Suspicion (24 page)

D
anny carried the Beretta onto the plane in the pocket of his down parka.

It went just as Galvin had promised. No going through security. No metal detectors or wands or pat-downs. He just walked right onto the plane as he’d done in Boston. Galvin had told him to keep the gun with him.

The seating arrangement on the plane was slightly different on the way back.

Celina sat next to her husband. They spoke almost continuously, in low voices, alternating between Spanish and English. Danny couldn’t hear what they were saying, but Celina looked worried and upset, and Galvin seemed to be trying to placate her.

The two girls sat next to each other on the couch at the back, as before. Jenna was reading the book Abby had just finished, John Green’s
The Fault in Our Stars
. Abby was reading a novel by Jodi Picoult.

Danny took the seat near Lucy’s, but she appeared not to be speaking to him. She hadn’t said a word in the Suburban on the way to the airport, and as soon as the plane took off, she’d opened her Cleopatra biography. A couple of times he’d caught her eye, or took her hand, only to get no response. An averted glance, a limp hand.

She smoldered. He’d never seen her so angry. In fact, he could barely think of times when he’d seen her angry at all. Nothing more than momentary irritation. But this was different. She was angry, and she was frightened.

She’d seen him holding a gun, and there hadn’t been an opportunity for him to explain without someone else overhearing. It must have freaked her out to see a gun in his hands.

“Hey,” he said softly.

She arched a brow, turned a page. “Hmm?”

“We need to talk. It’s important.”

She closed the book on her index finger. As if to say:
I’ll give you a minute, no more.
“Important enough to involve me? And maybe your daughter?”

Her voice sounded high, constricted. Indignant. A faint tremble.

She looked at him, eyes hooded, a hostile expression that said either
I really don’t care
or
I don’t believe a word you’re saying
.

“Oh?”

“I can’t talk about it here. But as soon as we get home. I just want to say I’m sorry.”

She shrugged, returned to her book.

The horror he’d witnessed that afternoon on the mountain pass had changed everything.

For far too long, he’d kept the real situation from the woman he loved.

It was time to tell her the truth.

H
e waited until Abby had gone to bed that night.

In the old days, not so long ago, that meant tucking her in and reading to her and talking and eventually turning out the light. Often he’d fall asleep before she did and later stumble out of her bedroom in a stupor. Now it meant she closed the bedroom door and put on her headphones and listened to music and “chatted” with friends on Facebook.

Danny kept his voice low, just in case Abby wasn’t wearing her headphones and had her ear against the wall.

“Baby, something happened this afternoon,” he began. “But it began a while ago.”

He started with Galvin’s loan and the meeting with the DEA. He told her how he’d planted a bug in the Boston College medal and how it was somehow discovered. He told her about Esteban’s mutilated body. About how he furtively downloaded Galvin’s BlackBerry at the Plympton Club. And finally about the nightmarish event earlier in the day. Had it been only a matter of hours since they’d discovered the mutilated body of the bodyguard? It felt like days.

Mostly, she listened. After the first few minutes, she stopped interrupting him with questions. Her mouth came open a few times, an understandable response to the shock. She gasped at his descriptions of what had happened to the two driver/bodyguards.

When he finished, she was silent for a long time.

Her eyes were filled with tears, her jaw tight.

“So basically you decided to secretly cooperate with the DEA against a Mexican drug cartel,” she said. “And put your life in harm’s way. And your daughter’s. And mine, too.” He was surprised by her tone, flat and cold and bitter.

“That’s not how it happened, Lucy. I told you.”

His cell phone made the plinking sound of a secure text message. He ignored it. He knew what it was: They wanted his photos of whoever Galvin had met on the Aspen mountainside. Well, they could wait.

She sat up in bed very straight. “No, that’s exactly how it happened. You didn’t tell me in the beginning because you knew what I’d say. You knew how I’d react.”

He shook his head. “Come on.” But he knew she was probably right.

“Because keeping me in the dark would keep the bad guys away. Like that? Is that what you thought? You know, we shrinks call that magical thinking.”

“Lucy.”

“Because you didn’t want to have this very argument?”

“I wanted to keep you safe. You and Abby both.”

She shook her head slowly.

She was wearing an extra-extra-large T-shirt that said
KEEP CALM AND CARY GRANT
on the front. A spoof of an old British wartime poster you now saw parodied everywhere:
KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON
. A silhouette of Cary Grant in
North by Northwest
, running from a crop duster. Danny had forgotten whether he’d given it to her. She loved old Hitchcock movies. She insisted they didn’t make movie stars like Cary Grant or Spencer Tracy or Gregory Peck anymore.

“I figured, the less you or Abby was involved, the better. Safer to keep you out of the loop.”

“So one day Tom Galvin would get arrested and—what, the Mexicans would leave us all alone and say, ‘Rats, I guess we’re just going to have to file an appeal’? And ‘Oh, that guy who’s responsible for us losing billions of dollars, that guy who funneled the information to the DEA, we’ll just leave him alone, because them’s the breaks of the justice system’? Like that?”

“There’s no need to raise your voice.”

She swung her feet out from under the covers and onto the floor. “What the hell were you
thinking
? That they’d go away quietly? Because they always do that, right? Just walk away and throw up their hands. These people who behead their enemies and butcher them, and . . . and you just thought you were going to work against these cold-blooded killers and they’d leave you and your daughter alone?”

He made a palms-down gesture, patting the air, trying to calm her, get her to keep her voice down. “You don’t really think I’d deliberately do anything that might cause harm to you or Abby, do you?”

She folded her arms across her chest. “So when you told her she couldn’t go over to the Galvins, and I asked you if there was something about them you didn’t like, and you said no . . . ?”

“Yes. That was a lie.”

“And the reason you didn’t want her being driven around by Galvin’s chauffeur—when you said you were just uncomfortable—”

“That was also a lie.”

“The old friend who wanted publishing advice, the Jay Gould letters at Wellesley—”

“I lied to you over and over again. I did. I’m deeply, deeply ashamed of it. But everything I did was about protecting you and Abby. Lucy, come on, keep it down, Abby can hear.”

“And all because you can’t deal with confrontation.” Her cheeks burned deep red. “Well, that’s something I really can’t fix. This is such a disappointment, really.”

He no longer recognized her. The mask of anger had lifted away, and what remained was terrifyingly unfamiliar. A woman who looked at him like he was a stranger. Her eyes stared, her expression oddly neutral, impassive.

“You didn’t want to have this fight, so you decided you knew best.”

“I didn’t—” He faltered. He didn’t know what to say, because he knew she was right.

She fell silent, and so did he. There didn’t seem to be anything more to say.

He got up from the bed. He saw tears in her eyes. She spoke so softly he could barely hear. “You take care of that girl, and tell her I love her so much and I’ll say good-bye to her another time. Right now I can’t.”

“Lucy,” he said.

But she’d closed the bedroom door behind her.

 • • • 

He lay awake for what seemed like hours.

He wept.

At four in the morning, when the sky was dead black, and daybreak seemed impossibly far off, he had an idea.

He selected ChatSecure on his iPhone and texted the DEA agents:
Need to meet ASAP.

 • • • 

“It really sucks that I have to go to school today,” Abby said the next morning. “Instead of being in Aspen.”

“I know. Life’s tough.”

She seemed to relent a bit. “I know. Jenna calls it a first-world problem. Lucy left already?”

“She had to leave early.”

A beat. “You guys were fighting last night.”

“We were talking. Did we wake you up?”

She shook her head, then shrugged.

His iPhone, in his pants pocket, vibrated and bleated the distinctive tritone of a secure text message.

“Is that yours?”

He nodded, slipped it out of his pocket. Entered his passcode. The message read:
Busy on another case. Can’t meet until tonight or tomorrow.

“That from Lucy?”

“It’s business. Boring.”

“You changed the text alert sound? It sounds different.”

“I don’t know. You want some coffee?”

She gave him a quick look of surprise. “Yes, please.” She looked at him and smiled.

“Just this once,” Danny added. He rose and got down a Winnie-the-Pooh mug from the cabinet and filled it three-quarters of the way with coffee. “You can add your own milk and sugar.”

“Okay.” She poured some Lactaid milk until it was as light as coffee ice cream. She stirred in three teaspoons of sugar. “You sure you guys weren’t fighting?”

“We’re fine,” Danny said. He’d tell her when it felt less raw. “Get a move on. You don’t want to be late.”

 • • • 

“Let’s go,” Danny called out fifteen minutes later.

He jangled his car keys. Abby was still in the bathroom, doing whatever teenage girls do in the morning that takes them so long.

“Boogie, move your butt.”

The bathroom door opened. Abby’s face was different. It was twisted in what at first looked like intense curiosity, but something about her expression made Danny look twice. Anger?

“Where’s her toothbrush?” she said.

“What are you talking—?”

“Lucy. Lucy’s toothbrush. Her makeup. It’s gone. It’s all gone.”

Danny couldn’t think of what to say beyond, “It is?”

“You broke up.” An accusation.

Danny sighed. “Can we not get into this right now? You’re going to be late for school.”

“You lied to me!”

“It’s not your business.”

“Not my
business
? All the times you’ve told me to treat her like a member of the family? ‘She loves you, Abby. She’s part of our family, you should treat her like that.’ And now you’re freaking
lying
to me?”

“Abby. Boogie. We’ll talk later. Not now.”

“No!” Abby threw something at him, something small and hard. A hairbrush. It missed him by a couple of feet.

“Hey!” he shouted. “Abby, what the hell are you doing?”

“Sure, why not lie to me the same way you lied about Mom.”

“Huh?”

“You said she had an infection. An
infection
.” She was crying now, her face red and distorted.

“Abby—”

“You made me go to camp!”

“You
wanted
to go to camp.
Mommy
wanted you to go to camp.”

“I was kayaking and swimming when Mommy was
dying
. Oh my God.” Her voice had gotten high and tiny and constricted.

“Baby,” he said. He went to hug her and she pushed him away. He went numb.

Tears dripped from Abby’s cheeks. Her nose was running. It tore Danny apart to see her like this. “Like it wasn’t my
business
Mom had breast cancer. Like I couldn’t hear the truth.”

Crying now, too, Danny said, “Abby, sweetie, no. That wasn’t it at all. Mommy wanted you to be happy for as long as possible.”

She said something, but Danny couldn’t make out the words. All he heard was “
happy?
”

“Honey,” he said. “I lied to you because Mommy asked me to.”

And then it was out.

Pass the buck right back to your dead wife, he thought. Blame her. She’s not around to defend herself.

Did it make any difference that it was true?

This time when Danny tried to hug her, Abby didn’t fight him. She didn’t hug back, not really, but she allowed herself to be hugged for a long time. His shirt was hot and damp from his daughter’s tears.

 • • • 

Ten minutes later he called Jay Poskanzer, the criminal defense attorney.

“Jay,” he said, “I need a little help.”

“On what?”

“It’s about the DEA guys I’ve been dealing with.”

“Uh-oh.”

“Yeah. I want out.”

T
he terror Danny had felt in Aspen at the side of the mountain had scarcely lessened its grip on him.

Whatever the reason behind that nightmarish mutilation, it might as well have been done for his sake alone. It was a warning, that’s what it was. A glimpse of his future.

But it was Abby’s tears that had finally decided it for him: He had to get out. The DEA agents would not let up until he met an equally grisly end. To them it made no difference; he’d be a casualty of a long and brutal war.

He could predict what they’d say.
No turning back now. Toothpaste’s out of the tube. Hang in there; keep the faith. We’ll take care of you.

They’d say whatever it took, make whatever threats they could, to keep him reporting on Tom Galvin, trying to incriminate him. But he couldn’t, wouldn’t, do it anymore. He couldn’t be responsible for putting the guy in prison. Or getting him murdered, more likely.

A loving father of three kids who’d never done him any harm, who’d tried to bail him out, who was himself trapped like Danny was trapped. Lucy was right. He’d made a terrible mistake.

And now he had to undo it.

Force the DEA to back off. However he had to do it.

So he sat in front of Jay Poskanzer’s desk and tested out the solution he’d finally come up with.

Poskanzer toyed with a miniature baseball bat, a Red Sox souvenir. He leaned back in his expensive-looking office chair. “What do you mean, you want out?”

“I want to stop cooperating with them.”

Poskanzer’s eyes narrowed. His wire-framed glasses were clouded, as if begrimed by fingerprints. His frizzy reddish-gray curls came to a point on either temple like ram’s horns. “You signed an agreement. It’s a binding legal document.”

“Yeah, well, I want to get out of it. I want it nullified. I want to stop cooperating with the DEA. Simple as that.”

The sun shone through one of the plate-glass walls of his office, flooding the place with light, glinting off the glass-topped desk. “Dude. Not so simple.”

“If it were simple, I wouldn’t need to hire you.”

“Are we on the clock?”

“I’ll let you know in a couple of minutes.”

Poskanzer shrugged. “On what grounds do you want to get out of the agreement?”

“Professional misconduct.”

He chuckled nervously. “What does that mean?”

“Threatening to leak to the Sinaloa cartel that I’m cooperating with them.”

“They wouldn’t—You don’t actually believe they’d do that, do you?”

He nodded. “Sure. It wouldn’t surprise me. I take them at their word.”

Of course, all they had to do was take a deposition and put him on the witness stand and the cartel would put out a hit on him. It was a wholly unnecessary threat. But they’d made it.

“You got proof? An e-mail, maybe?”

He shook his head.

“Voice mail? A note? Anything?”

He shook his head some more.

“What are their names, again?”

Danny told him. Poskanzer wrote them down. “So it’s your word against two federal agents’.”

“Not if we get them on tape.”

“Wait a second.” Poskanzer held up his hand like a traffic cop. “You’re not talking about recording it yourself, I hope.”

“Why not?”

“It’s illegal, for one thing? In Massachusetts, both parties have to consent.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t think they’re going to consent.”

“Right. And I can’t counsel you to break the law. That’s against the Massachusetts lawyers’ code.”

“Well, I didn’t ask your counsel on that, did I?” he said with a smile. “We’re talking about a massive, multibillion-dollar investigation into the Sinaloa cartel. So I broke the law by making an illegal recording. That’ll be a slap on the hand. A goddamned
speeding
ticket.”

Poskanzer shrugged. “I . . . I didn’t agree to this.”

“Got it. So noted. Now, let’s say I get proof. Then where do I go with it?”

“You take it to the Department of Justice’s Office of Professional Responsibility. Hold on.” He swiveled his chair and batted out something on his keyboard. “Okay, here’s their website, okay . . . it says . . . here we go:
Jurisdiction
 . . . yada yada ya . . .
investigate allegations of misconduct by law enforcement personnel.
Yep, these are the folks you want.”

“And they’d really go after a couple of DEA agents? Not just cover it up?”

Poskanzer exhaled a long sigh of what sounded like frustration. “Here’s the deal. This is what they do, investigating official misconduct. But they won’t open an investigation unless they think they can win it. Which brings us back to proof. You don’t have any.”

“Not yet,” Danny said, and he stood up. “But I will.”

 • • • 

He’d gotten three secure texts from the DEA agents demanding to meet. They wanted the photos, the ones he’d failed to get in Aspen. He’d avoided their texts.

But he was ready to see them now.