. But I had no idea what he wanted from me.

My first impulse, as a law-abiding citizen, a member of the bar, and a dutiful officer of the court—not to mention a man
who’d been interrogated at length by an FBI agent and had promised to cooperate with her—was to call Roger Horowitz and turn the cell phone and the envelope it came in and the entire problem over to him.

My second, even stronger instinct was to take a deep breath and do nothing until I could give the entire situation some serious analysis.

I smoked another cigarette. Drained my coffee mug. Refilled it. Lit another cigarette.

Serious, focused analytical thought wasn’t coming that easy to me. There was a tight, acidic ache in my stomach that kept getting in the way.

So I called J.W.

J.W. Jackson was a former Boston cop who got shot, retired young, took his pension, and went to live on Martha’s Vineyard. He was a no-bullshit kind of guy, a Red Sox and Hemingway fan, a lover of the sea—everything I like and trust in a friend.

Once or twice every summer I fished the Vineyard beaches and jetties for striped bass and bluefish with J.W., and we got along well, even if he sneered at my little fly rod, called it a “toy,” and disapproved of my practice of using sporting tackle and putting back the fish I caught. “Fish,” he liked to say, “are the bounty of the sea. They should be respected. You disrespect them if you play with them after you hook them, because there’s no reason to think they consider it play. If they can be caught, they should be killed and eaten, not thrown back. Throwing them back makes it a game that they don’t participate in voluntarily. It’s disrespectful. Eating them shows respect. Take me. I really enjoy shellfishing. But you don’t see me throwing back a bushel of oysters after I’ve had all that fun gathering them, do you?”

We didn’t agree on some things. But J.W. was a pretty smart man.

Zee, his gorgeous wife, answered the phone, and after I begged her to divorce J.W., abandon her children, and run off with me, and after she declined in such a gracious way that I almost believed she was tempted, she gave J.W. a holler.

A minute later he came on the line. “What’s up? You comin’ down? Blues have headed out to sea for the hot months, but the stripers have been hitting pretty good around Cape Pogue and Lobsterville. The kids keep asking when Uncle Brady’s coming back. They expect you to sleep in their treehouse with them. They claim you promised last time you were here.”

“I’d like to,” I said. “Believe me. But that’s not why I’m calling.”

He hesitated. “What’s this I’m hearing in your voice?”

“I got a problem.”

“And you’re calling me?” He laughed. “You call
me
with a problem, you got a real problem.”

“I need a cop’s perspective here.”

“I am not a cop anymore,” he said.

“That’s exactly what I want. I can’t talk about this with an actual cop. You don’t have any duty to perform.”

“None whatsoever,” he said. “It’s a grand lifestyle.”

“Yeah, I envy you. You know that. Really, what I need is a friend’s perspective. Okay?”

“Then, indeed, you came to the right place. Fire away.”

So I told J.W. about the murders of Walt Duffy and Ben Frye, about the Meriwether Lewis letters, about the latenight phone calls and the fires, about getting mugged in my
parking garage, about my session with Agent Randall, about the Spotted Owl Liberation Front.

And then I told him about how I got my new cell phone and the call I’d received on it. “I know I should get ahold of Agent Randall and dump it on her lap,” I said. “But . . .?” I left it as a question.

J.W. didn’t say anything.

“I don’t know what to do,” I said finally.

“I can’t tell you what to do,” he said.

“I know,” I said. “I’ve been trying to analyze it.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Sometimes analysis helps.”

I laughed. “
Sometimes
?”

“Lemme ask you a question,” he said.

“Ask away.”

“When you analyze this thing, and when you conclude that you should turn the whole deal over to the FBI, how does it make you feel?”

“Feel?” I said. “It makes me feel . . . nervous. Jumpy. Unsettled.”

“It doesn’t feel right?”

“No, I guess not.”

“You don’t trust the cops, huh?”

“Oh, I guess I trust them. But . . .”

“But their priorities are different than yours,” he said.

“This is the guy that already killed two people,” I said. “He could kill anybody. Me, somebody I love . . .”

“A crazy person,” said J.W. “Deranged.”

“Oh, talking to him, he sounds sane enough. But he burns down buildings and kills people.”

“That could be a pretty good definition of deranged,” said J.W. “See, Brady, the problem with cops is, they’re always
looking for patterns and clues, trying to understand cause and effect, stuff like that. Rational stuff.”

I found myself nodding. “I guess that’s what’s bothering me. It’s not that I don’t respect cops.”

“They’re not infallible,” said J.W. “I oughta know. I was a cop myself. This guy who’s calling you. He sounds smart and crazy. Nasty combination. You don’t have any idea who it could be?”

“No,” I said. “He seems to know a lot about me, though. And he disguises his voice. That probably means I’d recognize it if he spoke normally.”

“He got into your apartment building. He was probably the one who swiped your wallet and your briefcase. He’s studied up on you.”

“I should do what he says, then,” I said. “Leave the cops out of it. That what you’re saying?”

“Is that what you want me to say?”

“Jesus, J.W.”

“No, I mean it. You called me. What did you want from me?”

“Perspective, I guess.”

“What if I told you flat out to call the cops, give ’em that cell phone, and wash your hands of the whole thing? Would you do it?”

I hesitated. “I don’t know.”

“Would you have regretted calling me in the first place if that’s what I said?”

“Yeah, maybe.”

“Because it doesn’t feel right.”

“I guess so.”

“So you already know what you want to do, right?”

“I know how I feel,” I said. “But I don’t know if it’s the right thing.”

“Yes, you do,” he said. “A very wise person once said to me: For most decisions, give it deep analytical thought, then do what your head tells you to do. But for really important decisions, you’ve got to listen to your heart.”

“Do what feels right,” I said.

“This is a pretty important decision, huh?”

“It sure feels like it,” I said.

“Your heart’s telling you to leave the cops out of it, right?”

“For now, at least. Yes.”

“Then that’s probably what you should do.”

I blew out a long breath. “I don’t know, man.”

“Look,” said J.W. “I’m not saying you shouldn’t get some help. I’m just saying you’ve got to be damn careful whose help you ask for.”

“I trust Horowitz.”

“Yeah,” said J.W., “except he’s part of that FBI bunch. You say something to him, you can’t expect him not to take it to that agent.”

“I should just wait, then,” I said. “Don’t make a decision until I’m sure of it. Do nothing for now.”

“Doing nothing is a decision, too,” he said.

“It feels like the right decision.”

“For what it’s worth,” said J.W., “if it was me, I think that’s what my heart would be saying. I’d play it by ear. If this guy wanted to kill you, he’d’ve probably tried it by now. I studied up on these psychos when I was with the cops. For some reason, he’s decided you’re a challenge. It’s personal for him. He’s playing with you. The way you like to play with fish on that little toy fly rod of yours. He’s got you
hooked, and he’s enjoying it, him pulling one way, you thrashing around, pulling back. Why not string him along for a while, see what you can figure out.”

“String him along how?” I said.

“Psychos like this guy,” said J.W., “once they got you beat, reeled you in and you’re flopping on the beach with your gills flapping, gasping for air, they’re done with you. You’ve got to give him a tussle. Don’t give in to him. Don’t lose your temper. It’s a fine line. You don’t want to piss him off. Do what he says, but don’t give in to him. He wants to beat you mentally. That’s his power game.”

“It sounds like an extremely fine line,” I said.

“Sure,” he said. “You’re angling for time, so to speak. Try to figure out where he’s headed with all this. When the time comes to call in the cavalry, you’ll know it.”

“How will I know?”

“Keep paying attention to your heart,” he said. “It’s hardwired to your subconscious. It picks up on all the subtle vibes, the tiny little nuances and clues that don’t quite register with the rational part. Your heart knows things that your mind doesn’t know.”

“So who is the wise person who explained that to you?” I said.

“Zee,” he said. “Wisest person I know. Listen. When this is over, you and Evie come down for a weekend. We’ll catch us a keeper-sized striper, and if they’re not biting, we’ll rake some quahogs, dig some clams, make a pitcher of martinis, have us a feast from the sea.”

“You’re on.”

“You better be careful,” he said. “Zee would kill me if something happened because I gave you bad advice.”

Henry and I walked to the office. I had the damn cell phone in my pants pocket. I was acutely aware of it. It was just a sliver of a thing and weighed about as much as my car keys, but it felt like I was lugging around a hand grenade that might explode at any minute.

Julie was sitting at her desk when we got there. She made a big point of looking at her watch.

“Don’t start on me,” I said.

“I didn’t say anything.”

I poured myself some coffee and took it into my office. Henry followed me.

I took the cell phone out of my pocket, put it on my desk, and sat down. I hoped I wasn’t making a mistake, not telling Horowitz about it.

I lit a cigarette and called Evie at her office. When she answered, I said, “Your place tonight, right? Usual time?”

“Hi. Yes. Kinda busy here, Brady.”

“Do you mind if we stick close to home this weekend?”

“Well, okay,” she said. “But I thought . . .”

Earlier in the week we had talked about piling into my car on Saturday morning, cranking the sun roof open, loading up the CD player with a lot of good ol’ rock ‘n’ roll, and spending the weekend driving the back roads of Vermont, finding an out-of-the-way bed-and-breakfast, prospecting for old hand-carved decoys in village antique shops, maybe stopping to cast a fly on one of those lovely little Vermont trout streams that spill out of the Green Mountains and seem to meander along the edge of every pasture and pass under every dirt road on their way to the Connecticut River.

“I got some things going on,” I told her. “I’ll explain when I see you.”

“Fine,” she said. “See you tonight. Gotta go.”

I hung up. That was easy.

The damn cell phone sat there on my desk with its little green light blinking at me. I felt as if the man with the muffled voice was watching me through that green eye.

I tried to concentrate on the stack of papers Julie had left for me. It was slow going. I couldn’t get that voice out of my head.

J.W. said the man with the voice was playing with me, enjoying it. Crazy, deranged, unpredictable, J.W. had called him. He killed people.

What did he want with me?

Julie came into my office around noon. When she came over to my desk to collect the papers I’d piled into the out box, she recoiled as if a weasel had poked its head out of its hole and snapped its teeth at her. “What the hell is
that?”
she said. She pointed at the cell phone.

“Oh, that,” I said. “It’s a telephone.”

“It’s a cellular phone,” she said. “You hate cellular phones. Is it yours?”

“Sort of.”

She grinned. “Well, finally. I never expected you to enter the twenty-first century. But I’ll be darned if you haven’t at least crawled into the twentieth. Congratulations.”

“I haven’t. Not really.”

“Do you realize how much easier this will make my life?” she said. “I’ve been begging you to get a cell phone. What a lovely surprise.”

“Julie,” I said, “this is not for business.”

“What are you talking about? That’s exactly what cell phones are for.”

“It’s not really my phone, and I can’t say any more about it.”

“Are you carrying it around with you?”

I nodded.

“Well, give me the number.”

“No. I can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“Please,” I said. “Forget about the cell phone. I didn’t mean for you to see it.”

She narrowed her eyes at me. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t want to receive any calls on it?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Will you at least use it to make calls?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Let me get this straight,” she said. “You’re carrying around this phone, but you’re not going to use it? You intend to continue waiting in line at pay phones in courthouse lobbies? You will continue to be entirely out of touch when you’re out walking or driving your car or off fishing somewhere? Is that it?”