Gardiner, blazer draped over the back of her chair and the cuffs of her silk blouse unbuttoned and turned back, apparently her version of casual, clinks her full wineglass against Andrew DiPrado’s, then Eli Lansberry’s. “First we make an arrest, then we toast the system. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how justice gets done.”
I’m too far away down the caramel leather banquette at Alden & Harlow for Martha to clink against mine, so she wine-salutes, smiling in my direction. Nick Soderberg is absent, and no one has mentioned him. Five o’clock on a Thursday, when it’s light outside and we’re theoretically in work mode, seems an unsettling time to be drinking Chardonnay with your boss and colleagues in a trendy Cambridge restaurant. But Gardiner told us it’s an office ritual—handcuffs, arrest, and then wine.
This place used to be a Cambridge landmark. As Casablanca, Jack’s told me, it was the go-to romantic spot for Harvard students, the instant messaging that your intentions were serious. Casablanca’s long gone, if seven years is long, and now, as Alden & Harlow, all pale wood, warm suede, and immersive greenery, the subterranean bistro is beloved by my law-school foodie colleagues. Those who can afford it. But Gardiner explained that since the post-arrest drinking tradition started in this space, albeit (she said “albeit”) with beer, here it will continue. “Ritual is ritual,” she’d proclaimed. “This is what we do.”
What we do. What Gardiner and the SWAT guys did, to be more precise. I’d been on the outside, literally. Completely bummed not to be involved in the search of Jeffrey Baltrim’s house and see how they handled it. Gardiner wouldn’t let me go inside. Even more annoying, since Jonah refused to budge, she’d ordered me to babysit until his mother got home. Because I was a woman? Or maybe Gardiner was making sure I knew my place. If Andrew DiPrado had been there, would Gardiner have given him the same assignment? I doubt it.
I slide out of my seat, making bathroom excuses, and zigzag past tables of earnest twosomes, early drinkers, one solitary dark-suited businessman, maybe, staring into a martini glass. None of them had just participated in an arrest for murder. As I walk down a flight of industrial-concrete stairs toward the red-lacquer door marked W, I mentally reprise my morning, a high-wire act that’s only beginning.
Jeff Baltrim’s front door had closed with me left on the front stoop. Not a sound escaped. What were the police doing inside? How were they doing it? So frustrating to be kept on the sidelines.
“Do you have any books in there?” I’d pointed to Jonah’s backpack. Might as well talk to the kid. “Maybe about dinosaurs? Or trucks?”
“Why is my uncle inside with those police? My mom says police are good. They help us.”
“Do you live next door?” I asked.
“He’s the pizza man. He’s not my real uncle. We only call him that. I’m five. We get pizza all the time!” Jonah’s words spilled over each other, his eyes wide with enthusiasm. “Sometimes, my mom lets me go with him, like babysitting. I don’t have a dad. Because she’s a nurse. In the night. Sometimes I sleep in the backseat.”
I’d looked at him. Calculating. His mother was a nurse, too? I could almost hear Jack’s defense. No one, he’d try to persuade a jury, would murder someone while a kid was asleep in the backseat of a pizza delivery truck. But my husband would not be able to help Jeff Baltrim. My ambition had made sure of that.
“That sounds like fun,” I said. “Is it a pizza truck? Or a car?”
“It’s a car.” Jonah looked at me from under his baseball cap. Idiot grown-up.
“Did you go with your uncle yesterday night?” I shifted on the dusty wooden step. My black skirt would never be the same.
Jonah wrinkled his nose. “What’s a yester day of the night?”
Okay, he was five. “The night before today. Did you wake up in the car today?”
I could almost see him trying to remember. Then he stood, pointing. “A butterfly!” he exclaimed. “Catch it!”
I needed him to focus. But, yeah, he’s five. “Why don’t we let it be free, Jonah? See how happy he is? Jonah?”
“What?” He plopped back down on the step, his eyes on the brilliant black-and-orange creature that fluttered away past a pink dogwood blooming in the yard next door.
“Did you wake up in the car today?”
“It was dark,” he said. “So dark! And it wasn’t even morning. And we came home. Uncle Jeff picked me up and carried me. And he smelled yucky.”
Yucky, I thought. Whatever that means. Like oregano? Or death? Was this child an alibi? Or a witness for the prosecution? How would a suspect ever know who was about to be turned against them? What supposed ally was about to ruin his life?
Ben and his cadre of SWAT guys had emerged with three sealed paper bags of evidence. What they’d seized, I have no idea. Jonah’s mother arrived, asking me questions I had no idea how to answer. I’d taken her name and told her—I hoped it was correct—that Gardiner would be in touch. Later I reported to Gardiner what the boy had said about accompanying his “uncle” on last night’s deliveries, and the “yucky” smell.
That turned out to be a mistake.
“Doing a bit of private investigation, Ms. North?” Gardiner’s voice had sounded unmistakably dismissive. “But you’ll learn, I hope. Kids like that are unreliable, unpredictable, and prone to fantasy. He’s maybe five, have you forgotten that? What’s more, it would be no surprise that we’d find evidence the boy had been in the delivery car. Correct?” And that had been the end of that. She’d seemed so contemptuous I hadn’t dared ask what they’d found in the search. I see why Jack hates her. But she’s my boss.
Back at the banquette, Gardiner’s deep into discussion with Eli and Andrew. A glossy black plate of golden fries, sprinkled with parsley flakes, has appeared on the table.
I slide in to my seat and take a sip of my white wine to paper over the moment of awkward silence. “What did I miss?”
“We were handicapping defense attorneys,” Gardiner says. Using a manicured thumb and forefinger, she selects a french fry, then points it at Eli. “Correct, Mr. Lansberry? And our defendant’s history.”
“While you were babysitting,” Eli says, “Andrew and I checked Jeff Baltrim’s finances. Asset search, property search. Oregano Brothers was happy to hand over his employment application. And—”
I sneak a glance at Gardiner, who’s placed her french fry on a triangular side plate and is now spooning a puddle of ketchup next to it. Babysitting is exactly what I’d thought at the time, but it seems unnecessarily disparaging for her to have described it that way to my colleagues.
“And?” Andrew interrupts. “Indigent city. Tough to afford a lawyer on a pizza-delivery salary. He’ll get assigned someone from the murder list.”
“Not Ms. North’s husband, however.” Gardiner pats the salt from her lips, puts the black napkin back in her lap. “Lucky for him. What you missed while you were … indisposed, Rachel? Today’s search revealed Jeff Baltrim was once Tassie Lyle’s patient at Boston Med.”
“Did you know little Jonah’s—?” I begin.
“That boy’s mother is not involved, Rachel.” Gardiner dismisses my question, rolling over it. “But it appears our suspect had been selling drugs Ms. Lyle had procured for him. Seems she’d refused to continue, and our boy was not pleased about that. Gentlemen, and Rachel, welcome to the legal profession. This one’s a slam dunk for the prosecution.”
BEFORE
I stared at the empty coatrack by the door of my office, at the line of empty wooden hangers. Most everyone else had gone, and some idiot had stolen my coat and scarf. Who could have possibly…? But no. No one had swiped my coat. I’d left it in the coffee room, damp and soggy, before this morning’s encounter with Logan Concannon. I’d been so freaked out and eager to leave the room that I’d forgotten it. No big deal, usually, but now it meant that instead of sneaking out this evening through the back hallway and down the elevator by the stairs, I’d have to retrace my steps and retrieve it from the Communications Office coffee corner.
Logan had been distracted from our “We need to discuss that,” conversation, thank all that’s holy, and I’d successfully dodged her all day.
“‘We need to discuss that?’” I muttered. “Not a chance.” Not until I could figure out what to say. At least confer with Tom. But I hadn’t seen him, not all day. He probably was avoiding me on purpose, to prevent an awkward moment. I touched the necklace, nestled under my sweater, then opened my outer door and turned left into the gloomy hallway.
I’d laugh about this, I tried to convince myself, when I found out what Logan had really wanted to discuss.
If Tom—the senator—was in his private suite now, I’d be able to dash in and dash out undetected because the suite had no windows that connected to the coffee room. But the senator’s front door connected to Logan Concannon’s office, and therein was my dilemma.
If Logan’s office door was open, she could definitely see the coffee room from her desk. And she could see me.
“Plus,” I said out loud, then stopped as the word almost echoed in the emptiness. Plus, I thought, who was there to stand up for me? “He said, she said” was a cliché, a trope, and now, because of something I didn’t do, a reality. Thomas Rafferty could say anything, anything, and no matter how I tried to counter it, I was the employee, the vulnerable one, the expendable one, the little guy with no power. In the final analysis, power was the only currency.
No surprise on Beacon Hill.
I pulled open the stained-glass door to the Comm room. Waited. Listened. Nothing. Logan’s door was closed. The sliver of gap at the top showed only darkness, so the lights were off. Logan was gone. Score one for Rachel.
Then I remembered. I had the necklace. That was way more currency than “he said, she said.”
With newfound confidence, my heart finally calming, I stepped toward my coat on the rack. Reached up a hand. My boots were there, too. And then I heard the voices.
Coming from Logan’s office. The lights are off, my brain insisted. Yes, they were. But someone was in there.
“Rachel,” a voice said. Logan’s voice. “Well. I see.”
I stopped, frozen, my hand midair, a few inches away from my coat. Logan had not come into the room. She was not talking to me. She was talking about me. There was not likely to be another Rachel. Was Logan on the phone? Or was someone else with her?