The Son of John Devlin (20 page)

And after she had gone out for the evening, to the Blackthorn, he sat there in his chair and broke down and cried. For the first time in so many years, he broke down and sobbed, and it had taken a good long while before he was able to get himself under control. He’d cried at the prospect of her moving to Florida.

And then, a few hours later, with more than two hundred patrons jammed into the Blackthorn, a fire broke out, panic ensued, and Jenine was cut off from the exit, knocked by the stampeding crowd to the ground, where she was overcome by smoke. It was there, on the floor of a grimy bar, that Joe O’Connor’s baby had died.

Jack watched as O’Connor sat motionless, staring off into space. His face had a grayish pallor, his eyes were sunken in dark holes. He was a man, Jack could see, who had been broken by the loss of his child. What must it be like, he wondered, to have no family other than a daughter, and then to suddenly lose that child? He could not imagine how terrible it must be.

Jack was numb with shame. For although he did not know the facts, he was sure that Jenine O’Connor was dead because of the corruption within the Boston Police Department. The corruption was not abstract, not some offense against a civil society: It was a profound and savage violation of humanity. He ached for this man.

“I’ve been over it in my mind a hundred times,” O’Connor finally said. “Anyone who knows why it happened knows because they were in on it. Taking money. Nobody in that position will ever admit anything because
they’d be admitting to manslaughter. So the story has gone to the grave with Dineen.”

Jack, too, had thought about it. He’d gone over the various possibilities. He’d heard the rumors, the intimations, the whispers. But there had been nothing concrete, nothing more than speculation. Nothing more than talk. And that was why he knew that O’Connor was right: Any possibility of revealing the truth had gone to the grave with Dineen, for anyone with knowledge would be culpable in a crime.

“I thought maybe there was a possibility someone had said something to you,” Jack said, “maybe that you’d heard a name, something … a rumor, anything.”

Joe O’Connor looked at him and shook his head no.

Jack placed the file folder from the insurance company’s investigation into the fire at the Blackthorn on his desk. He began thumbing through the records, not sure precisely what he was looking for, but believing there had been a corrupt deal between the Blackthorn owner and someone within the BPD.

Jack did not know the extent of corruption in the Boston Police Department. He did not know who, exactly, was involved in whatever scams were being run. But in the months since he’d undertaken to investigate corrupt activity, he had theorized that corruption among uniformed officers was probably about what it had always been. But while there continued to be the sort of corruption he’d caught Moloney and Curran at, there was a new level of corruption, more elusive, more sophisticated, less visible than before. How did they hide the money? he wondered. He knew there were men who stole money from dealers, from bookies, and stuffed
wads of cash in their pockets. But he believed there were some who had gotten past that. There had to be another mechanism for payoffs; a way to absorb, conceal, and distribute the proceeds.

The insurance company file included a copy of the Boston Fire Department’s report on the fire, in which it had been ruled that the blaze was not a result of arson. The file included a copy of the Blackthorn insurance policy, details on the Blackthorn’s owner, a list of employees, major suppliers, a copy of the state-issued liquor license, and various bank records.

Jack pulled the bank records out and began going through the details of the Blackthorn account. Payments had been made, during the prior year, to a long list of suppliers, including distributors for various beer, wine, and hard liquor companies. There were payments to food vendors, to a cleaning company, an exterminator, a painting contractor, the insurance company, the state of Massachusetts, the IRS. There were payments to the telephone, electric, and gas companies.

He was skimming the expenditure summary, about to set it aside, when a number caught his eye. Listed under the charitable contributions—to the Boy Scouts, the local youth soccer and baseball leagues, the YWCA, CYO, and more—he saw an organization called CrimeStoppers. While donations to the other organizations ranged between fifty and a thousand dollars for the year, there were four donations to CrimeStoppers, each for $36,000, for a yearlong total of $144,000. It struck Jack as very odd indeed.

Just after midnight, he left police headquarters and began driving home. He’d gone about a mile when he noticed
the Le Sabre tailing him on Boylston Street, behind Fenway Park. When he stopped at a light, he saw the Le Sabre hanging back a couple hundred feet. When the light changed, he accelerated quickly and drove rapidly toward Brookline Avenue, where he hit another red light. In his rearview mirror he could see the Le Sabre speed up to stay with him and then abruptly decelerate when the red light appeared.

Why would they tail him? he wondered. It wasn’t as though he’d been hiding out. They knew where he lived, where he worked. His whereabouts were never a secret. He had believed that if they were to act against him, it would come at his home, at night. But he felt secure there. He’d had an advanced detection system installed so it would be impossible for anyone to invade his house while he was asleep without tripping a sensitive alarm.

As he rode out the Riverway, the traffic thinned noticeably. Jack stayed at 40 miles an hour, the precise speed limit, and watched the Le Sabre hanging back several hundred feet. He checked and made sure the doors in his Cherokee were locked. He followed the Jamaicaway out into Jamaica Plain, and as he drove up the hill toward Perkins Street, he wondered whether fatigue hadn’t created paranoia within his mind. At Perkins he waited for the red light to turn green, and when it did, he accelerated as though he intended to continue along the Jamaicaway. Instead, at the last possible moment, he jammed his steering wheel all the way around, took a hard right, floored the Jeep, and fishtailed along the street. Within seconds he was going 65 miles an hour in a 35-mile zone, and as he reached the back side of Jamaica Pond, he saw the Le Sabre coming, accelerating hard. There was now
no question. Jack slowed down as he proceeded up Goddard Avenue toward West Roxbury, and the Le Sabre slowed, too.

Jack took his Glock nine-millimeter out of its shoulder holster and placed it on the passenger seat and took it off safety. He continued driving at a leisurely pace, the Le Sabre following. He considered calling the Area E station house and asking for a cruiser to meet him at his house, but couldn’t bring himself to do it. It would appear that he could not handle himself. When he reached his street, he turned in. The Le Sabre followed. When he got to his house and turned into the driveway, the Le Sabre pulled ahead and idled in front of his house. He hesitated, then got out of the Jeep, dropped to one knee, and aimed the Glock at the Le Sabre, sixty feet away. But the Le Sabre did not move. They knew he would not shoot first. He tried to make out shapes in the car but could not; the windows were heavily tinted.

He noted the license plate number—and would later learn that the vehicle had been stolen earlier in the evening—and remained in a crouch, weapon ready, for a full minute, when the Le Sabre abruptly pulled away.

Jack took a deep breath and put his gun away. He went to the side door of the house and checked the security system. It was armed, just as he’d left it that morning. He disarmed the system, entered the house, and immediately rearmed it so that any entry from the exterior—through any door or window—would set off the alarm. With the doors locked and the system armed, he felt safe.

But then his sense of security was shattered, for when he walked into his kitchen, he was stunned by what he saw. There, sitting on his kitchen table, was a white
index card propped against a saltshaker. Someone had disarmed his security system, entered his house, then rearmed it. He picked up the card and read its three typewritten lines:

A
t ten minutes before six in the morning the temperature in Roslindale stood at 7 degrees. It was dark as Jack drove toward Holy Name Church, past a Hood’s milk truck and a
Herald
newspaper delivery van. He parked in the lot behind the church and entered the side door of the chapel. The early morning weekday Masses were celebrated here in this space barely one-tenth the size of the main church upstairs. Jack went to a pew about halfway back. He knelt, made the Sign of the Cross, and prayed. After a moment he got up off his knees and sat back on the wooden bench.

He felt someone moving close behind him. There were no more than a dozen other people spread throughout the chapel, and Jack thought it odd that someone would sit so close.

He turned and saw an old friend of his father’s, Eammon O’Brien, his hands clasped in prayer, his head bowed.

“Don’t turn around, Jackie,” O’Brien whispered. “Don’t pay no attention to me. You don’t know who’s observing.”

“Eammon, you—”

“Let me finish, boy,” said Eammon O’Brien. “I come
to tell you to watch out for yourself, Jackie. These are bad people, Jackie. They don’t hesitate to hurt anybody they want. Nothin’ will stop them. Your father would be proud, Jackie. You’ve made him proud. So enough is enough. Leave it alone. I am telling you as God is my witness and judge to leave it alone and don’t go no further. Nuthin’ will ever change this. They won’t allow it.”

“Eammon, I—” But O’Brien had risen and moved quickly away, farther back in the church, shaking his head as if to say, Stay away, stay away.

“The hearing’s today,” Jack said from his car phone. “And I wanted to see whether you had any advice.”

“Do what you think is best,” Tom Kennedy replied. “Use your good judgment. That’s all.”

“We’ll go and listen and go through the whole thing today so that we get out on the table how tight our case against them is,” Jack said. “Then, once we’ve done that, my inclination is to back off, give them a break. See if we can get them to pitch in and help us. See if we can rehab them, basically.”

“I guess I would have to say I’m a little surprised,” Kennedy said.

Jack hesitated. “Surprised good or surprised bad?” he asked.

“Just surprised,” Kennedy said. “I know you don’t like Moloney.”

“I think he’s a bad actor, but I also think that if there’s a chance these guys can turn it around, I mean …” He paused. “Plus, the idea that the department gets subjected to a barrage of negative publicity and speculation
is too high a price to pay. Sheehy’s right. It would be destructive. I really think it would.”

Kennedy said nothing.

“So?” Jack said finally.

“So, what?” Kennedy asked.

“So what do you think?” Jack asked.

“I think you’re being very wise,” Kennedy said.

Jack stood in disbelief when he heard the clerk’s words.

“It’s not here,” the clerk said. “Someone must have removed it.”

“I brought it here myself,” Jack said. “I filled out the form. Here’s the duplicate. Here’s the number. Please check again.”

The clerk frowned and disappeared into the back room. He returned, shaking his head. “You sure you didn’t take it out?” the clerk asked.

“Positive,” Jack said. The rules of the evidence locker were clear: Only clerks were permitted within. It was a sanctuary of sorts. No uniformed officers or detectives were permitted inside without written permission. But Jack now placed his palms flat on the counter and vaulted it.

“Hey, come
on
, Detective,” the clerk said as Jack brushed past him into the evidence room. He went to the numbered bin matching the number on his receipt. It was empty. He stood, staring down at it, growing angrier by the moment. Angry not with Moloney or Curran or any of the other corrupt cops involved in stealing the audiotape, but angry with himself for being foolish enough to trust anyone but himself with it.

Jack returned to the front. He made a fist and pounded
it down on the counter. What a fool he’d been. What a fool! How had he underestimated them? After so much thought, after such careful planning, how had he underestimated them?

He took the back stairs and walked up to the third floor. When he arrived at the conference room, everyone else was in place: the clerk magistrate, who would preside over the hearing; Detectives Moloney and Curran and their attorneys; Del Rio, and the police department lawyer, Steven Driscoll.

Jack tapped Driscoll on the shoulder and motioned with his head toward the door. Driscoll rose and went out into the hallway with him.

“The tape is gone,” Jack said.

“What!”

“It’s not in the evidence locker. They obviously ripped it off.”

“That’s our case,” Driscoll said. “That’s it.”

The two men stood silently in the hallway. Finally, they entered the conference room and took their seats.

“Let the record show that this is a preliminary hearing held under the rules of disciplinary procedures and practice of the Boston Police Department,” said Renolds W. Granby, the clerk magistrate in charge of the hearing. “This is an administrative hearing and its findings do not preclude other action in other jurisdictions.”

Granby was a man of fifty, with a gray suit and horn-rimmed glasses. He had an owlish look about him. He sat at one end of the conference room, adjacent to the office of the city’s police commissioner. Granby glanced to his right and looked at Detectives Moloney and Curran and their lawyers, then to his left at Detectives Del Rio
and Devlin, and Steve Driscoll, counsel for the police department.

“Does everyone understand the rules under which this hearing is being conducted?” Granby asked.

All present nodded.

“Does anyone have any amendment to the written statements submitted to me?”

This was a standard question, part of the procedure at such hearings, and ninety percent of the time the answer was no. Once in a while someone would have some bit of information to add. It was unheard of to withdraw a claim of evidence.