Guilt (7 page)

Sophie shook her head.

“She's three
days
old.”

Sophie gasped. She was as much in Luke's thrall as Abby. So what was not to like?

“Her name is Jamila,” Luke said.

“Jamila.” Sophie breathed the name, pressing herself up against the fence.

“That means ‘love' in Swahili,” Luke added, winking at Abby. This was giving Annie a toothache.

Sophie scrambled up the chain-link and peered over the top as the mother giraffe licked the baby's face.

“Get down from there!” Jackie cried, and went to pull her away. But Luke motioned to her that it was all right.

Sophie was so bold and fearless while Jackie was afraid of her own shadow. Kids could be so different from their parents. How on earth, Annie wondered, would Abby ever deal with a fence-climber? Annie would probably end up with a girlie girl who wanted to be a cheerleader. If she and Peter had a little girl, what would she look like? Annie nearly choked on the question. What was she thinking, anyway?

Sophie climbed down and tugged on Jackie's elbow. “Did you see? Did you see? The mommy's got a black tongue. Luke says it's more than a foot long.”

Luke explained how the mother giraffe gave birth standing up, and the newborn dropped all the way to the ground. The mother had to kick and prod her so she'd get up and walk.

“Her fur,” Sophie said. “It looks so soft.” She wiggled her fingers through the chain-link. “Can I touch her?”

“Right now the mother is feeling pretty protective,” Luke said. “So I think we'd better respect that. But in a few weeks you can come back and I'll take you inside.”

Maybe this guy
was
different.

“I don't want to screw this one up,” Abby whispered to Annie, crossing the fingers of both hands. “You like him, don't you?”

It shouldn't matter what I think
was what Annie started to say. But she knew it did. It always had and probably always would. As much as they'd become friends, Annie was still the big sister.

Annie's cell phone rang. She fished it out from her leather backpack.

“Annie?” It was Peter. “You're okay?”

“Well of course I'm—”

“Where are you?”

“I'm at the Franklin Park Zoo. Why?”

“The zoo? What are you doing at the zoo?” He sounded out of breath.

“My sister Abby—” Annie's throat went dry. Peter wasn't the type to check up on her. “Why do you want to know?”

“Where's Chip?”

Annie could hear shouting and sirens in the background. Something had happened. “I thought he was in court with you.”

“I was late getting here—”

“Here?”

“I'm outside the courthouse. Annie, there's been another bombing. Looks like it went off in the lobby.”

Annie felt cold, barely able to breathe.
Calm down,
she told herself. Chip was just late. He always underestimated how long it took to get places, never factored in time to park. Or maybe he had decided to walk. Nah, he never walked anywhere.

Peter went on. “I was hoping he'd called you.”

No, the message light on her phone wasn't blinking. Suddenly the smells inside the giraffe house were nauseating. She stumbled toward the exit and pushed through the door. Outside, she leaned against a bench and took gulps of fresh air. The static on the line felt like a pointed stick drawing a jagged line down her back.

“Annie? Are you there?”

“You've got to find him.”

“I will. I'll call you back as soon as I know something. Call me if you hear anything.”

“Is it bad?” Annie asked, not wanting to know the answer.

“It's pretty grim.”

8

P
ETER'S EYES
stung. He didn't know how long he'd been standing there, just looking at the cell phone. One ring and his call had gone directly to Chip's voice mail. Did melted cell phones ring? Did one-legged ducks swim in a circle? He squashed the comedy routine that threatened to erupt in his head.
Stay anchored,
he told himself as he pocketed the phone and tried to refocus. Thank god, at least Annie was fine.

Chip was probably fine, too. There were loads of reasons why Chip wouldn't be answering his cell phone. He could be using it, or have it turned off. He'd have to have turned it off if he'd gone into the courtroom. The upper floors of the courthouse looked unscathed in the acrid haze that hung over the area. At the base of the building, a steady stream of people were exiting, falling over each other as they tumbled out the door, coughing and covered with soot. Peter squinted through a gray scrim. Didn't look as if Chip was among them.

The intersection was rapidly filling with emergency vehicles and men in uniform shouting orders, herding people into groups, taking names, clearing the way for orange-clad emergency-services personnel, who were trying to get to the wounded or rush them out on stretchers. A firefighter in a yellow rubber raincoat emerged from the building, propping up a woman who was bent nearly double, coughing. He yelled for oxygen, and an EMT with a portable tank rushed over.

A breeze kicked up and an empty file folder skittered across the asphalt. Papers—pages from printed documents—were flying around like someone was celebrating end-the-bureaucracy day for City Hall.

Peter started across the street. A woman sat dazed at the curb, blood on her white T-shirt. A man in a business suit was facedown on the sidewalk. The back of his head was bloody. Dark pinstripes, dark hair. About Chip's height. Peter rushed over. The man's fingers were moving, and he wore a wedding ring. Thank god, not Chip. Peter felt a twinge of guilt at the thought. Peter crouched beside him. The man's eyes were glazed but he was conscious.

“What happened?” the man asked, pushing himself over onto his side.

More emergency vehicles converged on the courthouse from both sides. Peter got out his handkerchief and pressed it to the man's bleeding scalp. “Looks like you have a head wound. There was an explosion.”

The man blinked and his eyes focused. “Another one?” It was the question everyone would soon be asking.

“Peter!”

The voice came from behind Peter. He turned. Relief flooded through him as Chip hurried over, his briefcase flailing.

“Jesus, I thought you were in there,” Peter said.

Chip stared across at the charred lobby. “That's where I thought you were.”

Emergency personnel had set up a triage center at the end of the block. An EMT came over and started to take vital signs from the man Peter had been helping.

“I had to take care of something at family court,” Chip said. “If the clerk hadn't been so inept, I'd have been here.” Chip gave Peter a careful once-over. “Don't tell me, you ran late, too. You sure you're all right?”

Peter looked down. His shirt and suit were stained with soot and his jacket sleeve was torn at the shoulder. An empty, bloody Nike lay a few feet from where they were standing. That put things in perspective.

“I'm fine.”

A police officer asked them to move behind where other officers were putting up sawhorse barriers. Peter remembered his briefcase. It was still on the steps. While Chip called Annie to tell her he was fine, Peter gathered up the papers that hadn't blown away.

A dark sedan pulled up. Peter recognized MacRae getting out. MacRae spoke briefly to a uniformed officer, who pointed at a lamppost. MacRae went over and examined a flyer posted there. He pulled on a latex glove, reached up, eased off the tape, pulled down the flyer, and tucked it into a plastic bag.

Peter looked over at the mailbox nearby. There were flyers stuck there, too. A fluorescent green one for a local jazz group that was appearing at the Ryles. Below that was one that said,
ANXIOUS? UNABLE TO SLEEP?
It was a call for volunteers for a clinical study at Mass General. Peter looked around at his fellow bystanders. More than a few of them would soon qualify.

*   *   *

Bullfinch Square seemed oddly untouched as Peter and Chip crossed through. It could have been a quiet twilight in the protected area of green foliage and red brick not a hundred feet from the chaos of the courthouse. They continued up to Cambridge Street and around the corner to a coffee shop. There, the owner was using duct tape to attach clear plastic sheeting where there had been a window. Broken glass had already been swept away and the place was doing a brisk business. They got the last empty table.

Chip and Peter and Annie had often met at this greasy spoon with its too many coats of dark green paint on the walls. Over breakfast or lunch, they plotted strategy during a trial. Now it seemed like everyone in the place was talking on a cell phone.

“I was walking over from the T. She was supposed to meet me…” said one hollow-eyed, middle-aged man in a rumpled suit, probably an attorney.

“Looks like Armageddon,” said another.

“Yeah, I'll be home early. Sure. A half gallon of milk,” said a bearded fellow in uniform, probably a court officer. “Anything else?”

Chip cleared his throat. He was eying Peter's coffee. “You sure you're all right?”

Peter looked down at the two sugar packets he'd emptied into the cup. He was adding a third one. He didn't even like sugar in his coffee.

Chip sat there musing, his eyes troubled. “I hope the prisoners got evacuated safely.” His client would have been up in the twelfth-floor courtroom, awaiting the trial. Chip would also be wondering about the people he knew who worked at the courthouse—who'd made it out in one piece and who hadn't.

“First the law school. Then the district court,” Peter said. “Maybe someone's ticked at lawyers.”

“Wouldn't be the first time,” Chip said. “Odd coincidence, don't you think? The first bomb takes out the law school intern I happen to have been working with. This one just misses me and you, and could have gotten Annie if she'd been here.”

Peter shrugged. There was no point in speculating.

“You think I'm paranoid?” Chip asked.

“You ever read about that man in Pennsylvania who got struck by lightning three times? Sometimes it's really just coincidence.”

Peter opened his briefcase and began sorting through and straightening the papers he'd stuffed inside. The pages had gotten out of order, but everything seemed to be there.

“I wonder when they'll reschedule the trial,” Chip said. “And where.”

Peter flattened out the notes he'd planned to review while he was waiting to testify. His crib sheet with a table summarizing the main research findings about the effects of alcohol on judgment had been torn nearly in half. Under that was a rumpled piece of paper that looked as if someone had stepped on it. The top corners were torn. Peter's stomach rolled as he read the words printed in big black letters. He rotated the page to show Chip.

Chip's lips moved as he read.

There is no god. No right or wrong.

The law prevents Us from pursuing Our destiny.

Nothing but violent resistance can ever overcome the selfishness which is the basis of the present organization of society, which the few willingly perpetuate to exploit the many.

A pudgy man in a suit at the neighboring table peered around his newspaper through horn-rimmed glasses. Peter had an instant of eye contact with him before the man adjusted his paper in front of his face.

“I wonder if this is what MacRae was pulling down,” Peter said, keeping his voice low.

Chip ran his finger under the words and held on the final sentence “This sounds familiar. Some kind of quote, maybe. And did you notice this?” He pointed to a handwritten symbol near the bottom of the page. It was a circle with the capital letter A inside it. Peter didn't recognize it. “Stands for anarchy.”

“Hey, you!” the waiter, an older man in dark trousers and a white shirt, shouted after the man who'd been sitting at the table next to them, but the man was already out the door. “Sonofabitch,” the waiter muttered. “Didn't pay for his coffee.”

9

“S
O,
P
ETER,
where'd you say you picked this up?” MacRae asked the next morning, gazing poker-faced at the flyer Peter had brought to his office.

“Across from the courthouse. Thought it might go with the one you pulled down off the lamppost?”

MacRae did a double take.

“I was across the street, up on the plaza, on my way to court. Late, thank god.” Peter told him that he'd been knocked down and his papers had gone flying. “I didn't realize until I got back that I'd picked it up. When I read it, I realized I should bring it to you.”

MacRae slipped the flyer into an evidence bag. “Flyers just like this were all over the immediate neighborhood.”

Peter told him that Chip thought he'd recognized the quote, and that the symbol at the end stood for anarchy.

“I know. It's un-fucking-believable,” MacRae said. “Cambridge.
Pff.”
He blew air out between his teeth.

In a nutshell, that was what Peter loved about the place where “mainstream” thinkers were considered a fringe element. When Peter first moved there, a scruffy, amiable group of old-style radicals who called themselves the Anarchist Drinking Brigade held regular meetings at the Green Street Grill. Last year, a church in the middle of Harvard Square hosted a book fair where they sold anarchist manifestos alongside vegan cookbooks.

“You think this could be the same person who did the law school?” Peter asked.

MacRae looked impassive.

Peter recalled the way MacRae had dismissed him after the law school bombing.
You people will probably end up defending the bastard.
The hell with him. Peter's conscience was clear. He'd brought in what he'd found. He started to get up, then paused at the sound of MacRae clearing his throat.