Next of Kin (28 page)

‘Maybe,’ Kozlowski said. ‘It’s gonna take a lot of convincing to get the top brass to give up Eamonn McDougal’s kid without something that’s a slam dunk. This
isn’t a slam dunk; it’s a really good lead. They play it right, they may take down a whole bunch of people. They play it wrong, and they get nothing. That’d be hard to live
with.’

Lissa shook her head. ‘He’s gonna take the deal,’ she repeated.

‘Maybe,’ Kozlowski said. ‘There’s nothing to do but wait and see.’

‘There’s one other thing to do,’ Finn said. ‘I’ve got to get back up to New Hampshire tonight to meet with the woman from the adoption agency, take a look at my
adoption file. Did she call?’

Lissa shook her head. ‘It’s been quiet.’

Finn sat behind his desk, picked up the phone. He pulled Shelly Tesco’s card out of his wallet and dialed the number. It rang three times before her secretary picked up.

‘Adoption Services.’

‘Can I please speak with Shelly Tesco?’

‘I’m sorry, Ms Tesco is not in; can I take a message?’

‘What time do you expect her?’

The woman on the other end of the line paused. ‘I’m not sure,’ she said. ‘She was supposed to be in this morning. Who’s calling?’

‘Scott Finn. She and I have an appointment for this evening, but she never told me where to meet her.’

‘I don’t see you on her calendar,’ the secretary said.

‘No, she might not have written it down. It probably doesn’t qualify as a work appointment. She and I were going to meet after she left the office. All I need to know is where and
when to show up.’

‘I’m sorry, I’m not sure what to tell you. I’ve tried her home and her cell, and I haven’t been able to reach her. What were you supposed to be meeting with her
about?’

Finn wasn’t sure how to answer. ‘It’s a personal matter,’ he said. ‘I was adopted, and I had some questions for her.’

‘Why isn’t that a work appointment?’ the woman asked. She sounded suspicious. ‘That’s what she does.’

‘Can you ask her to call me back when you talk to her?’ he asked. There was no point in trying to answer her question; he had no decent answer. He gave her his phone numbers.

‘Okay,’ she said. She didn’t sound confident, though. ‘I’ll have her call as soon as she gets in.’

The tiny New Hampshire town had only four police officers in the entire department. As a result, even Chief Steven Bosch had to take calls from time to time. He’d left
the NYPD ten years before, determined to find a more reasonable lifestyle for his family. For the most part, it had worked out well enough. At the moment, though, sitting at his desk with the phone
pressed against his ear, he wished he was back in the big city.

‘What can I do for you, Mrs Shumley?’ he asked in his most polite tone. He wondered how long the call might last; Mildred Shumley was a notorious talker.

‘I’m worried about my neighbor, Shelly Tesco,’ Mrs Shumley said.

‘Oh?’ Bosch tried to sound interested, but unalarmed. ‘Why is that?’

‘I don’t think she was home last night,’ Mrs Shumley said.

‘And that worries you?’ He kept the exasperation out of his voice.

‘Well, normally it wouldn’t, but I saw a man coming out of her house.’

‘Ah,’ Bosch said. ‘And you don’t think that’s normal?’

‘Clearly not. Not if she wasn’t there.’

‘And if she was there?’

‘Well, that would be a different issue entirely.’

‘But still inappropriate?’ What was the point of having to put up with calls like this if Bosch couldn’t have a little fun?

‘That’s not my point,’ Mrs Shumley said. ‘As I said, I’m worried about her. What if she was the victim of foul play?’ The breathlessness of her voice on the
final two words caused him to roll his eyes.

‘She’d be the first since I got here to town,’ Bosch said.

‘I still think you should check up on her.’

Bosch sighed heavily. ‘She’s a grown woman, Mrs Shumley,’ he said. ‘I can’t go disturbing her every time she has a gentleman caller.’

‘But –’

‘If she’s still not around in a couple of days, call back and we’ll look into it,’ Bosch said. ‘Thank you, Mrs Shumley. Take care.’ He hung up the phone
before she could say anything else. Sometimes he longed for the days when he was dealing with actual crimes, rather than the overactive imaginings of a bored and nosey little town.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Brighton lay at the outskirts of Boston, five miles to the west of Copley, midway between the campuses of Boston University and Boston College. The neighborhood coveted the
bohemian aura of Greenwich Village and Haight Ashbury, and tried in vain to capture the same edge. The streets were lined with tattoo parlors and cut-rate furniture stores with names like Futon
Palace and Just the Basics. The sidewalks teemed with students and people in their early twenties, guitars slung over their shoulders, heads shaved proclaiming their disdain for all things
bourgeois.

Long stood on Brighton Avenue, looking up at an apartment that hung over a second-hand music shop. He checked his notebook again to make sure he was in the right place, headed over, and walked
up the stairwell.

He’d spent most of the day going through records, making notes on political donations, checking addresses, doing the crucial research necessary for his job. Eamonn McDougal and his
partners presided over a vast, disparate empire of legitimate and quasi-legitimate businesses, seemingly with no unifying theme. In addition to Rescue Finance, 355 Water Street Corporation owned
controlling interests in two garages, a pizza parlor, an Italian deli, several tenements that rented rooms and efficiencies on daily and weekly schedules, and a sporting goods store, among other
enterprises. Long now had a list of over fifty employees, along with their addresses, their history of political contributions, and a general idea of their salaries and lifestyles. He’d
visited five of them so far, looking for anyone who might confirm his suspicions about the campaign finance violations without any luck. Three weren’t home. The other two wouldn’t talk.
He wasn’t giving up, though.

Matthew Pillar was an office manager at one of the garages owned by McDougal and his partners. According to the information Long had collected, he was a recent graduate from the undergraduate
business program at Boston University, where he was a mediocre student at best. He was also the bassist for a local bar band that called itself No Way To Live, a name Long was sure appealed to
angst-ridden twenty-somethings.

The door to the apartment was in desperate need of fresh paint, and the carpeting in the hallway stank of beer and pizza grease. Long knocked, waited. He could hear nothing. He’d called
the garage to see whether Pillar was working, but had been told that it was his day off. He knocked again, and heard a groan and a crash as something was knocked to the floor inside the apartment.
A voice called out, young but ragged. ‘Hold on!’

‘Mr Pillar?’ Long called. Then he reconsidered. ‘Matt?’

‘Hold on! I’m coming!’

Long waited, relaxed, leaning against the wall. The door was pulled open and a young man was standing in front of him, his shaggy mane impressed with restless sleep, his eyes still adjusting to
daylight. ‘Yeah?’ he said.

‘Are you Matt?’ Long asked. He kept his voice friendly, as though he’d been sent by a mutual friend. He smiled. ‘Matt Pillar?’

‘Yeah,’ the young man said. He still seemed disoriented, but Long’s demeanor put him somewhat at ease.

Long pulled out his badge, kept the smile on his face. ‘I’m Detective Long, Boston Police. You mind if I come in and talk to you?’

Eamonn McDougal was leaning back in his chair; his fingers were linked, resting on his prodigious belly. ‘You did it, Finny’ he said, beaming. ‘You golden
bastard, you really did it!’

Finn didn’t smile back. ‘I did it,’ he said.

Peter Mitchell had taken less than an hour to get back to him. Finn was sitting at his desk, pushing paper around, accomplishing nothing when the phone rang. ‘You’ve got a
deal,’ Mitchell said. ‘We get the documents and the tapes, and we’ll drop the charges against Kevin McDougal.’

‘How soon?’ Finn asked.

‘As soon as you want. You get me the stuff, I’ll file a
nollo
today.’

‘My name stays out of it?’

‘Yeah,’ Mitchell said. ‘Your name stays out of it.’

‘And no one moves on Joey Slade for two days.’

‘You’ve got tomorrow,’ Mitchell said, hedging. ‘Plus tomorrow night. My people want to move in on Thursday. We want to announce the arrest before the evening news. That
gives you a day and a half.’

Finn understood the thinking. Friday was a news black hole. The District Attorney wanted to make a media splash before the weekend. He calculated the time in his head. If the case against Kevin
McDougal was dismissed that afternoon, he would be fine, he figured. He was in the DA’s office twenty minutes later, and the papers ending the prosecution of Kevin McDougal were filed twenty
minutes after that. Finn headed straight for McDougal’s office in Chelsea.

‘How’d you pull it off?’ McDougal asked. His smile threatened to swallow his face.

‘Does it matter?’ Finn asked.

McDougal’s expression darkened, but only for a moment. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, I guess it don’t. You want your secrets, you can keep ’em. It’s a hell of a
job, though. You deserve to be congratulated.’

‘I didn’t do it for congratulations,’ Finn said. ‘I did it because we had a deal. A deal I expect you to live up to.’

McDougal nodded, waving a hand at Finn as though the man had nothing to worry about. ‘I always honor my bargains,’ he said. He stood and walked over to the metal filing cabinet.
Pulling his keys from his pocket, he took out a manila folder. ‘Here you go,’ he said. He tossed the file at Finn, then walked back and sat behind his desk again.

Finn held the folder in his hands for a long moment, looking at it without opening it. He took a deep breath, flipped it open and began reading.

There were only a few sheets of paper; little more than a tally of figures going back more than a decade. Marks in a ledger. ‘I don’t understand,’ Finn said. ‘You said
all the answers were in here.’

‘And they are, Finny, they are.’

‘All this shows is that she owed you money.’

McDougal nodded. ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘That she did.’

‘So you killed her?’

‘No,’ Eamonn said. ‘I didn’t.’

Finn waved the pages from the file at Eamonn. ‘Then what –?’

‘That’s not why she was killed,’ Eamonn said, gesturing toward the file. She’d been borrowing from me for more years than I should have allowed, and she was over her
head. She knew judgment day was comin’ and she couldn’t take it. So she found a way to pay me back.
That’s
why she was called.’

‘I don’t understand.’ Finn said.

‘Blackmail. The surest way to mark yourself as a target is to make yourself dangerous to someone else. Tell someone who has something to lose that you’ll reveal a secret.
The
secret. The one thing that person doesn’t want people to know. That person then has two choices: pay, or . . .’ Eamonn opened his hands, as though revealing a surprise.

‘Who?’ Finn demanded.

‘A very powerful man. Powerful and rich.’

‘Who is he?’

‘James Buchanan,’ Eamonn said. ‘He killed your mother, Finny.’

‘The senator?’ Finn’s voice was little more than a whisper. ‘Why?’

‘Because he’s your father.’ McDougal leaned back in his chair and let out a belly laugh that ripped the paint off the walls. He howled, throwing his head back. ‘Can you
believe it, Finny? You? The bastard of an American prince. Fuckin’ new-world royalty, you are. How does that make you feel?’

Finn shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s not right. It can’t be.’

‘Oh, but it can,’ McDougal said. ‘It was your mother’s last play. When I told Lizzie that I was coming to collect one way or another, she told me she had a way to get the
money. She told me she had a secret – a secret that could bring down the richest man in the Commonwealth. I didn’t believe her at first; Lizzie was a slippery bitch, and she could
bullshit with the best of them. So I had it checked out. She was telling the truth, and she started to collect. Made the first two payments back to me, even looked like she was getting in the
black. Then, on the night she was to make the last payment to me, she disappeared. Poof.’

‘I don’t believe you,’ Finn said.

‘You can believe me or not, but it’s the truth,’ McDougal said. ‘I thought she was stiffing me, so I went to her apartment that night. Found her on the floor. Almost shit
myself. I’d been to the apartment before, so I knew my fingerprints were there. I couldn’t be dragged into that – imagine the hard-on that would’ve given the fuckin’
coppers – so I called in a man named Coale to fix the situation. A specialist. He cleaned the place, made sure that there was no evidence that I’d been there. He left the police nothing
more than a victim of random urban violence.’

‘Buchanan killed my mother?’ Finn still couldn’t digest it.

‘He’s an evil one, that man,’ McDougal said. ‘Crossed me, too. I paid more than anyone will ever know to get him elected, and then when I needed him, he was nowhere to be
found.’

‘So now you want me to expose him? You want me to get your payback?’

McDougal’s face became somber. ‘You do what you need to do, Finny,’ he said. ‘You kept my son out of jail. You lived up to your end of the bargain; now I’m living
up to mine. However you want to use the information is up to you.’

Finn felt as though the ground were shifting under his feet. He put no trust in anything Eamonn McDougal said; the man was devoid of any sense of morality, and would lie without thinking. And
yet, somehow, what he was saying rang true. There was a symmetry to it that made sense. McDougal was using him, Finn knew, but it felt like he was using him with the truth.

Finn stood, shaking.

‘One thing, Finny,’ McDougal said.

Finn looked at him. It seemed as though he were looking through a gauzy lens. He felt distant, disconnected from everything around him. It felt like he’d lost whatever identity he’d
ever had, and that the new identity that had been picked out for him didn’t fit. ‘What?’ he asked. He could barely hear his own voice.