North's Star was Anderson 's thirty-two-foot Catalina sloop, one of the loves of his life. The only greater ones were his wife, Tina, and his daughter, Kristie.
"I figure I did my time on the front lines, you know?" he said.
I knew. All too well. Anderson had retreated to an island. I had retreated to the halls of Harvard medicine. "You did more than your share," I said.
He cleared his throat. "I could use your help."
His tone made me wonder whether he was battling a depression of his own. "I'll do anything I can. What's up?"
"The Bishop family," he said, as if that would explain everything.
"Who are they?"
" Darwin Bishop."
"Never heard of him," I said.
"The billionaire? Consolidated Minerals & Metals-CMM? It's publicly traded."
"Hey, you may live in that world now, but I don't hang in Nantucket," I said. "And I don't play the market. I always liked the track better."
"They made national news last night," he prompted.
"I try to stay away from the news, too."
Anderson got to the point. "One of his little twin girls was found dead in her crib. Five months old."
I closed my eyes and leaned against the wall. I had worked with other families stricken by SIDS, an unpredictable condition that cuts off breathing in infants, taking them in their sleep. "Sudden infant death syndrome," I said.
"Maybe… We're not so sure. There are two older, adopted sons in the family-sixteen and seventeen years old. The younger one has a history of violence. Really ugly stuff, including strangling a few neighborhood cats."
I knew where the discussion was headed. And I knew that Trevor Lucas had left me without the heart to go there. "I don't do forensic work anymore," I said.
"So I hear. The chief back in Baltimore said he tried you once or twice," he said.
"Four times."
"Can't blame him. You have a gift."
"That's one way to look at it," I said.
"I'm not expecting an investigation," he said, "just an evaluation."
"The answer is still no."
"I'll sign a purchase order for whatever you think is fair."
"Christ, North, you know it's not about the money."
"Look," he said, "the D.A. here is leaning on me. He wants the younger brother arrested and charged with murder. He'll try him as an adult and aim for life in prison, no parole."
Few things outrage me more than a judicial system that bends chronology in service to vengeance, and Anderson knew it. I stayed silent.
"He's only sixteen," Anderson went on. "The Bishops adopted him from a Russian orphanage at six. Who knows what kind of hell he went through before that?"
"I've got my work cut out for me right here," I said, half to remind myself.
"I don't want to push you, but there's something that bothers me about this family-especially the way the father laid out a red carpet for me to question his son. You're the best I've…"
"I'm trying to stay focused." I was also trying to stay sober, not to mention sane. "Why don't you call Ken Sklar or Bob Caggiano at North Shore Medical Center? They work with Judith David. You know the group. They're world class."
"One interview with the boy," he pressed. "That's all I'm asking."
I didn't want to let Anderson down. But I didn't know how far into darkness I could walk without losing my way forever. "If you want me to call Sklar myself and ask him the favor, I will."
"I want you."
"No," I said, "you want part of me I left behind two years ago, the part Trevor Lucas took." I didn't give him the chance to respond. "Listen, I got to finish up rounds."
"Frank…"
"I'll give you a call some time." I laid the receiver back in its cradle.
2
I drove my black Ford F-150 truck out of the Mass General parking garage, took a right onto Storrow Drive, and headed toward the Tobin Bridge to Chelsea and East Boston. I wanted to chase North Anderson and the Bishops out of my thoughts, to keep my distance from death. That used to mean half a bottle of scotch and a gram of cocaine, but I knew I would have to settle for my ritual coffee at Cafe Positano, an unexpected collage of mahogany, marble, and brass in the middle of a run-down row of storefronts, sandwiched between a discount packie and a variety store.
I pulled up in front of the place, went inside, and stepped up to the espresso bar. Mario Graziani, a broad-shouldered, perpetually tanned, fifty-something-year-old, who wore a tattoo of the Colosseum on his forearm, was bantering in Italian with the bricklayers and bookmakers and judges who were his regulars. Without my asking him to, he steamed my milk to a cottony froth, spooned it over a couple ounces of ink-black espresso, and dusted the top with cinnamon. He slid the mug across the bar. "Qualcuna ti vuole," he said, nodding discreetly over my shoulder.
I had picked up a bit of Italian about five years before, treating an eighty-four-year-old Sicilian man with Alzheimer's disease. His name was Maurizio Riccio, and his cortex was so full of the tangled neurons of dementia that he had become unshakably convinced he was back in Sicily with his teenage sweetheart. This break with reality was distressing to his children, who wanted their father to know for sure that he wasn't nineteen and frolicking in the Mediterranean, that he was slowly wasting away from prostate cancer, in the Cohen, Florence, Levine Assisted Living Center, right in Chelsea. They insisted I prescribe him an antipsychotic like Thorazine. I refused, and they took his case away from me. I held on to what I'd learned of his language-and what I'd learned from him about the agelessness of the human soul.
Qualcuna ti vuole-Someone wants you. I lighted a cigarette, sipped my coffee, then turned slowly and glimpsed Justine Franza sitting alone toward the back of the place, reading a book. She was resting her head on her palm, her elbow on the table, so that her long, golden hair hung to one side, like a curtain. She was a thirty-two-year-old, upper-crust Brazilian photographer touring the United States. I had met her the night before when she'd come in with a few friends. We'd spent twenty minutes talking about the Amazon and Rio de Janeiro and the seaside resort town of Buzios, all of it a pleasant enough cover for what I really had to say. If I were alone with you on the beach in Rio or in a cliffside cottage in Buzios or down the street in my loft…
"Molto bella, no?" Mario purred.
I drank enough of my coffee to be able to walk with the mug, then started toward her table.
"Clevenger!" someone shouted.
I stopped and turned toward the door.
Carl Rossetti, a local defense attorney who looked more like a drug dealer, bounded in. He had straight, jet-black hair to the small of his back, gold bracelets on both wrists, earrings in both ears. He also had one of the sharpest legal minds in or around Boston. "You think you could analyze me, doc?" he announced. "Let me tell you: You ain't got that kind of time."
Men and women seated at the tables around me looked up at him. He threw waves and smiles back at them.
I had analyzed Rossetti, but he could count on my never telling a soul.
He walked up to me, kept shifting foot-to-foot, as if still on the move. "How about that adopted lunatic on Nantucket?"
My heart sank.
"I guess he's some piece of work. Strangled a couple cats around the island a year or so back. Nearly burned down the Bishop estate. And he's got a history of breaking and entering every place within walking distance." He grinned. "From Russia with love, huh?"
"The way I heard it," I said, "nobody has any idea whether he's involved. They haven't ruled out sudden infant death syndrome."