Canning knew the old Russian expression to mean, “With company, even death loses its sting.” But today he thought of it as “South Atlantic Resources is finally open for business.”
Bella was finally going back to work.
5
Thornton awoke to a medley of electronic blips. He was lying on his back in a bed with metal side rails, his hospital gown drenched with perspiration. Five floral arrangements were packed onto the windowsill, the petals beginning to wilt. Raising his head from the pillow set off a network of fiery pain. An IV tube hung from a bag labeled FENTANYL 50MCG/ML. Fentanyl, he recalled, was a major-league painkiller, 100 times as powerful as morphine. Better not to think about how he’d feel without it. Around his left wrist was a plastic band identifying him as Staten Island University Hospital patient BALDWIN, MYERS, DOB 08/20/75. His actual date of birth was more than a year later, but Baldwin was his late mother’s maiden name. He anticipated an explanation from the man slumped in the armchair to his right, FBI Special Agent Jim Musseridge, whom he’d met once or twice on the story circuit.
“How long?” Thornton croaked. It felt as if someone had lodged a sword in his throat.
“Good, you haven’t lost your powers of observation.” Musseridge’s gruffness was almost as strong as his Brooklyn accent. “The flowers are from your Uncle Sam, part of the cover for your own protection. It’s been four and a half days since you took a header on the sidewalk outside the ferry terminal.”
Thornton felt an inclination to quarrel. His rusty faculties provided no backup.
The wrinkles in Musseridge’s gray business suit indicated that he, too, had been in the hospital awhile. Or not. In contrast to the current generation of yoga-svelte G-men, the fortysomething Musseridge resembled an old school linebacker, the sort of guy on whom a fresh suit is rumpled in minutes.
“There was some bleeding inside your head,” Musseridge went on. “They had to operate to relieve the pressure.”
Thornton ran his fingertips over his scalp. He felt prickly stubble and a bandaged ridge of sutures.
“Luckily you’ve got yourself one thick noggin. But you swallowed some vomit, which led to pneumonia, so they had to put you on a ventilator for seventy-two hours. None of this probably sounds too good, but they say you should be out of here in a day or two.”
A flashback broadsided Thornton: the man in the overcoat, materializing from the men’s room, pointing a Ruger.
Finding the bed’s lift control, Thornton started the backrest groaning toward an upright position. Too slow. Gritting his teeth against the pain, he used the side rails for leverage and sat up. The full events of the St. George terminal exploded back into his consciousness. “What about Catherine?” he asked.
Musseridge eyed his worn wing tips. “She didn’t make it. I’m sorry.”
Thornton hoped he’d misunderstood. “Is there a funeral?”
“There’s a wake tonight down in Maryland.”
“What time?” Thornton tried to get out of bed. The room seemed to tip.
The FBI man restrained him. “You’re not gonna be able to get there, bud.”
Reaching the same conclusion, Thornton lowered himself back to the mattress.
“So what was Ms. Peretti doing up here in the first place?” Musseridge asked.
“I was going to ask you the same thing.” Thornton noticed a young man pacing the hall. The close-cropped white-blond hair and a more stylish model of Musseridge’s suit proclaimed him an FBI agent. Where there was one Feeb, you could usually expect to find a second. Warren Lamont, if Thornton wasn’t mistaken. Called “Corky” by his fellow agents, who teased him that he should have been a surfer.
“How about you tell me your story first?” said Musseridge.
Thornton provided the most accurate account he could, the only pertinent bit as far as he knew being the Potomac jogger who’d threatened Peretti. “I don’t have any idea what she was planning to tell me,” he concluded with regret.
Although Musseridge’s tie required no adjustment, he tightened it. “The Bureau was hoping you’d provide a little more insight than that.”
“It would help if I knew what she was working on at Senate Intel. A terrorist threat, maybe a Mexican cartel—”
“The answer could be in one of 1,854 classified documents she may have seen in the twenty-four hours prior to coming to New York. Or it could be somewhere else. Unfortunately, she didn’t keep any kind of diary. We went through all of her calls and e-mails: nothing there. Based on our interviews with her colleagues, friends, and family, you’d think this was just a random act of violence.”
“Except the shooter had a Ruger Mark III with a suppressor, and he used it like it was just another day at the office for him.”
“Yeah, except that. We plucked the rounds out of the wall.”
“Learn anything?”
“Twenty-two LRs, subsonic, hollow point — pretty much what you’d expect.” Musseridge twisted his wedding ring. “Other than the victim, there was no evidence that a human had come in contact with the bullets since they left the Remington factory.”
“So you have absolutely nothing on the guy.” Thornton figured he was most likely to get information by putting Musseridge on the defensive.
The agent sighed. “We’ve got ferry terminal security video of the shooter described by the witnesses at the crime scene — the same guy you described — plus a shitty shot of him leaving in a cab.”
“You couldn’t find the cab?”
“NYPD found it, parked at a pub by the stadium.” Musseridge meant the minor-league Staten Island Yankees’ Richmond County Bank Ballpark, a fly ball away from the ferry terminal. “The cabbie’d been sitting at the bar for three hours as the incident went down. There were about fifty witnesses. Had his car keys on him the whole time.”
“Still, there had to be some biological evidence, right?”
“We’re talking about a New York City taxi, a ginormous ferry terminal, and a fast-food place. Hard to tell the shooter’s hair and prints, if he left any, from the thousands of other—”
Thornton remembered. “He was wearing surgical gloves.” Labs could lift prints from within the gloves.
“We didn’t find them, and not for lack of dumpster diving. Which leaves us with this.” Musseridge glanced at the notepad balanced on his lap. “A young woman holding an important position with the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence tells her husband and coworkers that she’s going up to New York for a conference on commercial shipping security. Instead, she meets an old flame for dinner at a tourist restaurant where the two of them could go with a reasonable amount of confidence that they wouldn’t run into anyone they knew. Later the same night, the same couple is seen on a ferry ride, awfully cozy.” Musseridge looked up. “That’s another reason you’d be ill-advised to go to the funeral. As far as the media knows, this was a random act of violence, and we’ve kept your name out of it, but not from Ms. Peretti’s family. As far the Bureau’s concerned, a fling isn’t a federal offense. But you are gonna have to tell us how you happened to take her to the exact spot where an assassin was waiting.”
The hospital bed suddenly felt like a witness stand. Thornton had been aware that Musseridge would fill out the FBI’s requisite record-of-interview form — the infamous FD-302. Its categories included WITNESS, used when the interviewee may have seen the offense committed, INFORMATIONAL, for an interviewee lending assistance to the investigation, and SUBJECT, meaning the interviewee is believed to be involved in the offense. The abruptness with which Special Agent Lamont stopped pacing the hall and cocked an ear toward the hospital bed declared SUBJECT.
Thornton tried to tamp down his indignation, if only because the Feds took petulance as indicative of guilt. “We got on the ferry because she was afraid that she was being followed. We were close together to minimize the chance that the suspected tail would overhear us.”