Both men understood that the proverbial gloves were off from now to Election Day. The newspaper photograph with the coded message “It’s him” was dangerous enough. But it was the recent e-mail that really had Lomax worried. This kind of scandal could cost him the election.
“That Doug Wells from
Action News
is trouble,” said Lomax. He was massaging between his eyes, as if staving off a migraine.
His manager was staring at the patterns in the red silk wall upholstery, his expression tired. Josef Weimer was a Princeton graduate with the political cunning and finesse of Otto von Bismarck but the television persona of a frankfurter, which in the modern world left him perfectly equipped to live vicariously through men who were gifted with the total political package. For the past eighteen months he had worked twelve hours a day, seven days a week with one mission: get Brandon Lomax elected.
“He’s just one reporter,” said Josef.
“A reporter who’s trying to impress a woman.”
Josef looked away. “A dangerous combination, I admit.”
“Wells is not going to let go of this Chelsea James investigation. Even if Emma backs off now, Wells won’t. Not after his TV segment on how Chelsea James is the unsolved case that still haunts her three years later. If she suddenly loses interest, that will only make him more inquisitive. That’s the way the journalistic mind works.”
“What do you want to do?”
“We have to find out who this tipster is before Wells finds out that the son of a bitch is pointing the finger at me.”
“If the AG’s office can’t find him,” said Weimer, “I don’t see how we can.”
“I don’t care how,” said Lomax. “Make it a priority. Make it the
top
priority, you hear me!”
The order came with so much force—and desperation—that Josef paused to collect himself. His voice quaked, but he had to ask the question.
“Sir, I don’t mean to be impertinent. But are we talking about saving an election or are we worried about going to jail for vehicular homicide?”
Lomax delivered a chilling glare. “Just find him,” he said. “Fast.”
HE DID IT IN THE BLACK OF NIGHT, ALONE, IN A PARKED CAR. TOTAL
darkness and total silence. As if that would help conceal his identity.
He had absolutely no intention of giving up his anonymity.
The
Action News
segment on Emma Carlisle and the Chelsea James case had aired midway through the eleven o’clock news, right before the weather. It concluded with Doug Wells’s direct appeal to the anonymous tipster: “Law enforcement is waiting to hear from you on your terms. Please visit the Rhode Island attorney general’s Web site for more information.”
At 11:30
P.M.
, after the sports update, he logged on to the AG’s Web site from an iPhone that was still linked to the pirated wireless account that he had used to send Emma the anonymous e-mail. The police hadn’t shut it down—obviously, because they wanted to hear from him again—but there was no way to trace the wireless activity back to him. It wasn’t exactly ingenious, but he was definitely feeling clever.
The site came up on his screen. On the far left side, directly below the attorney general’s shield, was a menu. At the bottom of the list, below the button marked “Media and Information,” was a link to “Chelsea James Investigation.” It looked different from the other menu buttons and was clearly a new addition. He clicked on the link, which led to another Web page.
“Please enter your password,” it read.
His first thought was that he didn’t have a password, but the directions at the bottom of the page cleared up the confusion.
“Earlier this month, an attorney in the Criminal Division of the Office of the Attorney General received an e-mail from an anonymous tipster. The password is the e-mail address from which that e-mail was sent.”
Smart
, he thought. Without a password, no one visiting the site—including the media—could see whatever special instructions law enforcement wanted to give the tipster. The chosen password was one that only the tipster would know.
He entered it.
The site took him to another page. The message there was short, directly to the point: Emma Carlisle wanted to meet. She promised it would be just herself and the tipster—no police. It laid out everything he needed to know: where to go, when to be there. But he already knew all that.
His visit to the Web site had nothing to do with gaining information. He’d gone through the motions for one reason only: to alert the authorities that their special site had received a hit from the man who knew the correct password, the man who had sent them the anonymous e-mail. The cops would spring into action, even if Emma had promised no police involvement. They would all be waiting for the tipster to show up at the proposed meeting on Monday morning.
He logged off his Internet connection and switched off the iPhone, returning to total darkness. He wondered who Emma expected to see when she got there.
BRANDON LOMAX WAS GETTING NERVOUS. THE MEETING BETWEEN
Emma and her anonymous tipster was set for Monday at 9:00
A.M.
The countdown had begun: T minus thirty-one hours.
“Go to sleep, honey,” his wife said.
She lay in the bed beside him. After thirty-two years of marriage, he didn’t have to do much to convey his restlessness to her. Even in a dark room at midnight, lying on her side with her back to him, she could sense when his eyes were open.
“I’m trying,” he said, but it was futile.
His campaign manager’s question was replaying on a continuous loop in his mind, threatening to keep him awake all night: “Sir…are we talking about saving an election, or are we worried about going to jail for vehicular homicide?” His response—“Just find him”—must have seemed cryptic, even incriminating. But he wasn’t playing games.
The truth was, he
didn’t know
.
Lomax had indeed suffered a relapse into alcoholism three years ago. Unfortunately for him, there were no slight relapses. He had a drinking problem, and he didn’t want just one or two drinks. He wanted ten or twelve.
When Emma had asked him if he had an alibi for the night of Chelsea James’s death, he and his wife had reported back to Chief Glenda Garrisen.
“Brandon was with me,” Sarah Lomax told the chief. “The entire evening.”
Garrisen was too respectful to probe, which was fortunate. Sarah was a good wife but a lousy liar. Her story would never have held up under real cross-examination. Lomax hated himself for putting her in that position, but it wasn’t as if they were covering up a crime he knew he had committed. The honest truth was that he had no idea where he was on the night of Chelsea’s death.
He had been drinking. That much he could say. His lack of any memory of what actually happened that night left open a sickening possibility: he very well could have been the drunk who had driven Chelsea off the road.
“Honey,” his wife said in the darkness. “Your alarm clock is going off in five hours. Please shut off your mind.”
He sighed heavily, then rolled over and kissed her on the cheek.
“What was that for?” she said.
“You know.”
She withdrew just a bit, reminded about the lie she’d told to construct his alibi. He held her in his arms for a minute, just to reassure her. Then he peeled back the covers and climbed out of bed.
“Where are you going?” she said.
“I’ll be right back,” he said. He pulled on his robe and slippers, found his way in the darkness to the hallway, and walked to his study. With the door closed, he sank into his worn leather desk chair and stared at the ceiling.
What if it
was
me?
The question would have seemed bizarre to most people—to anyone who had never begged an alcoholic to get up off the floor and stop ruining his life, never watched a friend fall slave to the disease, never seen Brandon Lomax at his dead-drunk worst.
What if I killed her?
He closed his eyes tightly, trying to deal with that painful possibility. His drinking had hurt many people in the past—his wife and daughter for sure. But the wounds had been entirely emotional. Never had his alcoholism inflicted physical injury on any living thing, save for his own liver. This new possibility made him hate who he was, hate himself for his weakness.
It made him want a drink.
Be fair to yourself, Brandon.
That was what Sarah would have told him. It was a self-help strategy to deal with the fact that as long as he was an elected official, at least 50 percent of the people were going to hate him. Internalizing every vicious attack gave him no chance against the bottle. His wife taught him to ignore his critics, to question his accusers, to stand up for himself. Sarah’s advice made sense here, too. He couldn’t ask that question—
What if I killed Chelsea?
—without addressing the flip side.
What if this tipster was lying?
The flow of guilt shut off like a faucet. Suddenly he was the victim. Self-loathing gave way to anger. And he had every right to be furious. On Monday at 9:00
A.M.
Emma would meet with her tipster, some anonymous coward who could ruin him with his lies. He had to seize control.
Across the room the grandfather clock chimed once, marking the half hour. It was 12:30
A.M.
His campaign manager was on call around the clock, but this was not a job for his political strategists. This was a personal fight for survival.
Lomax returned to his bedroom and got dressed inside the walk-in closet, careful not to disturb his wife. As he crossed the dark room again to leave, she sat up and asked, “Where are you going, honey?”
“I need some warm milk and we’re out of two percent. I’ll be back in fifteen minutes.”
He felt like the Grinch, the way he’d thought up that lie and thought it up quick. He wasn’t sure if little Cindy Lou Who believed him, but she didn’t pursue the excuse further. Lomax grabbed his keys, headed out to his car, and drove three blocks to a convenience store. He would have to remind himself to buy some milk. First things first: the pay phone. This was a call there could be no record of on his home or cell phone.
He paused to wonder if he was doing the right thing. Perhaps he had jumped the gun earlier in the week by hiring a private investigator to find out what Paul and Rachel Townsend knew about the tipster. He’d had no idea, however, that the cowboy was going to pose as a police officer and visit their house. Even though the tipster had not named him in that first tip, Lomax had long felt a bad vibe about the night of Chelsea’s death. The accident had occurred not far from his house. He had no memory of his whereabouts for the better part of that night, but he did know that somehow he had gotten from a bar in South Boston to his house in Providence. He’d driven by the scene of the accident several times over the years, and each time it was strangely—eerily—familiar to him. Once or twice, he’d seen Chelsea’s brother there scrounging around for evidence.
Now that the tipster had implicated him directly, it was time to take things to another level.
He dialed information for Sid’s Nightclub in Lincoln. It was long distance, but he had enough quarters to place the call. A woman answered, and there were bar noises in the background. It was a lively Saturday night at Sid’s, gamblers tanking up before hitting the slot machines at Twin River.
“Is Sal there?” he said.
“Yeah, just a sec.”
In his twenty-two years as a prosecutor, Lomax had come up against plenty of unsavory characters—Olneyville gangs, Valley Street drug traffickers, the Mafia, even hit men. Sometimes, however, he had decided not to seek indictments. His prosecutorial discretion was always based on the law and the facts—except once. One time in two decades, in a racketeering case that could have gone either way, he gave the benefit of the doubt to the friend of a friend. Never did he dream that he would call in that favor, but he was smart enough to recognize that now was the time. Someone had to intercept this anonymous tipster before the face-to-face meeting with Emma on Monday.
It wasn’t a mob-style hit he wanted; Lomax hadn’t gone completely mad. Like any seasoned politician, however, he knew that everyone had a price. Surely this tipster could be bought off. Particularly if the bribe was offered by someone skilled in the ways of making the proverbial offer that couldn’t be refused.
“Sal here,” said the voice that came on the line.
“Sal, it’s me. POTUS.”
POTUS was the Secret Service abbreviation for President of the United States. It was a little trivia Sal had picked up watching the old TV show
The West Wing
. It was the code name he had told Lomax to use if ever he needed to call on a guy like Sal Vanelli.
“How you doing, my friend?”
“Not so good,” said Lomax. “I need a favor. A big favor.”
AT
9:00
A.M. EMMA ENTERED THE MODERN DINER IN PAWTUCKET.
Emma had put a lot of thought into the place to meet her anonymous tipster. The Modern Diner made sense, and not just because it had great pancakes. It was in the Oak Hill neighborhood, true blue-collar Pawtucket, where satellite dishes adorned old but colorfully painted frame houses and sidewalks still bore the shield of the Works Progress Administration to mark their construction in 1939. The Modern Diner was of the same era, the dining portion of the restaurant built to resemble an original Sterling Streamliner, a railway dining car manufactured in the late thirties and early forties. More important, it was a local landmark (the first of its kind ever to be placed on the National Register of Historic Places), so Emma figured it would be a familiar destination and a nonthreatening setting for anyone from Pawtucket.
It was also within walking distance of Babes’s house. Even though the fingerprint analysis had failed to link him to the first newspaper tip, she had not completely given up on her theory that he was the tipster.
“Just one?” asked the waitress at the front.
“For now,” said Emma. “I’m expecting someone.”
The diner was bustling, as usual, and the waitress invited her to take any available booth. Before heading down the narrow center aisle, Emma grabbed a discreet read of every customer, trying to determine if her tipster had already arrived. A man drinking coffee at the counter seemed like a possibility. Apart from Emma, he was the only customer dining alone. He looked up from his newspaper as she passed, and Emma quickly stole a closer look.
She’d never seen him before, but she’d seen men like him many times over. Men who would sit on the other side of a courtroom next to their high-priced criminal defense lawyer, all cleaned up in a suit and tie, trying to look legit. Jurors were sometimes fooled, but Emma could spot the little badges of fraud—the shiny new wedding band that had been purchased the day before, the hole in the earlobe that normally held a big diamond stud, the bloodshot eyes that said, I work nights and rarely see the light of day. This “businessman” at the counter was clearly pretending to be someone he wasn’t.
Emma slid into a booth and positioned herself with a clear view of him.
“Something to drink?” asked the waitress.
“Iced tea—no, wait,” Emma said. Something about being in a diner made her yearn for her favorite part of Rhode Island school lunches. “Make it a coffee milk.”
“And for your friend?”
“What?” said Emma, fearing that she had been too obvious in checking out the impostor at the counter.
“You said you were expecting someone,” the waitress said.
“Oh, right. He can decide when he gets here,” said Emma.
Unless he’s already here.
The waitress left two menus on the table and walked away. Emma picked up one and pretended to read it, keeping an eye on the man who was looking more and more like her anonymous tipster.
Forty miles to the north, outside a coffee shop in Brookline, a man found a choice parking space on the street. “Found” was perhaps not the right word. He saw a woman feeding a meter and offered her fifty bucks for the spot. Parking was hard to come by in this neighborhood, but having this particular spot was that important.
He called himself “the Checker.” He never used his real name, not even with his clients. Especially not with his clients.
The Checker knew about the proposed meeting in Pawtucket. He wondered if anyone really expected the tipster to show up. In his mind, the only certainty was that the cops would be all over the neighborhood, waiting in the wings. The Checker wanted no part of that. This job was definitely more his style.
He took a long drink from his coffee and put the tall paper cup back in the holder, careful not to spill. The last thing he needed was four dollars’ worth of java all over his two-thousand-dollar laptop, which was open and running in the passenger seat beside him. His digital camera with its telephoto lens was resting on the dashboard. He had everything he needed, including patience.
He grabbed his camera and took aim.
Emma continued to watch the man seated at the counter, waiting for him to make a move. Her instincts continued to tell her that this was the guy.
Seeming to sense her gaze, he cast a slow, confident look in her direction.
Emma hid behind her menu. Then she dug her cell phone from her purse and placed it on the table beside her. Safety was on speed dial. The police were on alert, ready to swoop in if anything went wrong.
The waitress brought her coffee milk. The secret to the state’s official drink was in the syrup, of course, a molasses-like substance made of sugar-sweetened coffee extract. The oldest brand name was Eclipse, and Emma had fond memories of her grandmother reciting the commercial: “You’ll smack your lips when it’s Eclipse.”
Emma drank slowly and watched as the man rose from his stool, placed a few bills on the counter, and picked up his briefcase. Emma wondered what might be inside of it—more damning evidence against Brandon Lomax? Her pulse quickened as he stepped away from the counter, but instead of coming down the aisle toward her, he started for the door. Emma’s gaze followed him, and as he left the restaurant, she slid to the end of the booth for a view out the window. She watched as he crossed the parking lot, after which she lost sight of him. Maybe he wasn’t the tipster after all.
Or maybe I scared him away.
She was about to dial her police contact to put a tail on him when her gaze shifted to a man standing on the sidewalk across East Avenue. He was wearing a hooded sweatshirt with a baseball cap underneath. Emma couldn’t see his face, but the longer she looked, the more he resembled Babes.
Suddenly he turned and ran.
Emma jumped up from the booth and tried to rush after him, but the old diner was so much like an old railway car that it had only one narrow aisle and little room to maneuver. By the time she made it out the door and into the parking lot, the man across the street had long gone.
She opened her flip phone but stopped short of hitting the Speed-dial button that would have sent the police chasing after him. The man’s run was awkward, uncoordinated, and the baseball cap was no coincidence. It had to have been Babes, and something had frightened him enough to make him run away. Maybe Emma’s police protection wasn’t as low profile as promised.
She reached for her phone and quickly realized that sending the cops after him would only have pushed Babes over the edge.
The waitress was suddenly standing right beside her in the parking lot, waving a bill. “You owe us for the coffee milk,” she said.
“I’m good for it,” said Emma, as she dialed Ryan James on her cell phone.