“I’m sorry,” said Rachel. “We have to do what’s best for Babes. I hope you understand.”
“I never judge in situations like this.”
They sat in silence for a minute. Then Emma heard a faint noise coming through the open window that sounded like the back door opening. A howl emerged from inside the house—definitely Babes—followed by Paul’s shouting.
“Enough with the damn newspaper, Babes! Now give it to me, damn it!”
Babes screamed like a child.
Rachel looked at Emma nervously, and those carved-in-wax worry lines in her face seemed to deepen right before Emma’s eyes.
There was another howl from inside the house, this one louder than the last.
Rachel’s gaze drifted off vacantly toward the street as she spoke, and her voice weakened as if she were speaking more to herself than to Emma.
“We always do what’s best for Babes,” she said.
FOR A GUY WHO HADN’T ROLLED OUT OF BED TILL LUNCHTIME,
Ryan’s day was surprisingly full.
The two hours he spent in Pawtucket seemed like theater of the absurd. Paul and Rachel, nervous about the morning’s events, were in fine form. Babes peered through the window in silent fascination as the forensic specialists checked the living room for prints. A real detective from the sheriff’s department showed up to take written statements from Paul and Rachel. Paul then left for work at the hardware store, and Emma headed off to the crime lab to see if an in-person appearance might expedite the forensic analysis.
After everyone left, Rachel got her time alone with Ryan.
“Emma Carlisle thinks Babes might be the anonymous tipster,” she said.
Ryan listened carefully as Rachel recounted her earlier conversation with Paul and Emma, after which he told her about the message on Chelsea’s grave.
Ryan said, “The newspaper was placed on Emma’s car in Providence sometime after she parked there in the morning. The flowers were at the cemetery in Pawtucket before I got there that afternoon.”
“Yes, Emma covered all that. Apparently the man who heckled you on the air was at work all day and couldn’t have been at Chelsea’s grave after calling into your show.”
“That’s what I understand.”
“Sounds like somebody is covering for him, if you ask me.”
“Maybe,” said Ryan. “But let me ask you this: Was Babes home all day yesterday?”
“Well, not all day. He was out for a couple of hours.”
“Do you know where he went?”
“No. He was with his friend Tom.”
Tom
, thought Ryan. And the thought was sobering. “I’ll look into it,” he said.
“What do you mean ‘look into it’?” she said, her tone uncharacteristically sharp. “You don’t actually think Chelsea’s own brother is playing this game, do you?”
Ryan’s head was throbbing again. Sleeping pills were just not worth the side effects. “Honestly, I’m not capable of thinking anything at the moment.”
“He was with Tom, for heaven’s sake. It’s not possible.”
Ryan didn’t say anything, but he disagreed with her on at least one point: with Tom,
anything
was possible.
By 3:30
P.M.
Ryan was riding the MBTA Red Line out of Boston and under the Charles River, to a city that was on just about everyone’s list of “most livable”—as long as you were looking for an education and not a job.
Cambridge is for most people synonymous with the ivy-clad halls of Harvard University, but it is also home to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the science and engineering mecca of the world. The 168-acre campus stretches for about a mile on the north riverfront, defined by a variety of distinctive and stylistically inconsistent buildings—from its Great Dome designed by William Welles Bosworth to the twenty-first-century “starchitecture”; from the postwar modern designs of alumnus I. M. Pei to the controversial containment building for an on-campus nuclear reactor. MIT’s meritocratic work ethic was legendary—not once since its creation in 1861 had the school awarded an honorary degree—and students lived by the five-letter motto, IHTFP, which, depending on one’s appetite for competitive academics, could be decoded as “I Have Truly Found Paradise” or “I Hate This F—ing Place.”
It so happened that the current student body included Babes’s best friend.
Tom Bales was, without a doubt, the smartest person Ryan had ever met. He was also the only man in Cambridge who wore short-sleeved Hawaiian shirts year-round. He’d even worn one with his tuxedo at Ryan and Chelsea’s wedding. Tom was Babes’s only guest. The two had been friends since early childhood, and the bond endured as they grew older, even if it wasn’t a conventional friendship. After Tom went away to college, he made a point of finding paid work for Babes. Professors or students who needed raw data inputted into a research matrix could count on Babes. It was the perfect way for Babes to fill a chunk of his day with a meaningful task in the comfort zone of his own bedroom, with the only human he had to deal with directly being his boyhood friend.
Through an exchange of text messages, Ryan and Tom agreed to meet outside MIT’s famous domed library on Killian Court, the picturesque green space facing the river where commencement was held every spring. Ryan arrived to find Tom flat on his back on the lawn, his hands clasped behind his head, eyes closed and bearded chin pointing toward the late-afternoon sun. Scores of students were cutting across the court heading to and from classes, but Ryan had no trouble spotting Tom in his trademark Hawaiian shirt.
“Aloha,” said Ryan.
Tom sat up as Ryan took a seat on the lawn facing him, a stack of textbooks between them. On several occasions Babes had told Ryan what his friend was studying, but Ryan could recall it no more than Tom could have hit a ninety-mile-per-hour fastball. All Ryan could say with any degree of certainty was that this walking brain in the Technicolor shirt would very likely own fifty U.S. patents before his thirtieth birthday and end up selling his company for nine figures. It was just the way things worked on this side of the Charles River.
“So you’re worried about Babes,” said Tom.
In vague terms, Ryan had told him as much in the text message. “Yeah. The three-year anniversary was yesterday.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“Rachel tells me that you and Babes spent some time together.”
Tom looked confused, but only for a moment. “Rachel, right. She’s still Mrs. Townsend to me. Yeah, she called me around nine-thirty in the morning and said she didn’t know where Babes was.”
“She called
you
?” said Ryan.
“Mr. Townsend was at work, and she couldn’t reach you. Babes did his usual morning walk over to the diner for coffee at seven, but two hours later, he still wasn’t back and he wasn’t answering his cell. You know how routine he is, and this was not his usual pattern at all. She was getting worried.”
“So you came down?”
“Sure. I don’t mind the drive. Turned the heat on and put the top down on the Mini Cooper. Good way to clear my head.”
“You went looking for him?”
“Well, it’s not as daunting as it sounds. There are only so many places Babes feels comfortable going. I found him right away, no sweat.”
“Where?”
He paused to choose his words. “At the scene.”
“Of Chelsea’s accident?”
Tom nodded.
Ryan said, “What was he doing there?”
Tom sucked down a couple gulps of his extra-large coffee. “You ever seen his crash box?”
“No. What is it?”
“I’d say it’s his personal way of grieving. It’s where he keeps things about Chelsea’s accident.”
“What kind of things?”
“Anything and everything. When I caught up with him yesterday, he was pacing from one end of the crash site to the other, like a detective. He had a couple of glass pellets in his pocket, maybe from a shattered windshield or a busted headlight. Every accident scene has little pieces of debris that aren’t cleaned up. He’s collected dozens of little mementos like that over the years.”
Ryan couldn’t believe this was the first he’d heard of this. “Does he go there often?”
“All the time,” said Tom. “Sometimes just to sit and think. But he’s also collected lots of stuff.”
Ryan’s gaze drifted across Killian Court toward the frieze of a marble-clad building that bore the name Newton. It was as if the proverbial apple had just fallen on his head. “What about newspaper clippings?”
“What about them?”
“Are they part of Babes’s crash box?”
“I don’t know. Could be. Why?”
Ryan didn’t want to share the details about the anonymous tip. “No reason.”
Tom let it slide, his attention having turned to a passing student. Her backpack and matching denim handbag were Tommy Bahama. He gathered up his books and sprang to his feet, seeming to sense a match made in Hawaiian-Caribbean heaven.
“I’m off to six.”
“Sex?” The New England accents were still a challenge for Ryan.
“No. Building six. Around here, all but the residences are referred to by number, not names.”
“Ah,” said Ryan.
Would a campus full of human calculators have it any other way?
Ryan thanked him, and Tom hurried after the Tommy Bahama brunette—close encounters of the nerd kind. He was a good guy, Ryan supposed, even if he did have a decade-long crush on Chelsea. After too much champagne at the Townsend/James wedding, Tom had sidled up to Chelsea and told her that if her new husband ever broke her heart, he’d be waiting for her. Chelsea had laughed it off, but Ryan sensed that it hadn’t been just the liquor talking.
The midday clouds had completely dissolved, and it was turning into a beautiful September afternoon. The rowing crews on the Charles River seemed to skim the waves toward Harvard Bridge. Ryan watched them for a few minutes and then walked off campus. He was a block away from the Kendall/MIT subway station when his cell rang. It was Emma, calling to apologize for the way things had gone with Chelsea’s parents before Ryan got there.
“Rachel told me everything,” he said. “It’s all right.”
“So you’re not angry?”
“No. I understand how they might be upset about your questioning their son. But I also understand that you’re just doing your job.”
She sounded grateful for that, but she quickly turned to business.
“I know it’s a long shot,” she said, “but the fact that this phony Lieutenant Benjamin seemed so determined to talk to Babes alone really has me thinking.”
“I understand what you’re saying,” said Ryan. “I just spoke with Babes’s best friend. Seems Babes has spent countless hours at the scene of the accident, just puttering around. If the drunk who ran Chelsea off the road lives anywhere around Pawtucket, maybe he’s seen Babes there.”
“And if he has any fear of getting caught, maybe he’d really like to know what Babes knows.”
“Bad enough to play phony detective and interrogate Chelsea’s parents?” said Ryan.
“Depends on how much he has to lose by getting caught, I suppose.”
“Which is why I don’t take offense at the questions you asked Paul and Rachel. We need answers.”
Emma hesitated, then said, “I hope you don’t think I pushed it too far by taking it to the next step.”
“What next step?”
“I just left the crime lab. We were able to pull a latent print off my BlackBerry, which I let Babes use while I was at the house.”
“You’re checking Babes’s prints?”
“We got a ton of fingerprints from the newspaper that the tipster left on my windshield. At some point in time, the newspaper must have been in a library or at a bus station, where it was handled by a number of readers. But not one of them turned up a match in the database. So I asked our analyst to compare Babes’s print from the BlackBerry to the prints on the newspaper.”
“And?”
“No match.”
“So Babes is definitely not the tipster?” said Ryan.
“I wouldn’t go that far,” she said. “It could mean nothing more than the fact that Babes’s right index finger showed up on my BlackBerry and the newspaper only had prints from his left thumb, right pinky, or whichever. Or it could mean that he wore gloves to handle the newspaper, or that for whatever reason the old newsprint just didn’t pick up a clean set of his prints.”
“It doesn’t bother you that Babes lives in Pawtucket and your car was parked in Providence?”
“The two cities are so close together that Babes could have walked. It’s definitely an easy bus ride.”
“So your bottom line is what?” said Ryan.
She paused, as if fearful of upsetting Ryan. “Honestly, I have this vision of Babes listening to your show and hearing Tony from Watertown saying ‘accidents happen.’ Something snaps inside him. He leaves the flowers saying ‘It was no accident’—maybe the message is for you, maybe it’s for himself, maybe it’s for Chelsea. Who knows? Then he gets down to business and drops the tip on my windshield.”
Ryan took a few seconds to process what she was suggesting. “So where do we go from here?”
“I’d like to get a complete set of his fingerprints, but I’m going to let your in-laws cool down a little before I make another approach.”
“That’s probably a good idea,” said Ryan.
“Meanwhile, if you think of anyone else I should talk to, you call me, okay?”
Tom Bales came to mind, but putting Babes’s friend on the police radar just because of his crush on Chelsea seemed petty.
“I’ve got your number,” Ryan told her.
EMMA HAD PROMISED HERSELF SHE WOULD NEVER DO IT. BUT SHE
knew she had to. On Wednesday she met Doug Wells for lunch on Federal Hill.
For some, it was the College of Culinary Arts at Johnson & Wales University that put Providence on the culinary map. For Emma, it was Little Italy. Doug said he’d take her anywhere that didn’t serve broiled haddock or Yankee pot roast, and while that left a plethora of choices in one of America’s best small-restaurant cities, Emma chose Andino’s on Atwells Avenue, the main drag on the hill. It was a pleasant and sunny afternoon—perhaps one of the last of the year to see temperatures climb into the seventies—so they took a table for two on the quiet back patio and sat in the shade of a big umbrella. Emma’s chicken Andino was excellent, as usual, and Doug was all the things she hadn’t expected: charming, funny, attentive. So charming, in fact, that he didn’t lose any points when he had to excuse himself to take a call on his cell.
“It’s fine,” Emma said with a smile.
The waitress came to clear their plates. Emma could have eaten every last bit of her angel hair pasta, but that would have meant another half hour on the treadmill. She restrained herself and let the waitress take it away.
The lunch crowd was thinning out, most of the remaining patrons lingering over coffee. The man at the next table was alone and reading the
Providence Journal
, which Emma noted only because Brandon Lomax was on the front page again. He seemed to be everywhere lately, and by all accounts his campaign for the U.S. Senate was becoming a veritable juggernaut. Emma was happy for him, and not just because he was her old boss. It was much more personal than that.
Emma couldn’t remember a time when her father hadn’t been sick. On occasion he had found the strength to give his little girl piggyback rides or play with her on the swings, but mostly he watched her from the sidelines as he rested. It was often frustrating for young Emma. She even called him lazy once. Not until after the funeral did she understand that it was a three-year battle with cancer, which finally took his life five days before her sixth birthday. They had the cake two weeks early so that he could watch her blow out the candles. Emma would never forget the sympathy card she made for her mother. On the outside, she colored a giant yellow flower with black pistils for eyes, tears falling to the ground. Inside she wrote, “I’m sorry your husband died.”
Emma spent many of her subsequent childhood years with her best friend, Jenny, the only child of Brandon and Sarah Lomax. Each school year, Jenny somehow managed to get the same teacher as Emma. (Jenny’s dad had more than a little something to do with that coincidence.) They took dance classes together and played on the same soccer team. Summers with the Lomaxes were the only family vacations Emma ever had. By the time summer rolled around, Emma felt like her last name could have been Lomax. The weekend sailing trips started in late May with Nantucket Sound’s annual Figawi Race—so named for the New Englander sailor’s foggy-day refrain, “Where the F*** ah we?”—and continued through the first week of August. Then Emma would spend three weeks with the Lomax family in their home in the Berkshires. Emma and Jenny told everyone in Great Barrington that they were sisters. One summer, Emma kept the ruse alive by calling Brandon Lomax “Dad.” It was a game, but she liked playing it.
“I’m baaaack,” said Doug, seemingly in a playful mood as he returned to the table. The phone call must have gone well.
“So I’m just curious,” he said. “What made you give me another shot?”
Emma was deadpan. “Complete and utter desperation and loneliness.”
“That’s what I thought. Which leads to my next question. When you said we could start over, clean slate, did you mean that literally?”
“What do you mean?”
“Is this our second date or our first?”
“Why does it matter?”
“Well, a year from now, I just want to know the right date of our anniversary.”
“Doug?”
“What?”
“Cut the bullshit. Now you’re trying too hard.”
“Damn. And I was doing so well.”
The waitress came and offered coffee. Emma shook her head. She wasn’t trying to cut things short, but she did have to be back in court. Doug handed the waitress his credit card.
“We’ll split it,” said Emma.
“My treat.”
“Then I should have ordered lobster,” she said jokingly.
“Next time?” he said.
She smiled. “Yes. Next time.”
The busboy came by to fill their water glasses, then left.
“Not to talk too much business,” said Doug, “but how much play did you get from your media pitch on the anonymous tipster?”
“Your eleven o’clock segment was great. Thank you again for that. The Rhode Island media jumped all over it. Parts of Massachusetts picked it up as well, fueled, I’m sure, by the Red Sox connection and by Ryan’s popularity on Boston radio.”
“Congratulations. You worked it hard.”
“I did. But the emergence of an anonymous tipster after three years without leads was legitimate news.”
“I agree. That’s why our station ran with it.”
“Unfortunately, it’s only news for a day. Then once again—silence.”
“Nothing more from your tipster?”
She paused. The sheriff’s department had not yet gone public with the Lieutenant Benjamin impostor. Until they officially determined that he wasn’t a current or former officer, they were treating it as an Internal Affairs matter, so Emma couldn’t mention it. “No new tips,” said Emma.
“Any leads as to who it might be?”
“One,” she said, meaning her own theory about Babes. “But a fingerprint check took some of the steam out of that idea.”
“He might still come around.”
“I’m hoping. But I feel like I’ve taken my best shot, and already the media have moved on to the next story, the next middle-school teacher to have sex with a student, the next Hub cop to get drunk and shoot a fellow officer in the ass. Chelsea James is old news all over again.”
The waitress brought back Doug’s credit card. He signed the receipt, and they started the walk back to their cars on the street. Doug seemed pensive as they joined the flow of pedestrians along Atwells Avenue.
“What are you thinking?” asked Chelsea.
“This James case seems really important to you. And I want to help.”
“That’s sweet of you, but you’ve done your part.”
“Here’s a thought. How about giving me an exclusive on the next anonymous tip?”
“Why on earth would I want to do that?”
“A little quid pro quo. You give me the exclusive, I give you sex. You drive a hard bargain, but hey, I really want that exclusive.”
“Very funny.”
“Sorry, bad joke. But I’m serious about the exclusive.”
“Am I missing something, or does that sound more like me helping you than you helping me?”
“Not at all. You believe you need another jolt from the media to draw out your tipster. Unfortunately, media interest is now down to zero. But if you give me an exclusive on the next tip, I could probably talk the producer into giving the Chelsea James story more coverage. We could maybe even do a feature on the tireless prosecutor and the three-year-old unsolved case that still haunts her.”
And the story of the phony detective who went knocking on Paul and Rachel Townsend’s front door—if she could convince Internal Affairs to go public.
“That’s kind of interesting, actually.”
“So what do you say?”
“I like it,” said Emma. “Let me run it by Chief Garrisen.”
“Great,” he said. They stopped at Emma’s car. “Business is closed. Now for the important stuff. Do you kiss on the first date?”
“Only if I like the guy.”
He smiled, leaned closer, and gently kissed her on the cheek.
“This was fun,” he said.
“I’ll call you,” she said, then got into her car. Doug watched and waved good-bye as she pulled away.
Emma was smiling as her car passed beneath the big arch with the symbolic Italian pinecone that marked the entrance to Little Italy, but crossing the river put her right back to business. She stopped by the office before heading over to the courthouse for jury selection in her next trial—another fun-filled afternoon of “Juror number seven, can you be fair and impartial; will you return a verdict of guilty if the state proves its case beyond a reasonable doubt; will you please not hold it against me when I walk over and strangle the defendant’s scumbag attorney?”
“Mail call,” her secretary said as she dropped a bundle on Emma’s desk.
Emma thanked her and thumbed through the stack. Bonnie was old school—still called herself a secretary, not an administrative assistant. “More organized than the Rhode Island mob,” she liked to say of herself. As always, the court orders were on top. Letters from lawyers were next. MC—miscellaneous crap—was on the bottom. It was the MC that caught Emma’s attention today—specifically, the manila envelope with no return address. It was postmarked Providence.
Had she not been waiting for the tipster’s next move, she probably would have thought nothing of it. Her antennae were up, however, and she had a hunch about this one. She took a pair of latex gloves from her top drawer—she always wore them when handling evidence—and pulled them on. With the envelope flat on her desk, she sliced across the top with her letter opener and peered inside.
Her heart skipped a beat. It contained a page from the newspaper.
She picked up the envelope by one corner, gave it a little shake, and let the contents slide out onto her desktop. It was the front page of the
Providence Journal
. Two days old.
Emma remembered stopping on the sidewalk to buy a copy of this same newspaper after her trial on Monday, the three-year anniversary of Chelsea’s death, right before she had found the tipster’s first message on her windshield. The big color photograph of her old boss, Brandon Lomax, was staring back at her again. “
FRONT-RUNNER
,” was the headline, followed by the lengthy article about his steamrolling campaign for the U.S. Senate. In this copy, however, certain words were underlined and numbered by hand, just as they had been in the tipster’s first “I know who did it” message. This time, the message contained just two words, which Emma put together right away. In the context of the tipster’s previous message, it made her stomach churn.
“It’s…him,” she read in disbelief.