Intent to Kill (19 page)

M
IDNIGHT WAS DECISION TIME FOR
B
RANDON
L
OMAX
. A
NOTHER
sixteen-hour day of speeches and glad-handing was over. He and his campaign manager were the last remaining souls in his Providence campaign headquarters. They were seated in the back row of the telephone bank, Lomax with his tired feet up on a battered metal desk. His jacket was off, his shirtsleeves were rolled up, and his tie was loosened in his signature style. On the wall behind them was a red, white, and blue banner proclaiming his original (and since rejected) campaign slogan:
TO THE MAX—
L
OMAX
—FOR U.S. SENATE.

“What do they know so far?” said Lomax.

“My read is nothing,” said Josef. “But you never know with the media.”

Lomax took a final gulp of cold coffee and glanced at the desktop telephones behind them. “The phone would be ringing off the hook if anyone had a clue about a lost DNA sample that could prove I was involved in the Chelsea James crash.”

“Or proved that you weren’t,” said Josef.

“Yes, but that wouldn’t be news, now would it—if I wasn’t involved.”

“I suppose not. Which raises the question: Do we leak the fact that you willingly submitted a DNA sample?”

“I think it can only be helpful,” said Lomax. “A guilty man would never volunteer to do that.”

“It still all depends on how the media spins it,” said Josef.

“What’s the worst they can say?”

Josef paused. “It’s sticky, since you were the attorney general when this evidence was gathered. Some reporters might suggest that the department never constructed a DNA profile from that evidence because you prevented it from happening. Or they might speculate that the disappearance of that sample wasn’t recent—that it vanished years ago, while you were still AG, a calculated destruction of evidence to make sure the shit didn’t hit the fan after you left.”

“That’s preposterous.”

“Is it?”

The men locked eyes. “Yes,” Lomax said coolly.

Josef blinked. “And then there’s the Garrisen connection.”

“What about it?”

Josef chose his words carefully, as if trying not to antagonize his boss any further.

“Connie Garrisen is one of your biggest supporters—could very well be the next U.S. surgeon general if you’re elected to the Senate. His wife is the current chief of the Criminal Division. She might have some questions to answer about DNA evidence disappearing under her watch.”

“It’s not really
her
watch. The DNA bank is maintained by the Department of Health.”

“The media doesn’t always point out those finer distinctions.”

Lomax mulled it over. “If we don’t leak anything, how will this play out?”

“As long as Emma Carlisle doesn’t go public with the anonymous tips that name you, Brandon Lomax is nowhere in the Chelsea James story. The media is left only with Chelsea’s troubled younger brother going on the radio to confess that he killed his sister.”

“I think we leave it right there,” said Lomax.

“I do, too. He’s the only suspect. Police are out there in full force looking for him.”

“And if he has an Asperger’s meltdown that forces some trigger-happy cop to make ‘I killed my sister’ his last words, it wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing.”

Josef looked at him in disbelief.

“What?” said Lomax.

“I just wish I hadn’t heard you say that.”

“Oh, come on. I wasn’t serious.”

Josef sighed. “It’s getting hard for me to tell anymore.”

“What do you think I’m going to do next, hire some mob guy to take him out?”

“No,” said Josef, rising. “But do me a favor, will you?”

“What?”

“Before you get there, fire me.”

Lomax wasn’t sure if he detected a hint of a smile on Josef’s face or not, but asking to be fired before the candidate hired a hit man was a dangerous thing for a campaign manager to joke about.

“I’ll let you lock up,” he said, rising. He grabbed his jacket and left through the front door. His car was at the curb. He got in and caught almost every green light on the way to his house on Benefit Street. His only stop was at the traffic light in front of the convenience store he’d visited the other night—the one with the pay phone he’d used to call Sal Vanelli.

Speaking of hit men.

It occurred to him that he hadn’t spoken to Sal since he’d botched the interception of the anonymous tipster at the Modern Diner. Josef’s snide remark was playing in Lomax’s ear, and a wave of panic suddenly washed over the candidate. Sal had totally screwed up the assignment. Lomax had to cut his ties—now.

Lomax steered into the parking lot, parked in front of the outside pay phone, and dialed Sal at the bar. “It’s POTUS,” he said, feeling a little silly about the spy stuff.

“Hey, boss. I didn’t want to call you, for obvious reasons, but I’m really sorry about the way things went screwy the other day.”

“Forget about it. It’s not a problem.”

“Let me make it up to—”

“No,
no.
That’s what I was afraid of. You don’t owe me anything.”

“You sure? Because I’m a smart guy. In fact, I’ve been putting two and two together here, and it seems to me that you could use some help.”

Lomax froze. He’d been very careful about how much to tell Sal. “What do you mean?”

“Well, it’s pretty clear that this kid Babes in the news is the tipster I was supposed to meet at the Modern Diner. My job was to buy him off and keep him quiet, right?”

Lomax didn’t answer.

Sal said, “Now he’s blabbing his mouth all over the radio. And just today—did you hear that guy from
Action News
call in to
Jocks in the Morning
?

“I heard about it.”

“Well, I’d be worried if I was you. So long as Babes is talking on the radio to his brother-in-law, you can keep track of what he’s saying. But what if he takes this offer from Doug Wells? Then you got no idea what Babes is telling the media. And that doesn’t sound like a good situation for you.”

“What are you saying?”

“I say we take things up a notch. Somebody should give Dougy boy a little visit.”

Lomax’s stomach was suddenly in knots. “No. Absolutely not.”

“Won’t cost you anything.”

“I said no. Don’t go there.”

“Okay. I’m not going to argue with you. But if you change your mind, you know how to reach me.”

“That I do,” said Lomax, and he hung up the phone.

YAZ NEEDED ICE.

His left eye was throbbing. That lunatic Babes was strong as an ox when he freaked. He was docile, gullible, obedient—as long as you didn’t touch him. The slightest physical contact, however gentle, was like an electric shock to him. All Yaz had done was run his fingertip back and forth along Babes’s lower lip. Babes bucked like a bronco, fists flying, legs kicking. The hardest blows went straight to Yaz’s face. He had no mirror, but he was sure that his shiner would be big and purple.

Crazy son of a bitch.

Yaz tore another strip of cloth from his dirty blanket and twisted it into a makeshift rope. Babes’s ankles and wrists were already bound together with a dozen other strips, but Yaz tied this last one extra tight.

“That ought to hold you,” he said.

Babes grunted, but he’d lost his will to fight.

Yaz stopped to collect his thoughts, his plan fully conceived. It was now only a matter of execution. The idea had come to him after Babes’s tell-all monologue about the night of his sister’s death. A drunk driver had been involved. It wasn’t clear to Yaz how Babes knew the driver’s name, and the name didn’t mean anything to Yaz anyway. The important detail was the car—anyone who drove a big Mercedes-Benz had to be rich. Yaz saw dollar signs. Driving drunk. Leaving the scene of a fatal accident. Maybe even manslaughter. If it were Yaz’s ass on the line, and if he were a respectable member of society who drove an expensive Mercedes, he’d cough up serious dough to stop an eyewitness like Babes from calling the police or the newspaper.

Ten grand. At least.

Yaz was down at the pond refilling empty water bottles. It was well after midnight. What better time was there to catch someone at home?

Yaz walked back to the crypt and gave Babes some water. Then he powered up Babes’s cell phone and called nationwide directory assistance. Babes had been absolutely certain about the name and spelling. There were three separate listings in New England, and Yaz chose the one with the familiar area code.

The operator offered to dial it for him at an extra cost of thirty-five cents.

“What the heck?” said Yaz, smiling thinly. “I’ll be rich soon enough.” Yaz didn’t worry about talking in Babes’s presence. He was probably trying to classify by phyla the different organisms in the pond water he was drinking.

There was an answer on the third ring.

“Yes, is this the killer of Chelsea James?” said Yaz in his most official tone, speaking into Babes’s phone.

There was a click on the line.

Yaz smiled. This was fun. This time he dialed the number himself. He knew he’d planted a seed. The guy had to be shitting his pants right now. Yaz gave the pansy ass six rings, tops, to pick up again.

It rang five times.

“Hello.”

“I saw you vomit,” said Yaz. “I know you did it.”

This time Yaz hung up…and waited. He was confident that a man of this stature would have some kind of call screening that had logged Yaz’s incoming phone number. He checked the time on the phone. It was 1:17
A.M.
He predicted a callback before 1:20
A.M.

Ninety seconds later, Yaz’s phone rang. It was the mark.

“Got your attention?” said Yaz.

“What do you want?”

Yaz felt like he had found the proverbial genie in the lamp.

“Money.”

“What do I get in return?”

“Silence.”

“How much do you want?”

“Ten thousand dollars.”

The man paused to consider it. “I can have it tomorrow.”

“Excellent,” said Yaz. “Meet me—”

“Under the I-95 bridge over the river in Pawtucket.”

Yaz took a moment. It seemed perfect. “I know it well.”

“Eleven o’clock tomorrow night.”

“I’ll be there,” said Yaz. “Pleasure doing business with you.” He closed the flip phone, and the deal was sealed.

RYAN WAS PUTTING HIS LIFE ON THE LINE.

This morning he’d decided to add to his exercise regimen by jogging to the radio station. Unfortunately, he chose a route through the South End that involved crossing Tremont Street at Worcester Street, where drivers confused survival of the fittest with the law of the crosswalks. A speeding BMW nearly flattened him between the lines. Ryan didn’t catch the license tag, just the bumper sticker:
LIFE’S TOO SHORT NOT TO BE ITALIAN.

A pedestrian was a dangerous thing to be in Boston, even at 5:20
A.M.

Emma was waiting at the radio station when he arrived. They’d agreed to meet before the show to plan their on-air strategy with Babes. To his surprise, she came dressed in exercise clothing.

“Don’t tell me you ran here from Providence,” he said.

“Don’t tell me I
look
like I ran here from Providence.”

He smiled. He’d never seen her dressed so casually. He thought she looked great.

“You look…fine,” he said.

“Fine?” she said. “Is that neither-here-nor-there fine, or more like 1970s
Super Fly
‘Ooh, that girl is
fine
’?”

Ryan’s mouth opened, but the words didn’t come. With Chelsea, he’d never fumbled the how-do-I-look question. But he hadn’t expected it from Emma.

“Ryan, snap out of it. I’m yanking your chain, okay? If I drive straight from here to my gym, I can still be in court for a nine thirty hearing. So let’s get started.”

“Sure.”

Ryan grabbed two bottles of water from the kitchen fridge and led her back to the studio. It was small with no windows to the outdoors, but it had a large interior window that looked out into the hallway, and another one that looked into the control room. The walls were acoustically padded and drab gray, and the carpet had probably absorbed more coffee spills over the years than sound.

“Have a seat,” he said, offering Emma his chair. He moved the boom microphone out of the way and pushed the headsets to one side of the table for a clear work area. His cohost typically arrived at 5:59
A.M.
for the six o’clock broadcast, so he and Emma had some time alone. That meant no chance to shower before the show, which made him a little self-conscious in such a small room. He grabbed a clean T-shirt from his workout bag, made a quick change, pitched the dirty one out into the hallway, and closed the door.

Emma looked mortified.

“Sorry,” he said. “I guess I sort of undressed in front of you.”

“Forget that. You just threw a dirty T-shirt into the hall.”

“You…want me to bring it back?”

She gave him a curious look, one that Ryan was having trouble reading.

“Poor Ainsley,” she said.

“What?”

“Nothing,” she said with a smile. “Is your producer still okay with your making a direct appeal to Babes?”

“Yes,” said Ryan, as he took a seat in his cohost’s chair. “I have the first three minutes.”

“That’s plenty. When did you last try Babes’s cell?”

“This morning, before I left the house. The call went straight to voice mail, which tells me that either the battery is dead, or his phone is turned off.”

“Then your show is still our best chance of reaching Babes,” she said before shifting gears. “By the way, I am so sorry about the way Doug Wells made a complete ass of himself on your show yesterday, trying to get Babes to call him.”

“Television reporters. What can you say?”

“I had plenty to say—to
him.
I want you to know that I had nothing to do with that. In fact, I told him I don’t ever want to see him again.”

“Really?” said Ryan.

“Yes. So now that we have that out of the way, let’s make sure you say the right things when Babes calls again. Have you written anything down?”

“I’m a baseball might-have-been who cohosts
Jocks in the Morning
. I haven’t written anything down since college.”

Emma took a notepad from her briefcase. “I am
so
glad I came.”

“Me, too,” said Ryan.

She seemed to sense something in his tone, but she let it pass. “Can I borrow a pen?”

Ryan handed her one and during the next fifteen minutes they worked out a script, word by word, line by line. She helped Ryan organize his thoughts, but she also had a subtle way of helping him sort through his feelings about Babes, the confession, and the danger Babes was now in.

By the time Ryan’s cohost and producer arrived, he was ready. He gathered up his script, put on his headset, and adjusted the microphone. The engineer did a quick voice test, and on audio cue from his producer, Ryan was ready to go.

“Morning, knuckleheads. Ryan James here with the incomparable Jock Grogan, and this is
Jocks in the Morning
, the numero uno sports talk show in the Hub.”

Ryan glanced through the glass at Emma, who could hear the broadcast on speaker. With her nod of encouragement, he continued according to their script.

“We’re starting on a serious note today,” said Ryan. “Those of you who were listening to the show a couple of days ago heard a pretty remarkable phone call from my brother-in-law, a very special person who we call Babes. Three years ago, when my wife Chelsea was killed in a car accident, I thought my own life was over. But it wasn’t only tough for me. Chelsea’s little brother took it very hard, too.”

Ryan paused. This was proving to be more difficult than he’d thought it would be. He glanced toward Emma again. She shot him another subtle vote of confidence, and it gave him more strength than she’d probably intended. He was suddenly no longer tied to the script.

“When something like this happens to you—man, you can’t describe it. At first, it’s like a lightning bolt. No way could this be true. You think you’re going to wake up and find this was just a bad dream. But it’s not a dream, and you’re so angry you could…”

Ryan was completely off script now, speaking from the heart. There was no going back.

“Well, you just want to find the bastard who did this and make him pay. But then you realize that no amount of justice or revenge—whatever you want to call it—is going to bring your wife back. That’s when the bottom falls out. I mean, sometimes you can’t even breathe. You know you should get down on your knees and thank God that your daughter is still alive, but then you ask yourself: Why the heck did He let the accident happen in the first place? Why did He have to take Chelsea? And it’s not just because you’ve lost the best thing that ever happened to you. You actually feel guilty because you have your whole life ahead of you, and Chelsea’s life is over, except in your heart. Which is so unfair, even ironic. Because your heart is frozen.”

Ryan drew a breath, but something inside wouldn’t let him stop.

“So you wake up every day resenting the fact that somehow this cold and frozen
thing
keeps on beating, forcing you to live with the pain, forcing you to hear people tell you that time heals all wounds. But time has a flip side. You’re getting older, and so are your memories. You start to forget what her voice sounds like, and the anger comes flooding back, and suddenly you’re drowning all over again.”

He paused, collected himself. “Sorry. This probably isn’t making any sense to you. What I’m trying to say, Babes, is this: I talked to your mom. She told me everything. I know why you think you killed your sister. But I’m here to tell you that you did nothing wrong. Chelsea’s death,” he said, his voice quaking, “was not your fault. It’s just not your fault.”

Ryan swallowed hard. It was difficult to say those words aloud, but not because he didn’t believe them. Listening to his own voice, it was as if Ryan were speaking to himself, trying to get the message through his own thick head once and for all: that he, too, had done nothing wrong, that he had not caused Chelsea’s death, and that there was nothing he could have done to save her.

There was complete silence on the air as the truth sank in for Ryan.

Finally, his cohost prompted him: “Ryan?”

It was clear from Jock’s expression that he thought Ryan had merely zoned out or lost his train of thought. Jock didn’t understand. Ryan looked again toward Emma, who was still watching and listening. The compassion in her eyes told him that she
did
understand. Maybe it took the heart and soul of a woman who dealt with violent crime and victims every day. For a split second he was back in his kitchen with Ainsley, staring straight into the sun—the nearest star to Earth—while Emma whispered to him that the answer was always closer than you thought.

Ryan reached inside for the strength to finish. “Babes, we all want you to come home. Please, just come home.”

He could speak no longer. He signaled to Jock, who took it from there.

“Ryan, we’re all with you, pal. Hope it works out. Okay, dudes,” he said, shifting gears. “Let’s talk sports.”

The current winning streak of the Red Sox was the farthest thing from Ryan’s mind. He removed his headset and pushed the boom microphone away. His gaze shifted once again toward Emma, and their eyes met. She looked as if she wanted to tell him something, and there was definitely something he wanted to say to her.

She gave him a complicated smile, then turned and left—quickly. Too quickly, Ryan thought.

Ryan got up and started after her, but his producer caught him in the hallway. She was smiling widely, excitement in her eyes.

“That was fantastic, Ryan. Absolutely great radio!”

Ryan heard the ding of the elevator in the lobby. Emma was leaving, and he let her go.

“Yeah,” he said. “Great stuff.”