Authors: Hank Phillippi Ryan
“What?” Jane couldn’t stand it. “What is it?”
“I’ll tell you the instant I can. I’ve got to go.” He turned, headed across the lobby.
She grabbed his arm, stopping him. “I’m coming with you.”
He pivoted. Jabbed a finger at her. “Hell, no. Forget that. You’re staying here, Jane. You’re not coming upstairs. You go outside, you cannot come back. You move from that plant, you’re under arrest. Call me on my cell when you hear from anyone.”
“Jake!” She felt like crying, in frustration and fear and bone-chilling dread. She couldn’t let go of his arm, clutched it like it might give her strength, or knowledge, or reassurance. “Jake. You don’t think someone shot Gracie. Do you? Where
is
she?”
“They’re looking, Jane.”
“I know.”
“We’ll find her.”
“I know.” She hoped, with all her soul and being, he was right. She would never look at a news story the same way again.
Let Gracie be okay.
Jane watched Jake’s back as he dashed across the lobby, watched the elevator doors open and close, taking him away.
She waited two seconds. Three.
Then she headed for the unmarked metal door.
* * *
The blaring alarm was the first thing Jake heard, a piercing insistent robovoiced repetition of instructions—
the danger is over, please stay in your room until given the all clear
—followed by earsplitting beeps and a rasping buzz. That’s what must have kept interrupting the incident team’s transmissions. Before the elevator even shut behind him, he ran past numbered doors, all closed as instructed, toward the open one at the end of the narrow corridor. A triangle of light played on the ugly gray hall carpeting, its apex pointing to whatever was inside.
“D, I’m here.” Jake keyed the radio as he ran.
“Room three fifty-four,” D’s voice came back. “Last door on the right. It’s open.”
By that time, Jake was there. He stood in the wedge of light, cataloging the scene. Framed photos of Boston statues hung on the walls. Sun pouring through one wide window slashed light and shadow on the furniture. Red-streaked sheets and a flowered spread lay tangled across the unmade oversize bed. Red-streaked once-white towels were piled on the once-gray wall-to-wall. Three toppled water glasses had landed on the floor. Water dripped from a quart-size bottle tipped precariously on the edge of a desk.
Classic struggle, textbook. Who won and who lost?
The loser was clearly on the metal gurney parked awkwardly in the only possible area of the room, a two-yard space between the bed and the mirror-covered wall. A crush of EMTs surrounded it, heads down. One protected the IV drip bag hanging from a thin metal pole, while another leaned close to the patient’s face, monitoring the transparent plastic oxygen bag attached to a bright green metal canister next to the motionless body. All the action, mirrored, reflected into twice the disaster.
Two uniformed cops, weapons holstered, stood sentry inside the hotel room door. DeLuca was not in the room. “DeLuca?” Jake keyed his radio again.
“Stand by,” D’s voice came back.
“Where’s D?” Jake asked. “Do we have identification on this victim?”
Taking two steps toward the stretcher, he recognized the graying ponytail of Deb Kratky. Yesterday the veteran EMT had handled the Curley Park victims. Now this. But she was blocking his view. He turned. Checked in the mirror. Still blocked.
Jake touched Deb on one pale-blue shoulder, needing her to move. “Kratky. You make a better door. I gotta get ID.”
“We’re stabilizing now, Jake.” Kratky didn’t move, still bent over the victim. She turned her head, raised her eyes from her patient, flipped a palm up, then down.
Fifty-fifty.
She managed a tentative half smile. “One shot, upper right chest. Vitals getting there. We’ll transport ASAP, maybe two more minutes.”
“Lobby clear?” Another EMT asked him. “Mass General is expecting.”
“All clear,” Jake said. “Deb, I gotta get ID. And where’s DeLuca? Did he get it?”
“With the shooter, he says to tell you.” Kratky stepped away from her charge, gesturing Jake to take a look.
A thin white blanket covered the body. Jake didn’t need to approach any nearer to get his first bearings. White. Male.
Brown hair, curly, clean-shaven
,
forty-something,
Jake cataloged. But he was hearing Jane’s voice saying the words.
Lewis Wilhoite.
“Are you still in front of the Purple?” Tenley had dialed Brileen before her mother could stop her. She didn’t need to announce who she was. Caller ID would display it.
“How did you know?” Brileen’s voice, laughing, came back through the cell. “Hey, are you watching me through your fancy surveillance thing? Whoa, did you see me look at you? I almost waved. I was on my way up to see you!”
Tenley put her hand over the phone mic. “She was coming to see me, that’s why she was here,” Tenley whispered.
She and her mom stood in the sheltered area outside City Hall. A bunch of cop cars and TV trucks, she could see only the rear ends of them, clustered in front of the U, almost a block away. No sirens or anything.
“Tenley, I’m not sure about this.” Her mom was running her hand through her graying hair, then adjusting her blouse.
“I’m right across the street,” Tenley said into the phone. “There’s someone I want you to meet. We’re walking to you now.”
“Who?” Brileen asked.
“It’s a surprise.” Tenley gestured at her mom.
Come on.
“One minute. We’ll be there in one minute.”
“Tenner,” Mom said, “this is a bad idea.”
“It isn’t. Trust me.” Tenley tucked her phone into the back pocket of her skirt, then paused. She draped her arm across her mother’s shoulders. It felt right. “I can’t let you be so sad, Mom. You said today, upstairs, it’s only me and you now. And it is. And that makes us a team.”
“I love you, Tenley.”
Tenley felt her mom lean into her, felt her weight against her chest, her hair against Tenley’s cheek. She paused, standing that way, thinking about it all.
“I love you too, Mom,” Tenley said. And she did. She could picture the ghost of Lanna and the ghost of her father looking down on her. Smiling. The world was only the world. Sometimes it was awful. Sometimes family was all you had. “Now come with me.”
* * *
Why had Tenley brought her here? The beery din of the Purple Martin, the dingy-noisy hangout Catherine had seen countless times in her years at City Hall. Steps across the street from her office but miles across a generational boundary. No one here probably even knew of the chaos, now reportedly over, just a block away.
She sat in the maroon leatherette booth, hands clasped on the speckled plastic tabletop. The lumpy upholstery was splitting at the seams, poorly repaired with mismatched duct tape, still torn in a couple of places. A ragged edge of the unforgiving fabric poked at Catherine’s thigh. She adjusted her skirt underneath her.
Brileen Finnerty. How many times had she said that name to herself? Tasted its toxicity, imagined the reality, her husband with a woman young enough to be his daughter.
And now here they were. Face-to-face. On opposite sides of a table.
“Come meet my mom,” Tenley had said. And out on the sidewalk they’d shaken hands, like two civilized people.
Still,
Catherine thought,
I know guilty when I see it.
Brileen was attractive enough, her coppery hair chopped in a way Tenley probably considered cool. She wore a short flowered skirt, a striped tank top, and an attentively battered jean jacket. A laptop bag slung diagonally across her chest. Not a whiff of femme fatale, Catherine thought, eyeing the bitten-to-the-quick fingernails.
No accounting for tastes.
She picked up a plastic-covered menu, pretended to read it while she studied Brileen. The girls ordered coffee from a T-shirted waitress while Catherine tried—unsuccessfully—to picture Greg with her. It didn’t matter, though. No accounting for tastes, maybe, but there
was
accounting for facts. The voice message instructing Greg to “meet at the usual place.” The ridiculously cryptic e-mails she’d read. “I’ll be watching for you.” Brileen had even signed her name.
Whether Catherine could picture it or not—and she’d never attempt it again—there
had
been something going on between them.
Why on earth had Tenley brought them here? Five more minutes, Catherine decided. Just enough to mollify her daughter. She’d checked her phone, several times. No one had pinged her. The mayor would be waiting for instructions. The cops were wrapping the hotel incident, but she’d been notified there was no more danger. They still had to decide how to handle the Curley Park subpoena.
Her heart twisted again with grief, and with anger, and with grief again. Greg was dead. Brileen couldn’t possibly know about that yet, and Catherine certainly would not be the one to tell her.
That
discovery she’d have to make on her own. A reality the girl would have to mourn alone, like all participants in deceit.
“It was so weird to see you from the surveillance room,” Tenley was saying. Catherine could tell her daughter was playing something back in her mind. “You looked up at the camera, right? How’d you know where I worked? What room, I mean?”
“You told me.” Brileen also seemed to be communicating a private message. “Don’t you remember
that,
either?”
“Huh,” Tenley said. “So who was the guy in the black car? And why were you coming to see me, anyway?”
Catherine cleared her throat, waved away the hovering waitress. No more chitchat. “Tenley?” She half smiled, tried to, at least, and got the show on the road. “Although your friend and I have never met, she knows very well who I am. I’m not sure why you wanted us to do this, honey, but we’re here now. Because you asked us to be. I have five minutes.”
“Brileen.” Tenley fussed with her water glass, turned it, moved it a fraction of an inch. “Mom thinks you were having an affair with my father.”
“What?” Brileen’s skin went white under her freckles, the pale brown spots suddenly highlighting her smooth skin.
Catherine saw Brileen’s eyes fly open. Those stubby fingernails, deep lavender, went to her lips. She clutched the laptop to her chest.
Yeah, well, that’s what happens when the truth finally comes out, Catherine thought. She never considered she’d actually meet this girl. Surely with Greg’s death—
Greg’s death
—she’d figured this sordid chapter would become part of a history she’d somehow learn to ignore. But there was a grim satisfaction in seeing justice done.
You didn’t get away with anything, sister.
Brileen looked straight at her. And laughed, a pealing, lilting, incongruous laugh. Her head thrown back, her slender throat showing, her hand clamped against her chest.
That’s it,
Catherine thought. What could possibly be funny? Funny? She gathered her purse, shaking her head, her skin tightening at such a disrespectful and insolent reaction. “Tenley!”
Tenley, looking at Brileen, put up a hand.
Wait.
Brileen’s laughter faded. When she looked toward Catherine again, her eyes were wet with tears.
Had she laughed so hard she was crying? Catherine could not put up with this for one more second. Or maybe the girl was hysterical.
The waitress arrived with two white ceramic mugs, coffee steaming, on a battered circular tray. Instantly silent, the three women flinched back against the upholstery, each side as far away from the other as possible. The waitress placed one, then two mugs on the table, the china clinking against the plastic. She laid out a napkin, then another. Then two spoons. Then the sugar container.
“Anyone need cream?” She paused.
“No,” Catherine said, trying to telegraph
go the hell away.
“Thank you.”
“Mrs. Siskel.” Brileen grabbed a paper napkin, blotted her tears as the waitress finally left them. “I am so sorry. I am so, deeply, deeply sorry.”
Catherine narrowed her eyes, trying to parse what she meant. Sorry about being a selfish, beautiful, husband-stealer? Sorry about laughing in her face?
“Lanna must have talked about me, Mrs. Siskel,” Brileen said.
“She mentioned you.” True enough, but only in passing. They were school chums, right? Which is how Brileen had latched on to Greg. Obviously. If she’d ever been to the Siskel home—
please, no
—it had been while Catherine was at work. Which, sadly for all involved, was often.
“So you know I loved Lanna,” Brileen said.
“You did?” Tenley said. She scratched her head, like she was trying to figure this out.
“Oh, Tenley, no. No. I loved her like a sister. Like you did.” Brileen touched her arm with one finger. “I’m with Valerie, have been for years. Done deal.”
The din and hubbub of the restaurant seemed to wash over Catherine, fried food and burned coffee and the whir of ceiling fans, her brain struggling for equilibrium. So if this girl was …
no.
Facts were facts, and what she had seen in e-mails and heard on voice mail was real.
“Then why were you calling my husband?” Catherine leaned forward, accusatory. “Why did you e-mail back and forth? Why did you meet him? Even the day he—”
Catherine stopped.
Even the day he died, there was a message from you,
Catherine was about to say. But she couldn’t. She wouldn’t say Greg was dead.
“Even yesterday, you e-mailed him,” Catherine said. “Yesterday morning.”
“I know.” Brileen took the laptop bag from over her shoulder and placed it on the seat beside her.
“You did?” Tenley said.
“You admit it?” Catherine felt her back stiffen, her eyebrows go up. That was easy.
“But yesterday morning, you and I hadn’t even met,” Tenley went on as if she hadn’t been cut off. She spun her coffee mug one way, then the other, batting the handle with her forefingers. The ceramic scraped against the table surface. A dark droplet splashed onto the table. “So how would you even—I mean, why—”