I broke one of the panels in the French door, unlocked the door, and let myself in. The house was cold but not freezing. The heat must have been on. I went down to the basement and found Gus where I’d seen him, tied to one of the lalley columns, his hands taped behind his back. He was slumped to the side, and his hands had a blue tint because of the pressure on his wrists.
“Oh please oh please oh please oh please oh please,” I muttered as a mantra while I knelt down and took off my gloves. I was careful not to move Gus too much as I desperately sought for a pulse. His skin felt cold, but my hands were too. After what felt like forever, I finally found a pulse. Faint, but it was there. I looked at the vomit on the front of his jacket and the blood that had congealed around the wound on the side of his head.
I took off my coat and put it gently around him. Emma had come halfway down the stairs to let me know the ambulance was on its way. I told her to go upstairs and turn up the heat. And to bring me a blanket.
“Gus,” I said quietly. No response. “Gus,” I said more loudly. “Gus, it’s Sully. You’re safe.”
The gatehouse guard—it ends up his name was Ben—waited for the ambulance and accompanied them to the house. He and Emma both pulled me away from Gus to let paramedics work. Ben took off his coat and draped it around my shoulders, and Emma wrapped her arms around my waist. After they’d worked on Gus for a while, they were ready to transport him. We heard them call in unresponsive, stable, and head wound.
Emma made a call and handed the phone to one of the paramedics. “This is Courtney O’Connor—she’s a doctor at Brigham and Women’s. Tell her what you just said.”
“Ma’am, we don’t have time to—”
“Just do it,” Emma said. The paramedic did as he was told and had a long conversation with Dr. O’Connor. At the end, he conferred with his partner and it was decided that Gus was going to Boston for treatment.
“Wasn’t that taking a chance?” Toni asked me. She’d come into the hospital waiting room a few minutes earlier with a large French roast coffee for me. She’d also brought herself one, and a bag of food.
“It may have been, because it was an extra hour’s drive. But Dr. O’Connor was willing to treat him in Boston and she has a great reputation. We probably would’ve moved him here anyway. I don’t know, Toni. I just let Emma take over.”
“Where is she?” Toni asked.
“She’s driving the sailcloth over to the theater.”
“That couldn’t have waited?”
“The show must go on,” I said. I smiled slightly, but I was serious. Emma had fought me, but I wanted to make sure the crew had what they needed to fix the set tomorrow. Besides, there wasn’t much she could do for Gus or for me sitting in the waiting room.
“Tell me what happened,” Toni said. I noticed, and was grateful, that she didn’t sugarcoat it. She knew my cop instincts had kicked in and that I could talk about what had happened this afternoon. I needed to talk about it, to help process my feelings. So I told her all about the visit to Century Cape.
“Somebody decided to use Martin’s house to hide Gus,” Toni said. “Didn’t the guard notice it was being used?”
“He said he’d been away, and since Martin had never turned the heat completely off in his house, the assumption was that his daughter was following the same example. It’s definitely worth following up with the team down the Cape. Whoever took Gus left the light on in the basement. If they hadn’t, we might not have found him.” My voice caught a bit.
“But they did, and you did. Don’t go there. Let’s figure out who did the hiding instead. My money is on Babs Allyn.”
“Babs? Why Babs?”
“She hired that private investigator, Jack Megan.”
“Jack Megan? Really?”
“Why, do you know him?”
“I do, and probably so do you. He’s a retired cop,” I said.
“I don’t remember him, but that doesn’t mean anything. Gus had used him a lot lately. He called him several times a week. Apparently Megan specializes in divorce cases, but I’d imagine he’s doing other work for Gus.”
“Jack also does research work. Typical private investigator fare. Has he told you what he was doing for Babs? Or for Gus?”
“He’s a hard man to find, and we’re having trouble getting a warrant to force him to talk. He’s not in his office, not at home. Not answering his cell. ’Course, it probably doesn’t help that it’s a cop calling him.”
“Maybe he’s on a case?” I asked.
“Maybe,” Toni said. “They found Gus’s phone, by the way. In the basement. There was an unsent message to you. To tell you he was sorry about lunch. He’d taken an unexpected trip to the Cape and would you come meet him. As I told you, the last text he sent that went through was to Babs.”
“Babs, huh? She does seem like a logical suspect.” Toni and I looked at each other. Even though we hadn’t been partners for years, I understood her as well as I had six years ago. There was more to this, a lot more that she couldn’t say.
“Here’s the deal, Sully. I brought you some caffeine, some food. Two old friends sitting and talking. Catching up. I have nothing to do with the case around Gus. I have nothing to do with the case around Babs Allyn. My focus is trying to figure out who killed Mimi Cunningham, and why. See if her death is connected to Kate’s death. There’s some evidence that links the two—no, I won’t tell you what it is—but we don’t understand the connection. Yet. Figuring out the ‘why’ has gotten a lot more complicated. Your friend Eric is helping me think that through. But I’ve been warned off expanding my parameters in this case. ‘Stay focused, Vestri.’ The John Engel mantra.”
“He’s a jackass,” I said.
“He is that. But he’s also my partner. So I’m staying focused. Visiting my friend in the hospital, checking in on my other friend, mentioning that Gus’s phone had a different number for Jack Megan, and writing that down for her information. In case she wanted to let this Jack Megan guy know what happened to Gus. Her call.”
Dr. O’Connor came out to update us on Gus’s condition. “He’s got some swelling of the brain, so we’ve put him in a medically induced coma. Frankly, given the extent of his injuries and the fact that he’s been without treatment for, what, two days? I’m surprised he’s not in worse shape. But I’m glad you brought him in here. We got some good folks taking care of him.”
“Good thing he’s got a wicked hard head,” Toni said. She smiled and I smiled back.
“When will he be able to wake up?” I asked.
“Not till tomorrow at the earliest. I’d suggest you go home and get some rest. There’s nothing you can do for him here, at least not right now. Feel free to go in and say good night, but I really do suggest you get some sleep. I promise I’ll call if anything changes.”
Somehow Gus looked worse in the hospital than he had in the basement. Maybe it was because he was so pale next to the hospital sheets. The hospital Johnny, which he would have hated, barely moved as he breathed. There were tubes and pumps and machines surrounding his bed. The beeps reassured me that he was alive, but I would have given anything for him to talk to me.
“Get well, buddy,” Toni said. She leaned over and kissed him on the forehead. She stepped back and away to give me space.
I leaned down and put my lips close to his ear. “Gus, I’ve got some stuff to do to try and make this right. I’ll be back, I promise,” I whispered. I kissed him on his cheek and then lightly on the lips. I stood up and took a deep, raggedy breath.
“Toni, would you give me a ride to my car? I’ve got a couple of errands to run tonight,” I said.
Toni gave me a ride back to the garage where my car was kept. On the way we went over the timeline of the case, or cases. Mostly I talked, she listened and asked questions. I didn’t get any new information from her; not sure if she got anything from me.
“I guess Gus is off the suspect list?” I asked.
“He is for me, but he never was on mine to begin with. I’ve had to stay neutral, given that he’s my friend. But John was going after him hard. Speaking of which, I’ve got to meet up with John, make sure he doesn’t screw this case up.”
“To be fair,” I said, “there are a lot of moving parts here. Hard to know what matters, what doesn’t, and what you’re going to need to prove the case later. It’s a little easier for us civilians to look into things on our own and let you know if we find anything worth knowing.”
“You know I would never, ever, suggest that. Make sure your phone’s charged, and let me know what you find out from Jack Megan.”
“Will do,” I said. “Thanks for the ride.” I got out of the car and walked toward the garage elevator.
The problem with underground garages was that cell phone reception was lousy. The problem with Boston was that once you left the garage, it was tough to find a place to pull over and make a call. The problem with me was that I couldn’t drive and talk. I plugged my phone into the charger and checked the time. Nine o’clock. It was late but I wasn’t going to wait till tomorrow to make this call.
After leaving the garage, I looped around the Boston Common, then went a block over and drove past the Park Plaza before I found a space to pull over. I found the piece of paper Toni had given me with Jack Megan’s other phone number. It didn’t match any I had. I wondered if it was a burner phone. I called it and got a full voicemail box for my efforts. So I texted:
Jack, it’s Sully Sullivan. Writing as Gus Knight’s ex-wife. He’s in the hospital, in a coma. I’m also friends with Babs Allyn, looking for her. I have a lot of questions and I think you may have some answers. I need to see you. Tonight.
I sat in the car for five minutes, ignoring the car that had pulled over, blinker on in hopes that the parking gods were smiling on them tonight. My phone rang. Jack preferred to call rather than to text. Made sense; easier to deny the content of the conversation.
“Sully here,” I said.
“Jack Megan,” he said. “What the hell happened to Gus?”
“Nice to talk to you too, Jack. Somebody hit him on the head and left him for dead in Martin Samuel’s basement down the Cape.”
“Down the Cape? What the hell was he doing down there?”
“I have no idea,” I said.
“He going to be okay?”
“There’s reason for optimism. We had him brought up here for treatment.”
“Damn, didn’t see that one coming,” he said.
“You heard about Kate Smythe?”
“I did,” he said. “They have any idea who did that?”
“Not that I know of. I think it has something to do with Mimi Cunningham’s murder but I have no proof, just my gut.”
“Gus and I were talking about you a couple of weeks ago,” Jack said. “We both agree you have world-class instincts.”
“For a theater administrator,” I said. I was perversely pleased at my ex-husband’s compliment. “Listen, I’d like to see you. Tonight. Catch you up with what I’m thinking, see if you can fill in some gaps for me.”
“I’m lying a little low right now,” he said.
“I’ll meet you wherever,” I said.
“Okay, but no cops. You got that? No. Cops. I know you still hang out with them on occasion.”
“I’m flying solo tonight,” I said. “Where should we meet?”
“There’s a bar in Brighton. The Bus Station. You know it? Meet you there in twenty minutes.” He ended the call, and I answered somebody’s parking prayers by pulling out of the spot and heading over toward Harvard Stadium.
I love bars like the Bus Station. Loud, slightly seedy bars that feature ’80s rock, only use iceberg lettuce, and have no pretensions, but do have an excellent beer selection. I inhaled the wafts of burgers and fries that met me at the front door and my stomach rumbled. I scanned the room and saw an average-height, well-built black man stand up from a corner booth. I smiled despite myself. Good old Jack, scoring a prime location on a Saturday night. I wondered if he was a regular.
I walked up and we gave each other a hug. “Good to see you, Sully. Have a seat. I ordered a large plate of fries, got a beer coming from the bar. Plenty of fries to share. Want a drink?”
A beer sounded really good, but I wanted to stay focused. “Just a seltzer.”
Jack called the order out to the bartender, who nodded. “You’re on the job,” he said. “I know that look. Tell me about Gus.”
So I did. I told him what I knew, and the timeline I’d worked out. I included information about Babs in the conversation.
“I hope to hell he’s going to be okay,” Jack said.
I looked over at his shaved head and deep brown eyes. The news of Gus had shaken Jack up. He’d worked with Gus for a lot of years, back when he was still on the force and Gus was in the district attorney’s office. Unlike a lot of folks, Jack hadn’t cut ties to me when Gus and I got divorced. Our paths had crossed this December, and we’d had a couple of meals together since then.
“They think so, but he’s in a medically induced coma right now. I’m glad we found him when we did.”
“We?”
“I was with Emma Whitehall. Long story. We didn’t set out looking for him, but one thing led to another—”
“And your gut kicked in,” Jack said. “Good thing for Gus.”
“Good thing for Gus,” I said. “And for me. Listen, I just found out that Babs Allyn had hired you. Did Gus recommend you to her?”
“Babs who?” He asked, his eyes darting toward the bar. The bartender came over with the drinks and let us know that the fries were on their way. I waited till he was out of earshot to respond to Jack’s question.
“Jack, I’m tired and I still have adrenaline flowing, but we both know I’m going to crash soon. The cops know Babs Allyn hired you. I want to know why, and what for. I’m assuming it had something to do with Martin Samuel’s disappearance?”
Jack looked at me and clenched his jaw. He took a long sip of beer, and used his napkin to wipe the foam off his upper lip. I watched his face contort as he wrestled around with the question of what to do.
“I saw Babs on Tuesday,” I said. “She was heading out for a meeting and never made it back to the theater. I saw her again that night, and she was a hot mess. Did she see you Tuesday afternoon?”
Jack nodded slightly.
“What did you tell her?” I asked.
“You’ve heard of client confidentiality—”
“I have, and I respect it. But I want to point this out. No one has seen Babs since that night. She’s either on the suspect list or something’s happened to her. I talked to Martin’s daughter, Holly, and she mentioned that Babs was investigating Martin’s disappearance. I’m assuming that’s what you two met about. I don’t know Babs well, but she seems like the type who would protect Holly from harsh realities, until she couldn’t. From what I understand, Holly and maybe Babs thought Martin was alive for a long time. But lately they’ve been having doubts. Have I got this part of the story right?”
Jack took another pull on his beer and set it down. “You do,” he said. “I’m worried about her too. Babs, I mean. A couple of months after Martin went missing, she got a postcard from him, from an island near where he’d disappeared. Told her he was okay, he’d be back soon. Holly got a similar postcard a couple weeks later. On both of the postcards, Martin asked them to hang tight, not to look for him. He was taking care of some business.”
“Was it in his handwriting?”
“That’s the problem. He sent them through this mail service they have down there, where you go online, type in a message, chose a picture, and then the company sends it out. On both postcards he used a phrase that he’d used before, and that made them feel like he’d sent the postcard. They both hung on to the hope those cards gave them. But then, when they didn’t hear from him again, and it was coming up on a year, Babs decided they needed to look for him. Hal Maxwell and the Cunninghams were making noises about getting him declared dead so that his will, and some of the insurance policies, would kick in. Babs hired me to see if I could find anything out.”
“Did you find anything?”
“I did some research on that mail service. Anyone could’ve used it, set up an account under Martin Samuel’s name, so there’s that. Not real proof of anything.” Jack took a long pull from his beer and continued his story. “I went down there, asked a few folks about the disappearance. Seems there were a bunch of folks staying on the Cunninghams’ boat, which was moored out in the harbor that night, not on the dock. The crew had taken the dinghy back to shore and were planning to come back out in the morning to make breakfast and set sail. Crew came on board in the morning and no one could find Martin. Apparently he took a lifeboat and his suitcase and left the boat in the middle of the night. Anyway, that’s what everyone thought.”
“Who else was on the boat?”
“Hal Maxwell. Babs Allyn. Mimi and Jerry Cunningham. Fred Ginger—”
“Who’s Fred Ginger?”
“A business associate of the Cunninghams. Helps them with their offshore banking.”
“Nice.”
“Right? That’s a can of worms I stayed away from on this job. Anyway, that was it. From what the crew said, there had been a lot of drinking that last day and into the night.”
“The entire crew left?” I asked. “Was that normal?”
“When the Cunninghams were staying in port, yes,” Jack said. “The crew would leave late and come back at dawn. From what I could find out, most of the time the Cunninghams and their guests were sleeping, or passed out, and missed the crew’s departure.”
“Did Babs remember them leaving?” I asked.
“Babs said she passed out around midnight. She didn’t hear a thing. She doesn’t remember what time, or if, Hal came to bed.”
“She didn’t remember a thing? She must be a pretty sound sleeper.”
“From what I can gather, she was a pretty heavy drinker. That was the last drink she had, as a matter of fact.”
“Until Tuesday night,” I said.
“Really? She’d been drinking?” Jack said.
“I think so,” I said, trying to remember the details of the last time I’d seen Babs. Had I seen her with a drink? Or had I assumed she’d been drinking? “At least, she seemed tipsy. She was furious. I couldn’t understand what she was saying to the Cunninghams but she was disheveled, you know? Babs was never disheveled.”
“She was pretty upset when she left our meeting,” Jack said.
“What did you tell her at your meeting?” I asked.
“I told her I thought that Martin Samuel was dead. There was no moon that night, so the harbor was dark. Really dark. I don’t see how a drunken person could’ve gotten on a lifeboat, made his way ashore, and no one saw him. Plus I talked to a couple of folks from the crew. The Cunninghams paid them well, very well. One of them said he’d thought maybe the boat had changed moorings the next morning, but he couldn’t be sure. And since everyone seemed so upset, he didn’t say anything.”
“The boat had moved?” I asked.
“Maybe, but I couldn’t get that verified,” Jack said.
“You think the crew was paid off ?” I asked.
“They may have been,” Jack said.
“What did the authorities say?” I asked.
“They aren’t convinced nothing happened, but they couldn’t find any proof. They did a thorough search of the boat, didn’t find anything. They did say it was clean, really clean. They smelled bleach, but Mimi Cunningham explained that away by saying that Babs had gotten sick on her way to bed. The police kept the boat down there for a few months in case new evidence came up or they found Martin’s body, but they finally released it in October.”
“Where’s the boat now?” I asked.
“The Cunninghams had it sailed up from the Caribbean. It’s actually at a slip in Charlestown.” Jack took a napkin and wrote some numbers down on it after double-checking them on his phone.
“Did you tell Babs where the boat was?” I asked.
“I didn’t have the information when she asked Tuesday. I haven’t heard from her since. The news about the guy who thought the boat was moved pushed some buttons for Babs. ‘They kept telling me I was crazy because I remembered something different’ she kept saying. Anyway, she never called to ask where the boat was. But Gus did. So I told him. Didn’t hear from him again either, but I wasn’t worried till I heard about Kate Smythe’s death.”
“Did you go check out the boat yourself ?” I asked.
“I didn’t, not yet. Too many fires burning right now, but it was on my list for tomorrow. Believe it or not, I have to go stake out a client’s husband tonight.”
“Hi ho, the glamorous life of a private investigator,” I said. One of the reasons I always gave for not becoming a private investigator after I left the force was that if I couldn’t wear the badge, I didn’t want to do the job. That was true. The other reason was that the work of private investigators was brutal and solitary. That said, if I didn’t have other things on my mind, I might have volunteered to go on Jack’s stakeout with him. See if they were as awful as I remembered.
The fries finally arrived and I picked one up off the plate. It was steaming hot, so I blew on it for a few seconds and then took a bite. It burned my tongue but it was worth it. I took another sip of the seltzer and unrolled a fork from a napkin.
“Thanks for the information.” I tapped the piece of paper with the boat slip location.
“You’re going to go down there now, aren’t you?” Jack asked. I didn’t answer but I did look away. “Dammit, Sully, how about you wait until daylight and I’ll go with you?”
“I won’t be able to sleep. I need to see the boat, you know? I can’t help but think what happened on that boat has something to do with all of this. Maybe Babs is there? I promise I won’t get into any trouble. I’m just going to look around a bit.” Jack looked dubious. I picked up another fry with my fork and blew on it. “Jack, you go do your job. I’ll call the cops and catch them up after I get back from the boat. I’ll keep you out of it, of course.”
“How about you call them first, let them check the boat out?” he asked.
“Where’s the fun in that?” I asked. I took a paper napkin and put some fries in it, smiling over at him. “I’m going to go satisfy my curiosity, look at the boat, give Toni Vestri a call, go home to sleep, and start fresh in the morning.”
“You be careful, you hear me? Text me if you need me. Gus will kill me if I let anything happen to you.”
“Ten-four on that. Thanks for the fries.” I put out my fist and Jack bumped it. I got up from the table and went back into the February freeze.