Dinner at Brill’s means takeout from The Smoke Shop BBQ in Southie, plenty of napkins, and an outfit you don’t mind getting sauce on. Wells eats standing up because he doesn’t own anything he wouldn’t mind getting stained. If you didn’t know the four of us, you’d probably guess the apartment belonged to him since he was the only one who looked rich enough to afford it, restored as it was to its Victorian beauty: re-sanded hardwood floors by yours truly, repurposed window frames, the salvaged molding up and painted, built-in floor-to-ceiling bookcase, and an open kitchen divided by a pale granite slab countertop where the rest of us sit.
Wells looks around admiringly and says, “It’s hard to believe this is the same place of a month ago. You guys went at it pretty hard the last few weeks, huh?”
“I told you,” Brill says grumpily, back on the sharp ground of his partnership with Wells. “I used the money Zesty fronted me to hire a real work crew. With skills.”
“For your floor, at least,” Anitra points out. “I still get to wake up with plaster dust in my hair.”
“That’s your choice,” Brill responds gruffly. “Deal with it.”
“He’s so sweet,” Anitra says. She means it.
“Hope your insulation’s tight. It’s getting cold out there.” Christmas lights had started to go up and I can see a neighbor across the way dragging through his door a tree like an open green umbrella.
“Those windows might look old, but they’re new,” Brill says. “Unless you’re talking about noise.” He points a thumb upstairs to my place.
“Puh-lease,” Anitra says. “You don’t hear a thing from us.”
“I better not.” He points a warning finger at Anitra, who doesn’t blush at all.
“Quiet as a mouse,” she says. “Anyhow, it’s not like he’s getting any. I’ve still got my own place and I’ve been busy.”
Still working on the money trail and condo boom story, though the paper had reversed itself, tasking her with the Rambir story again because it’s so juicy. After a few weeks Professor Yuki Fuji surfaced in Macau, the Las Vegas of Asia, which has no extradition treaty with the United States. Obviously, she had planned for the long game, her prior visits there to set herself up if she ever had to run. And run she had to.
Fuji was implicated in the murder of Rambir Roshan and it was a sensational story but one that ended abruptly because there would be no trial unless she set foot back into the country, which was highly unlikely.
Boston Police divers found the gun Fuji shot Rambir with as she tried to get ahold of the chips that Rambir had given to Sam for safekeeping.
Rambir had told Sam that he was meeting someone, though he wouldn’t say who, and to bring the chips only when he called, the cautious approach of a poker player getting the sense something wasn’t right, that a bad beat was coming his way.
He never called.
That was the theory anyway. Fuji had planned the meeting meticulously, worn a long man’s coat sprayed with a heavy cologne, over a thigh-cut neoprene wet suit. The coat lacked any DNA evidence except the blood splatter, which was from Rambir, and the fabric from the coat that ended up on Roshan when Fuji shot him at close range without ever pulling out the gun.
Rambir probably never even knew what was happening to him, the shot muffled enough that nobody nearby remembered hearing any loud noise or seeing flashes from the barrel. Fuji ditched the coat, dove into the still relatively warm waters of the Charles River, and using whatever strokes had garnered her all those swimming medals left in her office, swam in darkness to the other side, the flashing blues of the converging Boston and Cambridge cruisers probably already visible by the time she pulled herself out, laced up a pair of sneakers she’d stashed, and jogged her way to her rented home near the MIT campus, her reentry caught on university cameras.
Cold. Calculated. Regret minimization theory to the nth degree. That’s about as far as the story went, MIT throwing in a little misdirection with some inane dissertation dispute gone wrong, never mind Fuji’s relatively large bank account cleaned out while Agent Lee, Rosalinda Worth, and I twiddled our thumbs in her campus office.
Life goes on. Until it doesn’t.