High Crimes (6 page)

CHAPTER NINE

In the
middle of the night Claire sat up suddenly, drenched in sweat. Her heart racing, she walked around the darkened bedroom, the only illumination coming from a streetlight outside, until she found the drawer where they kept the family photos. The FBI search team had left it more or less alone. They were interested in more revealing, more immediate things—itineraries, travel times, flight numbers, that sort of thing.

There were countless pictures of Annie, album after album of photos from her birth to her last school picture. She had to be one of the most fully documented children in the history of the world. There was an album of pictures of herself, a bunch of baby pictures: Claire with Jackie, Jackie tagging along behind Claire and Claire looking aggrieved. A number of pictures of the family, Claire, Jackie, and their mother, who always seemed to look tired. A lot of pictures of Claire on a vacation in Wyoming with some college friends. Shots of her college graduation (she’d had a miserable outbreak of acne and had gained a lot of weight during spring semester senior year, and so never allowed herself to look at these pictures).

And Tom’s photos?

One baby picture, a small black-and-white with a scalloped border. It might have been any generic baby; it looked nothing like the adult Tom, but baby pictures often bear no resemblance to the adult.

And photos of him as a boy? None.

High school? Nothing.

College, too. Nothing.

There were no pictures of Tom except that one generic baby picture. No high-school yearbook with pages defaced by long goodbye notes in loopy handwriting from girls who had had unrequited crushes on Tom.

What kind of person had
no
pictures of himself growing up?

Why had she never wondered where all his photographs were?

*   *   *

Returning from class late that morning, trailing two insistent students who’d attached themselves to her like limpets, Claire gracefully asked them to return later in the day. She had a meeting, she told them. They were nervous about finals; she’d be happy to spend time with them later on.

Connie was at her desk doing correspondence. She looked up, started to say something.

Claire smiled, gave a nice-to-see-you-but-I’m-too-rushed-to-stop-and-talk-just-now wave, went into her office, and shut the door behind her.

Ray Devereaux was sitting in her chair.

“The shit has hit the fan,” he said. He was dressed in a gray suit, surprisingly well cut, a white shirt, a pale turquoise tie.

“Tell me about it.”

She sat down in one of the visitor chairs, dropped her briefcase to the floor. “Your sources are good?”

“Not especially. I’ve been calling around, but everyone’s awful tight-lipped. This isn’t a rinky-dink operation. This is big stuff.”

“How big are we talking?”

Devereaux leaned back in the chair, which creaked alarmingly. She half expected him to topple over backward. “They’ve accelerated the surveillance. They know he left a voice-mail message for you at home, and they’re approved to get your office voice mail at Harvard. They have no idea where he is, but they’re waiting for him to contact you. They have people outside his office downtown. A couple of guys outside this building. Everywhere you drive, they’ll follow you, in case you might be driving to meet him somewhere.”

“Like that song by the Police, right?” Claire smiled grimly. “‘Every Step You Take.’”

Devereaux looked blank. “Let’s take a walk,” he said.

*   *   *

They went for a stroll through the Law School quadrangle. She noticed the two plainclothesmen following at a not-so-discreet distance.

“Nice day, huh?” Devereaux said. “Real late-spring day.”

“Ray—”

“Not yet, honey. I’ve always thought those long-range directional microphones they got are overrated, particularly on a crowded street. But I don’t want to take a chance. I mean, we could walk along Mass. Ave. and drive them crazy trying to pick out our voices from a hundred other babblers, but why chance it? Let’s take a ride in my car. I just picked it up this morning, and I know I wasn’t followed, so it’s not likely they put a bug in it. Yet.”

Devereaux’s car was a new Lincoln. One of his clients ran an auto-leasing agency and let him lease cars for free, as compensation. She sank back in the comfortable, well-cushioned leather seat while he drove around aimlessly.

“You mentioned his father,” Devereaux said. “Nelson Chapman. You said he lives in Florida.”

“You talked to him?”

Devereaux shook his head slowly. “No such person.”

“I’ve
met
him. We visited him at his condo on Jupiter Island.”

“You’ve met a man who called himself Nelson Chapman. The condo you said you visited is owned by someone who’s never heard of any Nelson Chapman. Neighbors there, even longtime neighbors, have never heard of him. You don’t believe me, call if you want.”

“Are you saying Tom arranged for someone to play the
role
of his father?”

“That’s what it looks like. It’s real compartmented, this operation.” He steered with one index finger. “Real tough to get anything. My contacts don’t know shit, and those that know anything are shut up tight. But this much I learned: they’re saying Tom used to be a covert operative for the Pentagon.”

“Oh, come
on
!” she scoffed.

“Why is that so hard to believe?”

“He’s a money guy.”

“Now. But I’m told that he was in the military and disappeared, went AWOL, like more than a decade ago, that he’s escaping something really nasty, real serious. Some bad kind of shit.”

“What are you telling me?”

“They’re saying he’s wanted for murder.”

“So they tell me.”

“That he was some kind of clandestine operative for the U.S. government who committed some horrible crime and then went on the lam.”

She shook her head, chewed on a fingernail. An old law-school habit she thought she’d stopped. “That’s not possible.”

“You’re married to him,” Devereaux said equably. “You’d know.” He turned to look at her, then turned back to the road.

Claire smiled, a strange, bitter smile. “How well do you ever know the person you married?”

“Hey, don’t ask me. I didn’t know when I married Margaret that she was a bitch, but that’s what she turned out to be. Is it possible that Tom could have worked for the government, for some clandestine branch of the military? Sure. Fact is, he made up a history, a biography. The college thing was just the tip of the iceberg. He’s covering something up, escaping
something
. That much I’d say for sure.”

“But couldn’t there be a—benign explanation?”

“Like he ran up a lot of parking tickets in Dubuque? Doubtful.”

Claire did not smile.

“But I’ll tell you the truth,” Devereaux said somberly. “I always thought Tom was a little too smooth for his own good, but he’s your husband, so I gotta side with him. When the government starts gathering its forces to go after one guy, you gotta believe they’re trying to hide something, too.”

*   *   *

That evening, as she was trying to convince Annie that it was bedtime, the phone rang.

She recognized the voice right away: Julia Margolis, the wife of her closest friend on the Harvard faculty, Abe Margolis, who taught constitutional law. “Claire?” she said in her big contralto. “Where are you? You’re an hour and a half late—is everything all right?”

“An hour—oh my God. You invited us for dinner tonight. Oh, shit, Julia. I’m so sorry, I totally forgot about it.”

“Are you sure you’re all right? That’s not like you at all.” Julia Margolis was a large and still very beautiful brunette in her late fifties, a great cook and an even greater hostess.

“I’ve been insanely busy,” Claire said, then revised that: “Tom had to go out of town on business suddenly, and I feel like everything’s falling down around me.”

“Well, I’ve had the swordfish marinating for something like two days, and I really hate to waste it. Why don’t you come over now?”

“I’m sorry, Julia. I really am. Rosa’s gone home, and I don’t have a sitter, and I’m just frantic. Please forgive me.”

“Of course, dear. But when things settle down, will you call me? We’d love to see you two.”

CHAPTER TEN

Later that
evening Claire and Jackie sat in the downstairs study, in paired, slightly weathered French leather club chairs. Tom had spent two months searching for the perfect chairs for Claire’s office, because she’d once admired them in a Ralph Lauren ad. Finally he’d located a dealer in New York who imported them from the Paris flea market. They’d gone from a Paris nightclub in the twenties to Cambridge in the late nineties, and they were still magnificently comfortable.

Jackie again wore black jeans and a black T-shirt. Paint spatters freckled her shirt and arms: she was a painter who earned her living as a technical writer. Claire was still wearing her blue suit, a Chanel knockoff but a nice one, because she hadn’t had a minute to change. She was exhausted and her head ached and her neck and shoulders felt stiff. All she wanted to do right now was run a nice hot bath and soak in it for an hour.

The room glowed amber as the sun set.

“Ray Devereaux says Tom used to be some kind of clandestine army operative who got entangled in something,” Jackie said. “Jesus. You think Ray’s information is good?”

“He’s usually reliable. Always has been.”

“So what do you think, he did something for the government, the Pentagon, something undercover, and maybe he got into trouble? And … and he goes AWOL, just takes off, and he goes into hiding and changes his name, and then he moves to Boston and goes into business and hopes he never gets caught? And then, one day, by coincidence, your house is broken into and the cops run his prints, and bingo, the Pentagon’s found him? Is that how it goes?”

“Basically, yeah.” Claire turned to see whether Jackie was being ironic, or simply skeptical, but she wasn’t. She was thinking out loud, as she so often did.

“Hard to get a job with a firm if you have no references for them to check into,” Jackie went on, “so he starts his own business, and that way he doesn’t have people checking too deeply into his background.”

Claire closed her eyes again, nodded.

“So everything you know about Tom is a lie,” Jackie suggested gently.

“Maybe not everything. A lot. An enormous amount.”

Very softly, Jackie said, “But you feel betrayed. It’s, like, custom-made to rip your heart out.”

Tears came to Claire’s eyes, tears of frustration and exhaustion rather than of sadness. “Is it a betrayal if he’s escaping, hiding?”

“He lied to you, Claire. He never told you about it. He’s not who he told you he was. A man who can lie about his life, create a whole fake background, is a man who can lie about anything.”

“He contacted me again, Jacks.”

“How?”

“We don’t know if there are bugs here,” Claire said, pointing at the ceiling, although who knew where listening devices might be planted?

“Well, what are you going to do?” Jackie asked, but then the doorbell rang. They looked at each other. Now who could it be? Claire got up reluctantly and went to the front door.

It was a young guy in his early twenties, with a scuzzy goatee and a brass stud earring in his left ear, wearing bicycle shorts and a leather jacket. “Boston Messengers,” he announced.

Claire looked past him to see two Crown Victorias parked at the curb in front of their house. Passengers in both vehicles were staring at the visitor.

“Are you Claire Chapman?”

Claire nodded, alert.

“Jesus, lady, those guys out there stopped me and asked me a million questions, who am I and what am I doing here—you got something going on in here? You in some sort of trouble? ’Cause I don’t want trouble.”

“What are you doing here?” Claire demanded.

“I got a package for Claire Chapman. I just need to see some kind of ID.”

“Hold on,” Claire said. She closed the door, retrieved her purse from the hall table, and removed her driver’s license from her wallet.

She opened the door again and handed him the license.

The kid inspected it, comparing the picture to her face. He nodded. “I gotta ask for your Harvard faculty card, too.”

“Who’s the package from?”

“I dunno.” He looked at it. “Something Lenahan.”

Claire was immediately flooded with relief, then excitement. “Here,” she said, handing him her faculty ID card.

He looked at it, once again comparing the photos. “Okay,” he said warily. “Sign here.”

She signed, took the package—a flat, rigid cardboard envelope about nine by twelve inches—tipped him, and closed the door.

“Who’s it from?” Jackie asked.

Claire smiled and didn’t answer. Tom knew the phones were tapped, which meant that voice mail and the fax machine weren’t safe. He knew they’d be monitoring the mail. The sudden appearance of a courier might work just once, but without a court order they couldn’t intercept the package.

Inside was a handwritten letter, which brought tears to her eyes—and a plan, which for the first time brought her hope.