Which was why, rather than call Fanning to alert him of what she’d discovered, she instead tried Brenda Hilliard upstairs in compliance. If this was a misappropriation of funds, that department would have to be notified, regardless of who McTeague reported to. She got Brenda’s voice mail. By then it was after nine o’clock and most everyone had gone home, the whine of the vacuum cleaner starting up at the far end of the hall. She decided to send Brenda a quick e-mail, saying she needed to talk to her in the morning.
As she and Cressida left the sealed quiet of the lobby through the revolving doors and emerged onto Congress Street, the cooler night air swallowed them, carrying with it the hum and rush of the expressway. They turned onto Purchase Street, a few taxis tapping their horns for a fare, black women in business suits in this part of town apparently good enough for their services; ignoring them, they crossed the plaza in front of the Boston Fed and made their way into South Station.
Evelyn had never felt comfortable with co-workers outside the office and strangely only the more so with Cressida, to whom so much else might be said. Above all she didn’t want to disappoint the girl by seeming weak. Cressida had been the one, Evelyn felt sure, who had organized the office to send flowers to Carson’s funeral, in addition to the flowers she herself had sent.
“Have you heard anything yet?” Cressida asked, as they paused at the top of the stairs leading down to the T. “From the police, I mean.”
When was it, Evelyn wondered, that she had started to believe that she had left behind the world in which such a question might ever be asked of her? How long had that particular illusion lasted? In Roslindale, her apartment awaited her, tidy and quiet; the remote placed neatly on the coffee table, her kitchen counters wiped clean.
“They have a suspect,” she said. “Just a matter of what kind of case they can make, I guess.” She spoke more to herself than Cressida. “I should care about all that, I suppose. Revenge, or what have you. Getting him off the street. But I don’t.”
Over her assistant’s shoulder, she could see onto the station’s main concourse, where the last of the day’s travelers sat at the shiny steel tables beneath the big schedule board waiting for the commuter service west.
“If there’s anything I can do …”
Evelyn shook her head. “Go on now,” she said. “You’ll miss your train.”
Chapter 11
Later that same night, the head of data security called Doug to inform him that an e-mail had been sent to compliance referencing McTeague. Doug instructed him to erase it before it could be opened. He had just logged on to the bank’s server to pull up Evelyn Jones’s personnel file when his doorbell rang.
It would be Nate again. Over the last several weeks, he had become a regular visitor. The first time he’d appeared, at ten thirty sharp, standing on the front steps all doe-eyed and expectant, Doug had been watching a Red Sox game and he’d seen no harm in letting the kid sit on the couch beside him while he finished up his correspondence for the day. After that, Nate had turned up almost every night the Sox played, content to drink a beer and follow the score as Doug worked. When the game was over he would go on his way. Even if they didn’t say much to each other — in fact, especially if they didn’t say much — a few hours of having another person in the house felt all right. He wasn’t the kind of company you had to entertain.
Then, a week ago, while Doug was napping through the seventh-inning stretch, Nate had reached his hand over and rested it on Doug’s thigh.
A ballsy move for a kid that nervous, but then he’d had a few more beers than usual.
Years ago, down in sleeping quarters, sailors had now and then whispered come-ons or run a hand along Doug’s arm as he lay in his bunk. He’d never taken up their offers. The idea of it had done nothing for him: two guys getting each other off.
But something in the tentativeness of Nate’s gesture made him curious how it would play out and so he’d kept his eyes closed and let the kid’s hand move up over him. The mechanics were awkward at first but having someone else jack him off for a change didn’t feel half bad. Afterward, Nate had left soon enough, no reciprocation required. Which seemed reason enough to keep him around. That and his access to Charlotte Graves.
The bell rang again and Doug rose to answer it.
“You’re here,” Nate said.
“Yep,” he replied, remaining in the doorway, letting the boy wonder if he’d be let in this evening. From that first day that he’d crept into the house, something in Nate’s demeanor had goaded Doug on — his lack of defense, a vulnerability the shyest women lacked. It was a provocation of a sort, such weakness.
“Martinez is pitching,” he said, hopefully. “Are you watching?”
“I’m busy,” he said. “But go ahead. Turn it on, if you want.”
He spent the next hour reading up on Evelyn Jones. Her performance reviews were stellar. If you believed her supervisor, she was the patron saint of settlements, but given that man’s doddering liberalism Doug had no idea if he meant it or simply felt a historical obligation to praise his imagined inferiors. Doug trusted more the traders’ comments, who to a man reported that she was cleaner and faster than most anyone else who had handled their work. Around midnight, he called Sabrina and told her to do a public records search. As the game was ending, he finally closed his laptop.
Nate was sitting cross-legged beside him, the sleeves of his oxford shirt rolled up past the elbows of his slender arms.
“You’re not a baseball fan, are you?” Doug said.
“What do you mean?”
“Before you started coming over here, you didn’t follow it.”
“Sometimes I did.”
“What is your deal, anyway? Don’t you have somewhere to be? Out with your friends or something?”
Nate looked into the mouth of the bottle he’d been drinking from. “I like being here.”
“Why?”
He shrugged. “I just do.”
“Well, I got to get some sleep. Time for you to go.”
“Would you mind … I mean, it’s okay if you would, but would you mind if maybe … I stayed over?”
“Where? On the couch?”
“Okay,” he said, his eyes brimming with fear and longing. “If that’s what you want.”
“Jesus. Come on, then,” Doug said, leading him up the stairs to the bedroom.
What Nate wanted, and what Doug let him do once he had turned out the light, was to lay his head down on Doug’s stomach and take his dick in his mouth. He had never really touched Nate before but he palmed the top of his head now, guiding his motion. It had been a long time since he’d been given a blow job and though the boy was no professional his eagerness helped.
Afterward, he couldn’t sleep, not with Nate in the bed beside him. He tried for a while before fetching his computer from downstairs and starting in on more work. A box in the corner of his screen showed the Nikkei continuing to drop. Eventually, after nodding off for an hour or so, he got up and showered.