Brothers and Bones (5 page)

“I really need to find him,” I said.

The man made a terrible snuffling sound, then spit something thick onto the ground right between us. “You got any money?”

Why hadn’t I anticipated a moment like this? He’d want money for information, of course. God, I was doing badly here. I fumbled my wallet out of my coat pocket, keeping as tight a grip on it as I could, and extracted a ten-dollar bill. I took half a step forward and held it out. The man reached up and closed dirty fingers around it. Then he turned and walked back into the shadows.

“Go away,” he said over his shoulder. It echoed under the ramp.

“Wait a second,” I said. “Do you know the guy or not?”

He turned back to face me. Then I saw the foot-long length of rusty metal pipe in his hand. “You’re lucky I didn’t take your wallet. Now go away. I won’t tell you again.”

I looked at the man, his dead eyes, the metal pipe he held, and the woman peering out from behind his legs. I turned away and walked back toward the light across the street.

FIVE

I was having a dream. I knew I was. But still, the dream had terrible power. It disturbed me to my core, even though I knew I’d wake up at any moment and I wouldn’t be standing next to a drainage ditch beside Storrow Drive, looking down at the dead body of a homeless man lying in several inches of brown, brackish water, with slimy leaves the color of mud pasted to his puffy gray neck and cheek, his Harvard sweatshirt soaked and stained, his glassy eyes staring up from that face, that face I’d known all my life. I knew I’d wake up soon and I’d no longer be looking at my brother, Jake, lying dead and forgotten by society, by everyone who loved him but me, and maybe by me, too, because maybe I hadn’t done enough to find him, maybe I hadn’t looked hard enough, asked enough questions, followed the right leads, maybe I should have—

“Geez, are you asleep?”

I lifted my head from my desk and sat up in my chair. Angel Medina was peering around the nearly closed door to my office. “Nope. Just thinking.”

“Oh. I thought maybe you were sleeping. But I guess not. You might want to pull that paper clip off your forehead, though.”

I did, and said, “I thought I’d closed that door.”

“When I first started working here you told me, ‘My door’s always open, Angel.’ I remember that well.” He came into my office, closing the door behind him, and dropped into the chair in front of my desk. “Even if I ignore that faint outline of a paper clip on your forehead, you look like shit. What’s up?”

I shook my head to clear it. “Long night.”

“Redekov? How late were you here working last night?”

“Pretty late.” No reason he should know about my little stroll into the Boston netherworld. After I was mugged, or whatever you’d call it, by the street person from Boston College, I spent another couple of fruitless hours looking for anyone who might have some idea where the homeless guy might be before I finally dragged myself home and into bed around three a.m.

“Where were you this morning?” Angel asked. “I was looking for you before lunch.”

“Meeting with a witness,” I lied. I’d spent that morning ignoring my trial prep, choosing instead to roam Boston’s rougher streets again looking for my personal white whale in the Harvard sweatshirt.

Angel frowned at me. “Man, you look beat. You should take a nap or something.”

I rubbed my eyes. They felt puffy—not just the skin around them, but my actual eyeballs felt puffy. “Have you forgotten the paper clip, Angel?”

He smiled, then turned serious. “Listen, Charlie, we both know this trial is big. You need to work hard on it, we both do, I guess, but if you kill yourself at the start, who’ll take over as lead counsel? Shit, they might turn to me, and then we’d all be in big trouble. So take it easy, man. Pace yourself a little, all right?”

He was right. This was indeed a big trial. Blow it for the USA’s office and I could do real damage to my career, possibly losing my cherished spot on the Organized Crime Strike Force Unit, which is all I’ve wanted since Jake disappeared. And despite the recent distractions I’d faced, I couldn’t ask off the trial even if I’d wanted to, which I didn’t. That would have been career suicide. The problem was, I’d waited for a clue to Jake’s whereabouts for thirteen years. And I’d finally gotten one. How could I not do whatever it took to follow that clue wherever it led me, no matter how difficult it was to follow? But my work could suffer, without a doubt. It already had. Would Jake have wanted me to throw away everything I’d worked toward, maybe let a mob big-shot walk, on the mere chance that some crazy homeless guy
might
have something rattling around in his addled mind that might—just
might
—be relevant? I doubted it. And I’d worked too hard over the years to jeopardize my career now, starting with the long, hard hours of study in law school and continuing through the long, hard years working for the DA’s office and later for the Department of Justice.

I had to find a balance. I had to find the homeless man without tanking the Redekov trial. If I could find the guy relatively quickly, I’d probably be all right. I didn’t have to be back in court until Monday morning, which left me two days and three nights during which to find the homeless man, get my answers, then get my head back in the legal game.

I was about to give Angel some measure of assurance that I wasn’t about to self-destruct when there was a knock at my door and my administrative assistant Patty’s muffled voice said, “Charlie, you’re going to be late for your five o’clock.”

I looked at my watch. It was ten minutes to five in the afternoon. I’d been asleep for nearly an hour.

“Thanks, Patty,” I called. I got up from my desk, grabbed my jacket, and said, “Gotta run, Angel. You going to that charity thing on Sunday?”

“The thing for the arts? I don’t know. You?”

“Well, Lippincott’s speaking, so it seems like a good idea politically. Either way, I’ll call you that night. You can psych me up for Monday.”

Angel turned in his chair as I hurried past him. “But wait, where are you going? I thought this case was your life for the immediate future. I thought you’d be here all night again, despite my sage advice.”

“I’ve got to meet someone. Talk to you Sunday.”

* * *

I wasn’t on the street for more than a minute when I realized I was being followed. I was absolutely sure of it this time. Of course, it made it easier for me to be so certain when someone was calling, “Charlie, wait up!”

I smiled and turned as my fiancée, Jessica, trotted up to me, a little out of breath. I watched her slow to a stop and brush a little of her shoulder-length auburn hair—hair the color of the richest, most lustrous cherry wood—from the corner of her mouth. I wondered, as I often did when I’d see her for the first time on any given day, whether there was even one strand of her father’s DNA in her. I guess they were both on the thin side, but that was where the similarities ended. Andrew Lippincott was short, sharp, and angular, while Jessica, standing almost five-nine, was gracefully long and lithe. Lippincott’s face was a little hard, while Jessica’s was soft and beautiful. It wasn’t perfect, not by
Cosmopolitan
magazine standards—her nose was probably a touch too long, her eyes just a fraction of an inch too close together—but she turned way more than her fair share of heads. And though I’d heard people opine that Jessica had inherited her father’s gray eyes, I privately disagreed. Lippincott’s eyes were a smoky, gunmetal gray while Jessica’s, I always thought, were like mood rings. When she laughed they looked like soft gray cashmere. When she was mad they turned the gray of an angry, turbulent sea. And I swear those eyes could sparkle in absolute darkness. I’d never seen her father’s do that, though I tried not to find myself with him in absolute darkness. Finally, while Lippincott moved deliberately, each gesture or step calculated and efficient, Jessica had somehow acquired a dancer’s grace without ever donning a tutu or tap shoe.

Come to think of it, there was one way in which they were similar, I guess. They were both terrific lawyers. Jessica practiced securities law at Hudson Kain LLP, the fifth-largest firm in Boston, and was, by all accounts, a lock to make partner in a few months.

When she reached me she tilted her chin up and waited for my kiss. I didn’t make her wait long.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“Well, hello, sweetie,” she said, smiling, “how nice it is to see you, too.”

“Sorry. Of course it’s great to see you. It always is. But why am I seeing you?”

She hooked her arm in mine, spun me around in the direction I’d been headed before she called to me, and we started walking.

“I know you have your monthly appointment today, so I decided to surprise you. The grindstone has worn your nose down to a nub lately, Charlie. We’re getting behind on together time. I left the office a little early to buy a dress for the charity dinner on Sunday. I’ll shop while you get your head shrunk and we can meet up after your appointment. What do you think? Grab a little takeout, bring it back to your place, and, after dinner, try to work our way through chapter six of the
Kama Sutra
?”

I laughed. Neither of us had ever even seen a copy of the
Kama Sutra
, but I knew what she was getting at. And boy, it was a tempting offer. The fact that I was torn demonstrated how deeply affected I was by my encounter with the homeless man the day before. I had planned to try my luck again at finding him that night. I didn’t want to let too much time pass. Anything could happen to him. He could die of exposure or at the hands of some other dark-dweller. He could simply disappear, and take with him whatever answers he might have about Jake. Hell, I didn’t want to get my hopes up, but I still wasn’t absolutely sure he
wasn’t
Jake, and I couldn’t stand the thought of my brother spending even one more night on the streets. A vision from my earlier daydream—of Jake lying bloated and covered in drainage-ditch slime—popped into my head. I shivered. Jessica must have felt it, because she turned to me as we walked.

“What, do I suddenly give you the creeps?” She smiled.

“No, it’s just the Redekov trial,” I lied. “I screwed up pretty badly yesterday. I can’t make any more mistakes. I planned to go back to the office this evening and put some more time in on it. I know you know how important it is, Jess. And not just to my career. This guy is stone-cold bad. He needs to be locked up.” I truly hated being dishonest with her about my plans.

She removed her arm from mine. Not angrily, but it sent a subtle message. “We were supposed to have a quick bite last night, talk about your first day in court on this big, career-making case of yours, but you canceled on me.” I opened my mouth to respond but she quickly said, “It’s okay. I wasn’t left high and dry. Daddy stepped in for you and took me to dinner.”

“He tell you all about my performance yesterday?”

“Well, he wasn’t quite as hard on you as you were when you called me to cancel, but he did say you weren’t at your best.”

I suspected he said far more than that—in my experience with them, father and daughter also seemed to be good friends and kept few secrets from each other—and I couldn’t blame him if he did, but I let it drop.

“Jess, it’s not that I don’t want to spend time with you right now, but this Redekov thing is—”

“Charlie, I know how important this trial is to you. Just promise me that you won’t let it make you nuts.”

“I already am nuts,” I said. “Just ask Dr. Fielding.”

“You know I hate when you talk like that. Look, all I’m saying is, work hard, do well, but don’t obsess about the trial.” She hesitated, then added, “You do sometimes have a little problem with obsession, Charlie.”

I didn’t feel like going down that road and, besides, she wasn’t trying to be mean, so I ignored the comment. As much as I wanted to get started looking for the homeless-guy-who-might-be-my-long-lost-brother, I didn’t want to let my relationship with Jessica suffer. She thought I was going to the office tonight, and that if I declined to spend time with her today, it would be so I could prepare for day two of the Redekov trial, which she knew was the biggest thing to fall into my lap at work since Angel’s administrative assistant made a pass at me at an office holiday party three years ago. Being a lawyer herself, Jess would have understood, but I did feel guilty lying to her, so I said, “How about this? We’ll pick up some subs, eat them back at my place, and do just a few pages of the
Kama Sutra
. Then I’ll head back to the office. Does that sound okay?” I really hoped it did. I was relieved when she grabbed my arm again.

“You can work late tonight, after I’m through with you. And you can work as much as you want this weekend. Until Sunday night, of course.”

“The arts thing, huh?” I said, referring to the charity dinner to raise money to support the arts in the Boston area.

“You’re not going to cancel on me at the last minute. You can’t. My father—your boss and future father-in-law, that is—is speaking. So you have to go.”

“He’s not
speaking
. He’s going to give some
impromptu remarks
.”

“Yeah, impromptu,” she snorted. “He’s been working on them for weeks.” She knew as well as I did that both federal law and Department of Justice rules prohibit the United States Attorney from being a keynote speaker to draw attendees to a charity event, but that his attendance isn’t prohibited, nor is his making casual, impromptu remarks. Of course, Lippincott had been asked a month earlier by the event’s organizer, an old friend of his, to consider making such remarks when the night came. “But you can’t back out.”

“I won’t. I’m looking forward to seeing you in your new dress. And then seeing your dress lying in a heap by my bed later.”

“Very funny, you pig. Don’t count your chickens. We’ll see how the night goes.” I smiled. “Did Daddy give you the ‘personal perfection’ speech again?”

“He did.”

Jess could relate. She might have been the light of her father’s life, but that had not spared her the man’s demanding standards over the years. It was, I knew, a source of fairly minor tension between them, the only one I was aware of. However, Jess knew it had helped her to excel over the years, and for that she was secretly grateful. Besides, she had a theory as to what lay at the heart of her father’s unforgiving pursuit of personal perfection, a goal he coerced others under his influence to strive toward. She believed tragedy had given birth to the man’s defining trait. Decades ago, Lippincott lost a child, a severely autistic son, a brother Jessica barely knew. The boy was a long-term patient at St. Michael’s Hospital, a well-known health care facility not far from downtown Boston specializing in the care of patients with mental disabilities, when he was killed by another patient, a thirteen-year-old boy with severe mental illness. According to Jessica, her father felt he was nearly as responsible as the sick young killer was, believing that if only he’d been better, a better father, less inclined to listen to the experts who told him his son should be institutionalized, if only he’d kept his son at home, cared for him himself, Tommy would have lived until he died a more natural death one day. Lippincott even admirably declined to sue St. Michael’s, though he probably had a good case of negligence. But, according to Jessica, he was torn apart by the death of his son and blamed himself as much as the hospital or the killer. So he grew to expect more of himself, to be better, to be
perfect
. At least that was what Jess believed, and she seemed to love and respect him even more for it. As for me, I always wondered if the fact that both Lippincott and I had suffered tragic losses in our lives had somehow allowed a connection between us to be forged, one that went just a little beyond a mere employer-employee, or even future in-law, relationship. Perhaps that was why Lippincott had been so decent to me over the years, given me the chances he had.