Guilt (2 page)

“I'm fine,” Mary Alice said.

“But you're—”

“Really, I'm feeling great.” Mary Alice glanced at her watch. “I'd better be going. And they'll be expecting you back at work.”

“But…” Jackie hesitated, then backed away, nearly bumping into the man in the parka, who'd come out of the bathroom and was waiting by the classroom door. “Thanks for everything.”

Students began to exit the classroom.

“Let me know if you need help finding somewhere to stay,” Mary Alice said, raising her voice to be heard over the growing chatter in the hall. “See you tomorrow.”

Jackie left. Mary Alice picked up her briefcase.
You can only do what you can do
—her grandma used to say that, too, and it was the truth.

A second classroom emptied into the corridor. She was about to leave when she noticed the man's backpack still sitting behind the classroom door. She could see him walking down the corridor and heading out. He must have forgotten it.

“Hey!” she shouted. Some nearby students turned around. Mary Alice picked up the backpack and started to run. “Excuse me.… Pardon me.… Someone left this,” she said as she tried to get around students and faculty chatting in the corridor.

“Hey!” she called, outside now under the portico.

The man was in the parking lot, standing there shading his eyes and gazing back at the building.

“You in the blue coat.” She held up the backpack. She thought she saw surprise in the man's eyes, but he was too far away to be sure. “You forgot something,” she shouted.

Instead of coming toward her, he zipped his jacket, pulled up the hood, and did an about-face. He trotted over to a parked motorbike, jumped on, pushed down on the pedal, and took off, riding over the sidewalk and out onto Mass Ave.

Well don't trip over your feet leavin',
Mary Alice thought as she stood there feeling like a chump.

From the pedestrian island in the middle of the street, Jackie was looking back, a questioning look in her eyes. Mary Alice waved her away.

Odd. She was sure he'd seen her. He must have known she was calling him. She looked down at the backpack. It was heavier than she'd have expected, even if it were packed with law books.

That's when she noticed the faint chemical smell. Heard a click. She barely registered the flash that lit up around her like a supernova.

2

E
VEN FROM
the street, Peter Zak could see that Il Panino, the storefront café on a nondescript patch of Mass Ave about a half-mile from Harvard Square, was packed with its usual lunchtime throng. He admired the way Annie Squires maneuvered into a parking spot out front just barely bigger than her Jeep, perfect on the first try. It was one of many things he admired about her.

Grabbing a weekday lunch together was a rare treat. He took Annie's hand and they started across the street. A guy on a motorbike wearing a hooded blue parka honked and swerved around them. The horn sounded like a quiz show's wrong-answer buzzer.

“Jerk,” Annie said.

Il Panino didn't exactly qualify as “fast food,” but it was worth the fifteen-minute wait for their homemade mozzarella on crusty bread with summer tomatoes, fresh basil, roasted red peppers, and spicy prosciutto drizzled with a fruity olive oil.

Peter held the door for Annie.

“Well, will you look who's here,” boomed a brawny, barrel-chested uniformed cop who was sitting at a table in the corner with a group of Cambridge's finest. “What do you know!” his buddy said. By their expressions of delight, Peter knew they weren't talking to him. A third one sprang up, gave a courtly bow, and pulled over a chair. One chair.

“Be a sport,” Annie said, giving Peter a half-apologetic look. He let himself be dragged over. “Hey, you guys. You know Peter Zak?”

“Sure. Hi, Doc,” said the barrel-chested cop. His thatch of sandy-colored hair and shirt taut across his belly seemed vaguely familiar; probably involved in one of the forensic cases on which Peter had consulted.

The rest of the officers ignored Peter, giving Annie their full attention.

An unpleasant sensation flickered in the pit of his stomach. Jealousy. He tried to squash it back. What the hell, Annie was one of the guys. After all, she'd grown up in nearby Somerville in a family of cops. On top of that, she was an investigator. She had to deal with police officers on a regular basis. Getting along with them was her job, and she was good at it. They even overlooked the fact that, as an investigator for a criminal defense attorney, she'd gone over to the dark side.

None of them noticed when Peter excused himself and headed for the sandwich line. The menu was on a board overhead. He caught his reflection in the mirror beneath it and tried to erase the sour look on his face. He tugged at his jacket. No, it wasn't his imagination that the shoulders seemed a little snug and the trousers a little loose. He'd been rowing regularly all summer. On the downside, a few new gray hairs had sprouted at the temples and he needed a haircut.

The harried woman in a white apron behind the counter was taking an order from the man in front of him. Annie hadn't taken the offered chair. She was leaning over to talk to her buddies, her hands on the table. Packed nicely into formfitting jeans, she certainly had a handsome derriere, and her short top had ridden up exposing a few inches of tender back. It was a place Peter liked to kiss, right there in the indentation over her spine. And the nape of her neck, under all that long, curly, reddish-brown hair, and … oh, hell, actually most anywhere.

“The guys” were listening to Annie, their faces rapt with attention. One of them put his hand on her shoulder. Now the officer got up and planted himself in front of her. The two of them faced off, he about an inch taller. An instant later, Annie had him turned around, his arm twisted and locked in place behind. The table erupted in whistles and applause.

“You change ya mind about eating?” asked the woman behind the counter.

Peter turned back. She had an eyebrow arched, and seemed unimpressed by his “doctor's clothes”—the navy blue blazer and gray slacks he wore as a uniform whether he was managing the Neuropsychiatric Unit at the Pearce Psychiatric Institute or testifying in court as an expert witness.

Peter ordered a couple of sandwiches, and took their drinks to a table near the window. Annie joined him.

“They were asking about my self-defense class,” Annie said. She opened the bottle of water, brushed back a strand of hair, and took a drink. “I was showing them—” The fire truck that screamed past toward Harvard Square distracted her. “Actually, they were giving me a hard time, so what could I do? I had to demonstrate.”

Annie strained forward as another siren approached. This time it was a ladder truck, followed by the fire chief's red SUV. Their radios buzzing, all the cops rapidly packed up leftovers and headed out.

“I wonder what happened,” Annie said.

The woman at the counter called their number and Peter got up. When he returned, Annie was out on the sidewalk watching a pair of ambulances
whoop-whoop
ing up Mass Ave, weaving around traffic. She tilted after them, as if drawn by a force field.

Peter had a lot in common with Annie, but this was one thing they most emphatically did not share. If fire trucks and ambulances were going one way, he'd be headed the other. Let the pros handle it.

Peter went outside and joined her. He put his arm around her waist and squeezed. “Hungry?” he whispered into her ear.

“Mmm,” she said, but it wasn't the kind of
mmm
he'd hoped to elicit from her. It had a decidedly distracted edge. Annie tipped her head back a notch and sniffed the air. “A fire maybe? A big one?” She gazed at the horizon in the direction of the Square. “Or maybe not. I don't see a lot of smoke.”

These days, a fire seemed relatively mundane as catastrophes went. A world of awful had been opened up to include all kinds of unthinkable acts by terrorists, zealots convinced of their cause and willing to die in a blaze of glory as long as they took a few infidels with them, all in the name of a god, someone's God.

They went back inside. Peter ate. Annie mostly nibbled, looking up as a pair of police cruisers flew by, blue and white lights flashing, then two more. Next time he managed to inveigle Annie into a shared lunch, Peter promised himself he'd pick a place that wasn't frequented by cops and with no windows on a main street.

Now traffic headed into the Square was at a standstill. Typical Boston drivers, the ones not making U-turns were honking. A man in a big black SUV got out of his car. He scratched his head as he stood on the yellow line looking up Mass Ave.

Pedestrians had stopped and were looking up the street like a pack of hunting dogs. A man in a T-shirt and jeans ran past toward the Square. A tall, lanky woman wearing a scarf plodded in the opposite direction, the only one oblivious. Her face was smeared with soot, and the knee of her pants was torn and bloody. She cradled one arm in the other.

She stumbled. Peter jumped to his feet.

“Jackie!” Annie cried.

They raced outside. The woman didn't stop until she ran into Annie. Then she stood there blinking and rubbing her head as if she'd hit an unexpected wall. Annie put her hands on the woman's shoulders.

“What happened?”

The woman looked into Annie's face, her mouth open, recognition dawning in her eyes. Her knees gave way. Peter helped Annie prop her up. They half-carried her inside and sat her down.

Annie put her arm around the woman while Peter got a cup and poured some of Annie's water into it. When he offered it, the woman shied away like a nervous horse.

“This is Dr. Peter Zak,” Annie said. “He's my friend. Peter, this is Jackie Klevinski. I know her from Slim Freddie's.”

Slim Freddie's was the dojo where Annie taught self-defense. This was probably one of her students.

Jackie took the water from Peter and held it in a trembling hand. She sipped and set the cup down. Her face was chalky, her breathing shallow. Sweat beaded on her forehead and her pupils were dilated. Shock. Her pulse would be going a mile a minute. Peter grabbed a chair and put her feet up on the seat.

“Are you hurt?” Annie asked. “Your arm?”

“I'll call an ambulance,” Peter said, and started to get out his cell phone.

“No,” Jackie said, the words coming out like a small explosion. Others in the café turned to stare. “No,” Jackie repeated, more quietly this time, tucking a strand of hair into her head scarf. “I'll be all right.”

She pushed up her sleeve and examined a skinned elbow. The inside of her arm was scarred. Looked like she'd been an addict, though the tracks weren't recent. The scars didn't seem to surprise Annie, nor did Jackie's reluctance to go to the ER.

Annie wadded up a napkin and poured some water on it. She dabbed at the scrape, then pressed Jackie's hand over it to keep it in place.

“And your leg?” Annie asked.

“My leg?” Jackie looked down, as if seeing the torn pant leg and blood for the first time.

Annie pushed back her chair, leaned forward, and pushed up Jackie's pants. There was a nasty-looking scrape on her knee.

“Where were you?” Annie asked.

“I was”—Jackie took a few seconds to finish the thought—“at Harvard. At the law school talking to Mary Alice.”

Annie seemed to know who Mary Alice was. “What happened?”

Jackie's mouth stretched open, her face twisted in anguish. “B … bomb,” she said, hiccupping out the word. “On the steps—” Her shoulders shook as she wept uncontrollably.

In halting sentences, she explained that she'd taken an hour off from her job at the admissions office to meet with the legal aid intern who was helping her file a restraining order against her husband. She'd left her and started for the Square, then turned back, thinking she heard Mary Alice calling. She saw her standing on the steps of the building holding something.

Annie turned still, her hands fisted.

“She was standing there”—Jackie's voice broke—“and then there was this flash.” She made a little choking sound and put her hand over her mouth.

Annie gasped as the news socked her in the gut. “Mary Alice?” She put her fingers to her lips. “How could that be? I saw her just yesterday. She came by the office … she came to go over some paperwork …
your
paperwork with Chip. This was going to be her first real case.”

Jackie blinked. “I didn't know that. Seemed like she knew just what she was doing.”

“You must have been knocked down by the blast,” Peter said.

Again Jackie seemed surprised. “I guess so. There were people lying on the steps bleeding. Car windows shattered. There was smoke. Yelling. I didn't know what to do.” The words were spilling out. “I heard sirens. Then I…” Her voice trailed off. “It was so awful. Seems like the next thing I know, I'm here and you're asking if I'm okay.” She stared out the window. Now drivers were standing by their cars and talking to one another. “I guess I must have walked here.”

Annie sat forward, her hands unclenched. “You said Mary Alice was holding something. What was she holding?”

Jackie focused her gaze in midair. She held her hands out, palms facing one another about a foot apart. “Something dark. Maybe a backpack.”

“Her backpack?”

“No. She had a briefcase. She always carried a briefcase. She was always so proper and professional. A suit and a briefcase, and she—”

“So she had a backpack, not her briefcase?” Annie said, cutting in.

Jackie's face clouded with confusion. “She had both. But she was holding the backpack out in front of her.”

“Like she was showing it to someone?”

Jackie nodded. “I heard her calling. She was there, standing on the steps … and then she wasn't.” Jackie's mouth strained open in a wordless scream.