The blaring alarm was the first thing Jake heard, a piercing insistent robovoiced repetition of instructions-the danger is over, please stay in your room until given the all clear-followed by earsplitting beeps and a rasping buzz. That’s what must have kept interrupting the incident team’s transmissions. Before the elevator even shut behind him, he ran past numbered doors, all closed as instructed, toward the open one at the end of the narrow corridor. A triangle of light played on the ugly gray hall carpeting, its apex pointing to whatever was inside.
“D, I’m here.” Jake keyed the radio as he ran.
“Room three fifty-four,” D’s voice came back. “Last door on the right. It’s open.”
By that time, Jake was there. He stood in the wedge of light, cataloging the scene. Framed photos of Boston statues hung on the walls. Sun pouring through one wide window slashed light and shadow on the furniture. Red-streaked sheets and a flowered spread lay tangled across the unmade oversize bed. Red-streaked once-white towels were piled on the once-gray wall-to-wall. Three toppled water glasses had landed on the floor. Water dripped from a quart-size bottle tipped precariously on the edge of a desk.
Classic struggle, textbook. Who won and who lost?
The loser was clearly on the metal gurney parked awkwardly in the only possible area of the room, a two-yard space between the bed and the mirror-covered wall. A crush of EMTs surrounded it, heads down. One protected the IV drip bag hanging from a thin metal pole, while another leaned close to the patient’s face, monitoring the transparent plastic oxygen bag attached to a bright green metal canister next to the motionless body. All the action, mirrored, reflected into twice the disaster.
Two uniformed cops, weapons holstered, stood sentry inside the hotel room door. DeLuca was not in the room. “DeLuca?” Jake keyed his radio again.
“Stand by,” D’s voice came back.
“Where’s D?” Jake asked. “Do we have identification on this victim?”
Taking two steps toward the stretcher, he recognized the graying ponytail of Deb Kratky. Yesterday the veteran EMT had handled the Curley Park victims. Now this. But she was blocking his view. He turned. Checked in the mirror. Still blocked.
Jake touched Deb on one pale-blue shoulder, needing her to move. “Kratky. You make a better door. I gotta get ID.”
“We’re stabilizing now, Jake.” Kratky didn’t move, still bent over the victim. She turned her head, raised her eyes from her patient, flipped a palm up, then down. Fifty-fifty. She managed a tentative half smile. “One shot, upper right chest. Vitals getting there. We’ll transport ASAP, maybe two more minutes.”
“Lobby clear?” Another EMT asked him. “Mass General is expecting.”
“All clear,” Jake said. “Deb, I gotta get ID. And where’s DeLuca? Did he get it?”
“With the shooter, he says to tell you.” Kratky stepped away from her charge, gesturing Jake to take a look.
A thin white blanket covered the body. Jake didn’t need to approach any nearer to get his first bearings. White. Male.
Brown hair, curly, clean-shaven, forty-something, Jake cataloged. But he was hearing Jane’s voice saying the words.
Lewis Wilhoite.
52
“Are you still in front of the Purple?” Tenley had dialed Brileen before her mother could stop her. She didn’t need to announce who she was. Caller ID would display it.
“How did you know?” Brileen’s voice, laughing, came back through the cell. “Hey, are you watching me through your fancy surveillance thing? Whoa, did you see me look at you? I almost waved. I was on my way up to see you!”
Tenley put her hand over the phone mic. “She was coming to see me, that’s why she was here,” Tenley whispered.
She and her mom stood in the sheltered area outside City Hall. A bunch of cop cars and TV trucks, she could see only the rear ends of them, clustered in front of the U, almost a block away. No sirens or anything.
“Tenley, I’m not sure about this.” Her mom was running her hand through her graying hair, then adjusting her blouse.
“I’m right across the street,” Tenley said into the phone. “There’s someone I want you to meet. We’re walking to you now.”
“Who?” Brileen asked.
“It’s a surprise.” Tenley gestured at her mom. Come on. “One minute. We’ll be there in one minute.”
“Tenner,” Mom said, “this is a bad idea.”
“It isn’t. Trust me.” Tenley tucked her phone into the back pocket of her skirt, then paused. She draped her arm across her mother’s shoulders. It felt right. “I can’t let you be so sad, Mom. You said today, upstairs, it’s only me and you now. And it is. And that makes us a team.”
“I love you, Tenley.”
Tenley felt her mom lean into her, felt her weight against her chest, her hair against Tenley’s cheek. She paused, standing that way, thinking about it all.
“I love you too, Mom,” Tenley said. And she did. She could picture the ghost of Lanna and the ghost of her father looking down on her. Smiling. The world was only the world. Sometimes it was awful. Sometimes family was all you had. “Now come with me.”
Why had Tenley brought her here? The beery din of the Purple Martin, the dingy-noisy hangout Catherine had seen countless times in her years at City Hall. Steps across the street from her office but miles across a generational boundary. No one here probably even knew of the chaos, now reportedly over, just a block away.
She sat in the maroon leatherette booth, hands clasped on the speckled plastic tabletop. The lumpy upholstery was splitting at the seams, poorly repaired with mismatched duct tape, still torn in a couple of places. A ragged edge of the unforgiving fabric poked at Catherine’s thigh. She adjusted her skirt underneath her.
Brileen Finnerty. How many times had she said that name to herself? Tasted its toxicity, imagined the reality, her husband with a woman young enough to be his daughter.
And now here they were. Face-to-face. On opposite sides of a table.
“Come meet my mom,” Tenley had said. And out on the sidewalk they’d shaken hands, like two civilized people. Still, Catherine thought, I know guilty when I see it.
Brileen was attractive enough, her coppery hair chopped in a way Tenley probably considered cool. She wore a short flowered skirt, a striped tank top, and an attentively battered jean jacket. A laptop bag slung diagonally across her chest. Not a whiff of femme fatale, Catherine thought, eyeing the bitten-to-the-quick fingernails. No accounting for tastes.
She picked up a plastic-covered menu, pretended to read it while she studied Brileen. The girls ordered coffee from a T-shirted waitress while Catherine tried-unsuccessfully-to picture Greg with her. It didn’t matter, though. No accounting for tastes, maybe, but there was accounting for facts. The voice message instructing Greg to “meet at the usual place.” The ridiculously cryptic e-mails she’d read. “I’ll be watching for you.” Brileen had even signed her name.
Whether Catherine could picture it or not-and she’d never attempt it again-there had been something going on between them.
Why on earth had Tenley brought them here? Five more minutes, Catherine decided. Just enough to mollify her daughter. She’d checked her phone, several times. No one had pinged her. The mayor would be waiting for instructions. The cops were wrapping the hotel incident, but she’d been notified there was no more danger. They still had to decide how to handle the Curley Park subpoena.
Her heart twisted again with grief, and with anger, and with grief again. Greg was dead. Brileen couldn’t possibly know about that yet, and Catherine certainly would not be the one to tell her. That discovery she’d have to make on her own. A reality the girl would have to mourn alone, like all participants in deceit.