Brothers and Bones (30 page)

Bonz started shifting around in his bed. I coughed once, then again, hoping to draw him from his slumber. I wasn’t sure exactly what we should do next, but I knew that sleeping wasn’t going to get us anywhere. I coughed again and Bonz opened his eyes and scowled at me. Then he rolled over, sat up, pushed aside his bedcovers, and walked naked and scratching across the room and into the bathroom. I tried to keep my eyes off his scarred body. A minute later I heard the toilet flush and the water running in the shower.

I was tired of banging my head against a door that wouldn’t open for me, so I reached for the cell phone beside my bed. I turned it on and checked the battery level. Looked okay. It had occurred to me that we didn’t have Randy Deacon’s charger, so we had to preserve the battery as best we could. I saw that Randy had a voice mail. I also saw a missed call message. I punched buttons until I’d found the menu and then the missed calls list. I immediately recognized the number that placed the most recent call. Jessica’s cell phone. Her caller ID must have captured Randy’s cell number. I figured the voice mail was from her, but I didn’t know Randy’s password, so I simply called her back. Having tried many times myself to get a judge to expedite a wiretap authorization, I knew it was still probably too soon for her phone to be tapped.

“Whose phone are you using?” she asked immediately. “I don’t recognize the number.” Not
“Are you okay?”
I noticed.

“Don’t worry about it.”

“I’ve been scared all day, Charlie.”

“I called you early this morning. Left a message.”

“Yeah, I just checked my messages at home. I was at Daddy’s when you called. I heard about you as soon as I woke up and I didn’t want to be alone just then. You’re all over the news.”

“I figured that.”

“Respected federal prosecutor known for fighting organized crime, right during a huge mob trial—” her voice was beginning to crack “—kills his best friend in his apartment, leaves covered in blood, goes on the run.” She sucked in a shuddering breath. “And they say you kidnapped someone, Charlie, had him tied up in your trunk? And you assaulted two police officers? Jesus.”

“I’m innocent, Jess. Believe me.”

She was silent for a moment. I don’t think she believed me. Could I blame her? It looked really bad for me.

“Innocent of what, exactly?” she asked.

“Where are you now, Jess?”

“I’m working late.”

“You went to work today?”

“Daddy had to work and I didn’t want to sit alone all day with nothing to think about but…but this, so I worked too. Innocent of what?” she repeated.

“Well, I didn’t kill Angel, if that’s what you mean. I did leave the apartment with his blood on me, but someone else killed him.”

I heard her breathing heavily on the other end of the line.

“And I didn’t kidnap that guy—well, not knowingly, anyway. It’s complicated.”

“And the cops?”

“I guess I did play a part in that, but it’s not what you think, Jessica, any of it. I’m being framed by Carmen Siracuse.”

I heard a sniff. She was crying.

“You can believe that’s possible, can’t you?”

Another sniff, maybe a small sob.

“Jess? Don’t you think that’s possible?”

“It’s possible, Charlie. But you should know that the cops held a press conference. They won’t say what evidence they have against you, but they say it’s overwhelming.”

I already knew that but it still sucked to hear it. “Well, it wouldn’t be much of a frame if the evidence was weak, would it?”

“I don’t know, Charlie, I just…I don’t know what to believe.”

“Believe me.”

“I’d like to.”

“So do it. Is it really that hard?”

“I want to, I really do, but it’s not easy, not with what everybody’s saying. You have no idea. They’re saying the only way the case against you would be stronger is if they had actual videotape of you pulling the trigger.”

“Well, try to believe me anyway, okay?”

Instead of responding, she said, “My father wants you to turn yourself in.”

“Of course he does.”

“He says it’s your only chance and you of all people should know that.”

“I can’t.”

“He says he can help you if you turn yourself in now.”

“Murder is a state crime,” I said, “not federal. He’ll have no jurisdiction.”

Desperation tinged in her voice. “But he says he still has pull with the Middlesex DA’s office and he’ll do whatever he can to—”

I cut her off. “I’m not turning myself in, Jessica, at least not yet.” She said nothing. She sniffed loudly. “There are things I have to do first.”

“Like what?”

“Like prove my innocence.”

“Charlie…”

In the bathroom, the shower turned off.

“Jessica, I have to go. Try not to worry about me.” Good luck, I thought. I was worried as hell about myself. “I’m going to get to the bottom of this,” I said with far, far more conviction than I felt. “I’m going to find a way out. I’m going to get my life back. Our life. I promise you. But in the meantime, I want you to try, just try, to believe in me.”

She paused, then said, “I’ll try.”

“Thanks.”

I ended the call. I’d thought about telling her I loved her because I did, very much, but I feared that my declaration would be met with silence. I’d been through too much lately. I wasn’t sure I could have taken that.

Bonz walked out of the bathroom, again stark naked. That was getting unnerving. He sauntered over to his pile of clothes and started to dress.

“Who was that?” he asked.

“Jessica.”

“Not sure that was a great idea, Charlie.”

“Don’t worry about it. They can’t have her phones tapped yet.”

He shrugged. “She tell you anything useful?”

“I’m a star. All over the news. The cops think they’ve got a great case against me already.”

“They’re right.”

“Fuck you.”

It occurred to me too late that people had probably permanently lost the use of limbs for saying less than that to Bonz, but he simply said, “So what now?”

I told him my theory about pursuing the two simultaneous lines of investigation, at least until one became significantly more promising than the other.

“Makes sense to me,” Bonz said. “So, like I said, what’s next?”

“Well, I’ve been straining my brain to make something of Jake’s prayer clue and I’ve got nothing. I’ve replayed the mental pictures I took of everything in the church and I still can’t imagine where Jake hid the tape, though I still think it’s there somewhere.” My failure so far didn’t seem to surprise Bonz. He’d never thought much of my mental video recording.

“What about your brother’s notes? Anything in there?”

“I’ve been all through them, and they weren’t helpful.”

“Okay, so you wanna hear my plan, then?” Bonz asked.

I looked at him, surprised.

“You have one?”

“Sure.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“Well, first of all, I assume you don’t want me to kill Siracuse.”

“Wouldn’t help me much.”

“But it would make me feel a lot better. Plus, it would put the man responsible for what happened to your brother into the ground.”

“Yeah, but I want justice for him, not just revenge. Besides, it doesn’t clear my name and I’m still hoping to do that.”

“Figured you might say that. So here’s my plan…let me do my thing.”

“Your thing? You have a thing?”

He nodded.

“Which is?”

“Put the screws to some people, see what they know.”

“Break bones,” I said.

“Only if necessary.”

“Whose bones?”

“Well, we’d figure that out, decide who might know something useful. Then I persuade them to tell us what they know.”

“Think that would work?”

Bonz shrugged. “Never said it was a great plan.”

“I’ll think about it,” I said without really meaning it. I didn’t relish the idea of tracking down Mafia guys and then watching Bonz beat them up. First, as a federal prosecutor—well, probably a former federal prosecutor—I was against such violence as a matter of principle. Second, it was dangerous as hell for us. Going right at the people who were looking for us? Seemed insane. Besides, the best, least dangerous, cleanest solution for us, I knew, was still to figure out where, or with whom, Jake had hidden the tape.

“Okay,” Bonz said. “Just don’t keep thinking about it until it’s too late. You know what I mean?”

I knew exactly what he meant.

THIRTY-TWO

“Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep—” I’d read so many prayers that they were like a freshly painted watercolor left out in the rain, the carefully rendered images melting, bleeding into a Technicolor puddle on the paper. The words I read over and over blended into a jumble of prayer. They made no sense to me anymore. But Jake’s last words, as Bonz remembered them, probably mumbled in a pain-induced fog, were “Find Charlie and tell him if he wants the answers, to turn to prayer.” This was all we had. A single clue, and we sunk our teeth into it like a couple of pit bulls sharing a steak.

So that’s how we found ourselves at the Boston Public Library, which is right across Copley Square from the Fairmont Copley Plaza, where I’d attended the charity function with Jessica just last night.
Jesus, was it really just last night?

Bonz and I had walked together up the grand yellow marble staircase, past the unpolished marble lions reposing on the landing, then up to the second floor, where we followed a complicated path through several rooms to our respective destinations. He was in the religion section, slogging through musty old books on Catholic prayer, while I remained in the twenty-first century, sitting at one of the library’s computer terminals, surfing the Internet for anything prayer-related that might help us.

Of course, as vast as the subject of prayer is, we had no choice but to set some limits on our research at the outset. With prayer probably central to every major religion in the world, Bonz agreed with my assessment that we should restrict our efforts, at least initially, to the most famous of the Catholic prayers. After all, Jake didn’t leave me the prayer clue until he’d already been kidnapped. According to Bonz, he didn’t have access to a Bible or prayer book. If he’d left the clue
before
he was kidnapped, it would have been far more likely that he could have chosen a more obscure prayer to guide me to his tape. But because he was locked away without access to written prayers, presumably without warning, and definitely without being well-versed in the art of praying, it seemed most likely that he would, by necessity, have been limited to the prayers he already knew by heart—that is, the main ones.

As I noted, the most common prayer is the Lord’s Prayer, which most people seem to know a little of, even non-Christians. “Our Father, who art in heaven….” Then there’s the Hail Mary. After that, the prayers simply aren’t nearly as well known. Still, I couldn’t risk assuming that Jake didn’t know
any
of them, so I tried to determine the eight or ten most common ones.

You know what I learned? I learned that there are a
lot
of prayers out there. You can pray to God, of course. And you can pray to Jesus Christ. Not only that, but there are prayers to specific parts of Jesus. You can pray to his “sacred heart,” to his “holy wounds” in general, or to his “shoulder wound” specifically. I didn’t even know he
had
a shoulder wound. And then there’s Mary. You can pray to her, of course, or to her “immaculate heart,” or you can pray in honor of her “seven sorrows,” or you can recite a host of other prayers directed at the Blessed Virgin, Jesus Christ, God, and any of the countless saints the church has canonized over the centuries. Some of the prayers I read were short, some were very long, and some were very, very long. Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not knocking the church, or prayer, or people who pray. I’m just saying that none of this made my job any easier.

I did the best I could in choosing what appeared to be the most common prayers and printed them out for fifteen cents a page. In my stack were also the Apostles’ Creed, the Glory Be, an Act of Contrition, and a few others.

I took the pile over to a quiet table in a corner, away from the casual glance of other library patrons, and began to really study the prayers. I did so for over an hour. I got nothing. Bonz walked up to me with what appeared to be copies in his hands.

“What have you got?” he asked.

“I got nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Well, I don’t know, let’s take a look at the Lord’s Prayer here.” I picked up a copy and read, “Our Father, who art in heaven.” I looked up. “Well, there you go. I’ve solved it. Jake took the tape with him to heaven. Case closed.” I gave a little laugh that I realized sounded a tad batty.

“You’re losing it, Charlie.”

He was right. I was. And I’d been at it for less than an hour. Frustration was setting in. Must have been the murder charge hanging over my head, the cops and the mob racing each other to find me, my face in the news, my fiancée thinking maybe I murdered my best friend. Yeah, that might have been it.

“I’ve read these things a dozen times each,” I said, waving a fistful of printed prayers at him. “I see nothing here that sparks anything in me. I don’t see a thing even slightly resembling a clue Jake might have been pointing me to. You have any luck?”

I’d asked Bonz to research the history of the prayers rather than their actual text, in case there was something that could help us in the way a prayer had been created or had changed over time or had been employed over the years. It was a long shot, of course, for the same reason that the answer likely didn’t lie in a lesser-known prayer—that is, Jake probably wouldn’t have known about such things. Nonetheless, I didn’t think we needed the both of us reading the prayers themselves, so Bonz hit the history books. He didn’t seem comfortable with a research task, but he surprised me by digging in with only a minor grumble.

Because of the time-consuming nature of historical research, Bonz limited himself for now to the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary.