Guilt (17 page)

Harry's look morphed from surprise, to confusion, to fear. Before he could flee, Peter said, “No flag today?”

That threw him. He looked down, as if he expected a flag to materialize in his hand.

“Bastard took it,” he muttered.

“That's too bad. Hey, where've you been, anyway?”

Peter held out his hand. Almost automatically, Harry handed him a leaflet. The headline on the page was
DEVASTATE TO LIBERATE.

Harry's eyes narrowed. Who was this weirdo? Peter could almost hear him asking himself.

“I was just going to get myself a cup of coffee,” Peter said. “Want to join me?”

Harry shot the homeless woman a questioning look. She gave Peter a sharp appraisal, then she shrugged at Harry. She didn't know who he was, either.

Harry scanned the busy intersection, finally reopened to traffic, maybe looking for cops or divine intervention.

“Yeah.” He licked his lips. “I could use some coffee.”

The Toscanini's near Harvard Square was barely a storefront. Famous for ice cream, they also sold coffee and pastries all day. Harry followed Peter inside. The air was thick with the aroma of coffee layered over the pungency of chocolate and vanilla.

Harry ordered black coffee and Peter paid for that and a vanilla latté. Peter got them both scones. Harry must have been a regular because, without being asked, the clerk reached under the counter, pulled out a handful of nondairy creamer packets, and tossed them to Harry. Peter winced. That stuff was an insult to good coffee.

They took over two stools at the window counter overlooking Mass Ave and Harvard Yard.

“You didn't recognize me, did you?” Peter said.

Harry stirred two packets of the white powder into his coffee and set the extras in a little stack by his cup. He slid Peter a glance, his gray eyes sharp, and he had one foot on the ground, his behind perched on the stool, like he was hedging his bets.

“I'm Peter Zak. I live around here.” Harry's eyes registered no recognition. “Well, why should you know me? You're the celebrity. Always out there with your flag. The conscience of Cambridge, really.”

Harry stirred his coffee faster, smiling into it. At close quarters, Harry didn't smell bad, just a little stale, like he'd worn his clothes too long. Peter could see the wristband was from Cambridge Hospital. John Doe 22 was the name printed on it.

“So. You've been under the weather?” Peter asked.

“They're all liars,” Harry said as he calmly took a sip, sighed, and settled onto the stool as if he meant to set awhile. “They tried to poison me.”

“Did they?”

Harry gave a quick glance at the light sculpture overhead. “Fish bones,” he said. It did, indeed look like blue fluorescent fish bones hanging against a black ceiling. Geek art.

“So they tried to poison you?” Peter asked, trying to get the conversation back on track.

“Meat.”

“Meat.” Peter repeated the word. He had no idea what Harry was talking about. That's when Peter noticed that Harry's flyer said, in smaller letters under the headline, “A Beginner's Guide to Animal Liberation.” Was he a PETA recruit? Peter mentally lowered the likelihood that Harry was the A-bomber. A rabid antivivisectionist would be more likely to target research labs at Harvard where they were breeding mutant fruit flies, mice, and who knew what-all other unnatural beasties. On the other hand, schizophrenics weren't known for their clear thinking. Convoluted logic could be used to justify anything.

“So how'd you end up in the hospital?”

Harry gave a furtive glance, side to side, and held his hand up to shield his mouth. “I should have seen it coming. First they send someone around to cover up my posters. Saboteur. I told him that was my corner, my pole. But he just laughed. Called me”—Harry rubbed a spot on his forehead where there was what looked like an inch-long scar, still pink, with suture marks around it—“capitalist scum.” He picked at his wristband. “Prison. I was a hostage,” he said, his mind caroming to unconnected thoughts.

“So he took your flag?”

Harry nodded, his eyes filling up with outrage. “Grabbed it off me and hit me with it.” Harry gave a sly smile. “But I got him back. Knocked over his scooter. Showed him.”

A man on a scooter who was covering over Harry's flyers with his own? Peter tried not to show his excitement. Maybe Harry'd had a confrontation with the A-bomber.

“He had a scooter? You remember what color it was?”

“White. Except where I bashed it with my foot.”

Peter had a pretty good idea what had happened next. Harry's bleeding. He gets taken to Cambridge Hospital, gets his head stitched. As far as he's concerned, the doctors and ambulance attendants are all part of the conspiracy, so he has to protect himself. They ship him to the psych unit for evaluation. He won't give his name to the “enemy,” not in a million years, so the police don't know where he is. Weeks later, he washes up back in the Square, clean-shaven, flag broken, just another weirdo street preacher.

Harry leaned forward and looked up and down the street. “They're after me again.”

“They are?”

“That's what Linda told me. Came around five or six times, looking for me, asking questions.” Harry gouged a wad of paper napkins from the table dispenser and slipped them into his pocket. “Hit men.”

If Harry's story was true, then that nondescript white scooter the police were on the lookout for had a ding or two in it. The police would want to talk to Harry, have him look at suspects. But Harry was a wily creature, hard to catch. The whiff of a blue uniform and he'd make himself scarce.

While Harry picked raisins out of his scone, Peter excused himself and went into the men's room to call MacRae, leaving the door open a crack so he could keep an eye on Harry.

“Did you get an email?” MacRae asked before Peter had a chance to say anything.

Peter admitted that he hadn't yet checked. When he told MacRae where he was and whom he was with, MacRae exploded. “You keep telling us you're not a profiler—has anyone mentioned to you that you're not a detective, either? And how do you know it's him?”

“He's shaved off his beard, and he's pale. But I recognize him. I've seen him before. He's been in the hospital all this time.”

Now Harry was thoughtfully dipping a piece of scone in the coffee. Peter shrank back as Harry glanced over in the direction of the men's room door.

“I don't think he's your bomber. But he may have had a run-in with him.” Peter told MacRae about Harry's altercation with a man on a white scooter. “If Harry was admitted to Cambridge Hospital as John Doe 22 on the same day as the law school bombing, then maybe the bomber broke his flag and—”

“Don't let him out of your sight,” MacRae said. “We're coming over. Give me ten—”

“No uniforms. And try to keep a low…” The words died as Peter looked out again. Harry was gone. So were the extra packets of creamer. All that was left was a pile of raisins.

*   *   *

MacRae was apoplectic when Peter told him Harry had taken off.

“Great. He's probably gone underground again. Do me a favor, stay out of my investigation!” he thundered, and hung up.

Peter stood there, staring at the phone. MacRae was the one who'd asked
him
for help, he told himself, but that sounded like a pretty lame defense.

Peter raced back to the Harvard Square T station, hoping to find Harry. Harry's woman friend was still sitting on the sidewalk. Peter dropped a dollar bill into her cup. She mumbled thanks, and looked at him through a fringe of stringy hair. Her eyes were watery, and she smelled of urine and mothballs.

“Linda?” Peter said, hoping this was Harry's “Linda.” The woman's face registered nothing. “Has Harry been back through here?”

Her gaze narrowed, but it wasn't in response to his question. It was something she saw over his shoulder. He turned. A dark sedan had pulled up in front of the newsstand and a tall, mocha-skinned man in jeans and a sweatshirt got out of the passenger seat. Neddleman. Across the street, in front of the Coop, a pair of uniformed officers were talking to passersby.

“Don't know any Harry,” Linda said, her face impassive.

Neddleman stood by the entrance to the T station, giving Peter the eye. Peter went over to him.

“He was right here, talking to that woman, Linda's her name, I think—” Peter turned to show Neddleman where, but Linda had vanished, too.

He showed Neddleman Harry's flyer.

“Animal rights.” Neddleman grunted in disgust. “I hate Cambridge.”

Neddleman took the flyer by the corner and slipped it into an evidence bag. He gave Peter a hard stare. “Now would you get the hell—” He stopped. “Shit.” He reached behind Peter and lifted a piece of paper taped to the low brick wall surrounding the area in front of the subway station. It began:

Societies without government enjoy an infinitely greater degree of happiness. Under pretense of governing they have divided us into wolves & sheep. The jaws of commercial consumerism devour us and leave us corrupt.

The text went on rambling about how we'd all been turned into rapacious consumers, and on into sexual profligacy and moral degeneracy. At the end was a circled A, but this time with a slash through it. What was that supposed to mean?

Flyers had gone up days before each of the previous bombings. Sure enough, there was another one, posted under the window of the jeweler's on the corner. Another was plastered to the side of the tourist kiosk. Christ, they were everywhere. Peter tried not to acknowledge the urge to yell “TAKE COVER” at the top of his lungs and sprint to his car to get the hell away from there.

That's when he noticed that Neddleman seemed unperturbed. In fact, he was chuckling to himself and shaking his head.

“What's so funny?”

“You gotta laugh because what else can you do? We found these damned things stuck to the Longfellow Bridge. We found 'em in the Kendall T station. On a Green Line train. They evacuated the Coop when a customer discovered one in the top floor men's room. Turned out they were in all the restrooms, men's and women's. Even found a copy at Louis.” Louis Boston was an exclusive men's store on Newbury Street. “That's the problem when you go public with stuff like this. The wannabes crawl out of the woodwork. Now we've got choruses crying wolf, and we don't know which one means business.”

18

A
NNIE CAME
out of her office at three that afternoon. Jackie was standing by her desk with her coat on, putting on lipstick.

“You leaving early?” Annie asked. She cringed at her own words. She was starting to sound like Verna Lovejoy, the woman who had run the downtown office where Annie worked for a summer when she was eighteen. Every time Annie arrived at a minute after eight, or got up to leave for lunch five minutes before noon, Miss Lovejoy got that smug, sanctimonious look on her face, raised her eyebrows, and exhaled, making a little sound like she'd chomped down on a miniature whoopy cushion. The old battle-ax. Scary, the woman had seemed ancient, but she'd probably been about the age Annie was now. Unmarried, no kids, no life outside of work, and … Annie shuddered. There were entirely too many parallels.

“It's fine,” Annie said. Of course it was fine. She'd promised Jackie that as long as she did the work, she could have whatever leeway she needed to keep her life in order. Jackie was certainly holding up her end of the deal—she'd eliminated the backlog of paperwork, reorganized their files, reduced their list of deadbeat clients by half, and come in just about every day to ask Annie if there was anything else she could do.

“I'm finished with everything. I've got some errands to do before I pick up Sophie,” she said, her voice sounding a little too bright. She dropped the lipstick into her purse and left.

Annie watched from the office window as Jackie emerged from the building entrance. She hesitated a short way up the street, looked up and down, then got out her cell phone and continued walking. About halfway to the light at the corner, a station wagon eased up alongside her. Jackie waved and ran over to it. The passenger door swung open. Annie shrank back as Jackie gave a furtive look over her shoulder, back toward the office. When she looked again, Jackie was gone. So was the car. Annie had a good idea who'd been driving.

This is not your problem,
Annie reminded herself, trying to squash the irritation she felt. It was Jackie's life. Staying away from Joe wasn't a condition of employment, certainly not a condition of friendship.

Annie sat down to work. Jackie had stuck a Post-it to her computer monitor: “HOURS!” Jackie couldn't bill the clients if Annie didn't log her hours. Annie had fallen nearly three weeks behind.

She pulled out her date book, opened the spreadsheet Jackie had prepared for her, and began transferring her chicken-scratched notes. She logged one week's hours and kept going. When she got to a week ago Tuesday, she logged the four hours she'd spent that morning doing a background check on a client's prospective business partner. What had she done in the afternoon? Right. That was when she'd taken off to go to the zoo with Abby and Jackie, the same afternoon that the bomb went off at the county courthouse at a time when Joe Klevinski was having a job interview. Supposedly.

Annie logged the rest of her hours and closed the file. Jackie had also left her a pile of a half-dozen transcribed affidavits. She picked the top one off the pile and stared at the neatly stapled pages. She needed to read it and write a summary, but her gaze wasn't focused on the words. She was thinking about the first Mrs. Joe Klevinski. Annie mulled over Jackie's words:
What kind of mother takes her son away from his father like that?
How hard had Klevinski tried to find her? Annie wondered. Had he hired an investigator? It wasn't all that easy to disappear completely. Too bad the first Mrs. K wasn't around. Talking to her might have convinced Jackie that Joe wasn't going to change.