Fatal Harbor (7 page)

I went through the first section.

Then the second section.

And the last section, the sports pages.

I shook my head. Went back to work.

And then I found it, in a tiny paragraph buried deep within the Metro section.

UNAUTHORIZED
MOVIE
SHOOTING
SCARES
BU

Unbelievable.

I had to read the story three times before it sank in.

The shootings on Bay State Street near buildings belonging to the Boston University campus were officially reported as a student filmmaking project gone awry. Two BU students were being held in custody, names not yet made public. Quotes from witnesses about how realistic the entire episode had been, with shot-out windows, two people being shot, blood everywhere. “Even though they should have gotten the right permits and made the right notifications, whoever did this deserves an Oscar,” said Harry McDermott, twenty, a BU student.

I folded the paper shut. Went to the other side of the room, went through a plastic bag with the cheery blue Wal-Mart logo on its side. I removed a disposable cell phone, read the directions, powered it up, and made a phone call to Massachusetts. It was answered after one ring.

“Yeah?”

“Looking for Tinios.”

“Yeah?”

“Give him this number, all right?”

The man hung up on me. I put the phone down and paced the room, thinking things through. I looked at the
Tyler Chronicle
, which had a recap of last week’s bloody events at the Falconer nuclear power plant. There were four photos on the front page. The largest showed Curt Chesak, face masked, among a group of protesters, holding up a police helmet in celebration after ripping it off Diane’s beaten face. Three smaller photos, with a headline over them saying:
THE
DEAD
AT
FALCONER
. Two were of an older man and woman, who had been shot and killed by persons unknown at about the same time Diane Woods was being beaten nearly to death. The third was of someone I had met a couple of days prior, a John Todd Thomas, who had been a student at Colby College up in Maine. John had brought me to an encampment belonging to the Nuclear Freedom Front to meet Curt Chesak, and he then disappeared, his body being found later in the nearby marshes, a gunshot wound to his head.

THE
DEAD
AT
FALCONER
.

The other two were a man and a woman, both active in the NFF, one from Massachusetts, the other from Pennsylvania. He ran an organic food store. She worked in a knitting collective. And John Todd Thomas originally came from Arlington, Virginia, a place I once had known extremely well.

The ringing of my new phone startled me. I looked at the incoming number, saw the ID was being blocked. I answered it by saying “Hello,” and a man on the other end said, “What’s up?”

I sat in one of the two chairs in the room in relief. Among the numerous things Felix and I had gone over before embarking on this little adventure in justice was setting up a procedure to contact each other, using a middleman that Felix trusted and had used many times before. Even though the phone number I used said it was in Massachusetts, there was no guarantee the man lived there. Felix said he was a genius with the intricacies of the phone system, and when he was eleven or twelve he’d had a pitch-perfect whistling ability that enabled him to fool the phone system, to make free long-distance phone calls.

“You okay?”

“Hanging in there.”

“How’s your relative?”

Felix said, “No change, thankfully. But she’s off to Florida for a while. Good for her bones and other things.”

“Glad to hear it.”

“And you?”

“Things are getting more interesting.”

“Do tell.”

“Did you read the
Boston Globe
today?”

“Haven’t gotten to it,” Felix said.

“Check out the Metro section. Seems a couple of students were filming a movie near the Boston University campus. Lots of gunfire, bullets flying, bodies on the street.”

“The hell you say,” Felix said, both surprise and admiration in his voice.

“Page B-2, News Briefs,” I said. “Check it out. You know what this means, don’t you?”

“I’ve been around, I don’t need a picture drawn.”

Felix’s tone was pretty calm, a feeling I didn’t share. “All right, no drawn picture, but Felix, we’ve just entered the world of my former employer.”

No answer from the other end. I knew Felix was considering what I had just said; and to emphasize my point, I added: “Just so there’s no confusion, I don’t mean
Shoreline
magazine and my crazy editor, Denise Pichette-Volk. I mean before that.”

“Before that” being as a research analyst for an obscure section of the Department of Defense, which I had left years ago after the people in my section were all killed—except for me—in a training accident that could have embarrassed many a corrupt soul in our government.

I could hear Felix breathe. It was a damn fine cell phone.

“Well, how about that,” he finally said.

“Remember our little discussion back at the diner? About the number of men we’ve run up against since we went to Boston?”

“How could I forget? You put ketchup on eggs, remember?”

I pressed on. “You add the logistics and financing that you need to support that effort, and then you add on the ability to fake a news story about the shooting back at BU . . . we’re talking government agencies here.”

“Ours or theirs?”

“Somebody’s, that’s for damn sure.”

Outside my room, I could hear someone vacuuming the hallway. Any other time, I would find that incredibly irritating. Right now, I found it incredibly soothing.

Felix said, “You be extra careful, then.”

“What? No warning from you about stepping away, backing down, letting everything just settle out?”

Felix said, “They hurt your friend. I wasn’t going to insult your intelligence.”

“Thanks.”

“I’m going to be tied up for another day or three, getting Aunt Teresa out and down to Florida. You going to need anything?”

“You beat me to it,” I said. “Yeah, I’m going to be doing some out-of-state traveling. I need a photo ID and a credit card to match. Plus some cash. Can it be done?”

“How long do you need it for?”

“Just a couple of days.”

“Yeah, it can be done. Where are you now?”

I told him where and my room number, and he said, “Okay, it’ll be arranged. But what do you have planned?”

“You said something earlier about going back to the beginning.”

“Yeah. I remember.”

“I’m going back to the beginning, and then some.”

I brought Kara’s Subaru back to the Exonia Hospital parking lot and then took the elevator up to the ICU. At the entrance to Diane’s room, a muscular-looking young man was reading a copy of the
Union-Leader
newspaper out of Manchester, the state’s largest city. He had on jeans and a flannel shirt, and on display at his right hip was a holster with an automatic pistol.

Despite all that had gone on earlier, I felt happy at seeing him. I slowly approached him and he quickly folded his newspaper and put it in his lap.

“Help with you something?”

“I’m looking for Kara Miles.”

“And you are?”

“Lewis Cole. I’m a friend of hers and the detective sergeant.”

He stared me up and down and said, “You got ID?”

“Sure do. Let me get it.”

I moved slowly, went to my wallet, slipped out my New Hampshire driver’s license. I suppose I could have also passed over my press card, issued by the N.H. Department of Safety, but since I was no longer employed by
Shoreline
, I didn’t want to be accused of doing something illegal.

The police officer gave my license a quick scan, grunted, handed it back. “So it is you, and you’re one lucky fella. There’s four names on a list of people allowed to visit who don’t work at the hospital, and you’re one of them.” He motioned with his left shoulder. “Kara’s in there with the detective sergeant. You want I should get her?”

To do what? To tell her about the faint outlines of something dark and monstrous that had been stirred up out there, that was after me and her and Diane and no doubt others?

I passed over the keys to Kara’s car and condo. “Give these to her, if you don’t mind. Tell her thanks, that I’ve made other arrangements.”

“Fair enough. Anything else you’d like to say?”

“Officer, I’d love to, but I just don’t have the time.”

Sometimes in my off moments I like to think that maybe the Greek or Roman gods of old are still at work up there, sort of like a little immigrant grocery store going up against the current Walmart Supercenters of organized religion. Their activities by nature get drowned out, but every now and then they poke up, like they did tonight when the God of Irony—whoever she or he was—sent me a signal with the arrival at the Tyler Inn and Suites of a cab the front desk had called for me. Like before, it was a dark blue sedan with the yellow letters
EXONIA
CAB
stuck on the side.

The window rolled down. The same cloud of cigarette smoke. The same driver from the other night.

“Oh, it’s you,” she said.

“Try to contain your enthusiasm.”

She took a hefty drag from her cigarette. “What, you need to get over to the train station again? Why the hell don’t you just walk it? Couldn’t be more than a mile.”

I reached for the door handle. “Maybe I just like your company.”

“Hah.”

I opened the door, said, “A different place this time. How does Durham sound?”

Her tone brightened. “Mister, Durham sounds just fine.”

To get to Durham from Exonia meant traveling through two small New Hampshire towns, and my new best friend kept up an entertaining chatter as we proceeded. Even in this day and age, there were dairy farmlands and wide-open fields, and it was good to look at the red, gold, and yellow of the fall foliage as we approached Durham. My personal driver talked about the weather, about the snotty prep-school kids in Exonia, her aching hips, and how her husband George was adjusting to his new artificial knee—“and thank Christ the V.A. eventually said it was a service-related injury, otherwise my grandkids would be paying off that bill when we’re both dead and gone.”

Downtown Durham consisted of the post office, a couple of beer-and-pizza places, and a tidy downtown with two-story brick buildings. The UNH buildings were mostly brick and marble, and when I was dropped off near a main intersection with lots of college students walking briskly along, my driver asked, “You need a ride back?”

“I do, but I don’t know how long I’ll be.”

She passed over a creased business card. “Call me.”

I glanced at the card. “Maggie, I appreciate it, but like I said, I don’t know when I’ll be done.”

Maggie shrugged, put the car into drive. “What, you think my dance card is full for the rest of the day? No worries, pal, okay?”

She drove off, and I thought: no worries.

I wondered what that felt like.

CHAPTER EIGHT

I
walked a ways and sat on a stone wall, across from a dormitory called Congreve Hall. Like most of the surrounding buildings, it was brick with white windows and black shutters. Students walked along the concrete sidewalks, singly and in groups, most carrying knapsacks or book bags. I eyed them carefully as they walked by. There were times in this nation’s storied past that college students had had the luxury of studying in a safe bubble of fun and higher learning, only worrying about being popular or getting good grades, or getting the best education possible.

We were no longer in that special time. Nobody said anything as they passed by, but everything was off. Out there in the alleged real world, men and women with decades’ worth of experience in manufacturing, computers, and marketing were desperately snapping up entry-level jobs, leaving nothing behind for the hundreds of thousands of kids graduating each year. And of those graduating, “jobs” sometimes meant unpaid internships, moving back home, and looking with deepening dread at the payment book for their tens of thousands of dollars in student loans.

I’m not sure if I felt pity, or envy, or what. So I just sat there and ran things through my mind, from the note from Detective Renzi telling me to drop the matter, to the
Globe
story blithely writing about a movie shoot going awry, to those strong men hanging around Aunt Teresa’s apartment in the North End.

A lot to keep me occupied, which was good, because a couple of hours passed before the young woman I was looking for showed up. Her name was Haleigh Miller, and I had met her during the Falconer nuclear power plant demonstrations a few weeks back. She had befriended me when I covered the protests for my previous employer,
Shoreline
magazine, and she had also managed to hook me up with meeting Curt Chesak back before the violence erupted.

And speaking of violence and friendship, she had also been the girlfriend of Victor Toles, arrested last week for murdering his stepfather, local anti-nuclear activist Bronson Toles, with a skilled sniper shot to the head. Victor didn’t like his stepfather’s plan to sell valuable demo tapes of up-and-coming music acts to support his charitable causes. The stepson and his mom wanted to do something else with the money, like live in luxury for the rest of their lives.

An old and understandable conflict.

I stood up as Haleigh came closer, and she spotted me and stopped on the paved pathway.

“Oh. You.”

“Yeah, it’s me,” I said. “I won’t take much of your time. Just need to ask you a couple of quick questions.”

Her face sagged, like the muscles and tendons there had suddenly lost their ability to keep things in place, and for a moment it seemed like she was about to burst into tears. She sniffled some and said, “Shit, okay, can we sit for a second?”

We went back to the stone wall and sat down and I asked, “How are you doing?”

“Stupid question. Ask another.”