Next of Kin (27 page)

The garage was two blocks away from the loft. It was a trek he’d made more than a thousand times, and yet tonight it seemed different. He noticed the stores, noticed the people. He’d
taken note of them all before, to be sure. It was a requirement of his profession to be aware of everything around him. If necessary for a job, or if pressed, he probably could have rattled off a
description of every single building, every single storefront on the route. He probably could have described all of the locals and given an accurate account of their general habits – their
morning commuting schedules and their evening routines. But he’d never really
noticed
them before as anything more than pieces of his environment. Tonight, somehow, something was
different. They seemed like actual living, breathing beings.

Halfway between the garage and his loft, he passed a bar and glanced through the window. There was nothing unusual or notable about it; it was just like a thousand establishments in Boston.
Wooden booths, a long mahogany bar fronted with well-worn stools, four-fifths empty on a Monday night. And yet something about the place caught his attention. Perhaps it was the way the bartender
propped himself against the cash register, so comfortable in his conversation with two of the regulars. Maybe it was the couple in the booth, leaning in toward each other as though it had been a
year since they’d last seen each other, so desperate were they to drink in every last word. Whatever it was, he paused in front of the place, opened the door slowly, and stepped inside.

Everyone in the bar looked up when he walked in, and he could feel them all recoil. He was used to that. He had carefully cultivated an aura that inspired fear and kept people distant. Kept
people from approaching him. Kept people from questioning him. He never would have survived for this long any other way.

He walked slowly over toward the bar. He didn’t sit; that would have been going too far. Instead, he put his hands on the counter and turned to look at the bartender, who abandoned the
regular and walked over.

‘Help you?’ he asked.

‘Yeah,’ Coale said. ‘You got Scotch?’

‘It’s a bar,’ the bartender said. Coale gave him a look and the bartender shrugged apologetically. ‘What kind?’

‘Macallan still good?’

‘Top shelf.’

The man nodded. ‘Neat.’

The bartender retreated to pour the drink.

Coale could remember the last time he’d taken a drink. It was more than forty years before, on his eighteenth birthday. That was what people said you had to do on your birthday – get
drunk. If his father had still been alive at the time, he would have taken the boy out. His father had liked his drink. He would sit in their bare garage apartment with a bottle, reading, the aroma
from his glass the only texture to the place. As a boy Coale had loved that smell. He would have enjoyed a drink with his father on his birthday, but by the time it came his father had been six
months in the ground.

At eighteen he was alone, homeless, penniless. The booze hadn’t made anything better, and he didn’t enjoy being out in public. Watching all the people around him swirl with their
friends, their lovers, their lives, had only reinforced his loneliness. Soon after the hangover had worn off, he resolved to remove himself from all social contact. If he was to be alone, he
wouldn’t torture himself with meaningless interaction. If he was to be alone, he was going to take advantage of the solitude. And so he made himself into the perfect sociopath. Divorced from
all feeling, all empathy, all mercy. And that had made him powerful.

The bartender returned with the Scotch. ‘Twelve bucks,’ he said. Coale frowned at him, and the bartender shrugged again. ‘Top shelf,’ he said.

Coale reached into his pocket and pulled out a tight roll of bills. The smallest he had was a hundred. He peeled it off and put it on the table. The bartender’s eyes widened ever so
slightly as he watched. He picked it up and went to the register to make change.

Coale stared at the glass for what seemed a long time. The booze was golden brown and it danced and sparkled even in the dim, chalky light of the dive. He picked up the glass, breathed in the
aroma. It was foreign, after all the years. Sharp and stinging and dangerous, and yet somehow warm and alive at the same time.

He raised the glass to his lips and took a sip. Not even a sip, really; just a taste. The liquid settled on his lips, crept only far enough into his mouth for the flavor to roll over on his
tongue, no more. He sat there, closed his eyes for a brief moment, lost in the memory of the life he’d given up.

Then he pulled himself back and put the drink down. The bartender returned with the change. Coale looked at him, and once again saw only an object, not a person. He could easily have pulled out
a gun and shot him in the forehead without thought or remorse. It would have meant nothing.

He looked at the change on the bar, looked at the drink.

Without another word, he backed away, turned, and headed out.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Finn stood at the back of Courtroom D at the Roxbury District Courthouse. It was an arraignments session – a cattlecall of the accused, pulled from the holding pens
filled from the previous evening and weekend. At the right of the courtroom, a Plexiglas box held the accused, who spoke only through a six-inch circular pattern of air holes at the front of the
box. The holes were set low enough to allow the shortest defendants to respond, which meant that anyone of normal height had to stoop down to answer any questions. It wasn’t a huge
imposition. Few answers were required. A ‘yes’ when asked whether they had met with their court-appointed attorney, a ‘not guilty’ when asked how they wanted to plead to the
accusations against them. Then a schedule was set, and they were whisked away, replaced by the next defendant. It went on like this for hours.

Peter Mitchell stood at the front of the courtroom, moving through the docket with dispassionate efficiency. For each case, he rattled off the facts embodied in the police report. Sometimes they
were straightforward, sometimes sad, often shocking. A young woman was accused of burning her three-year old with a cigarette when the child wouldn’t stop asking to watch television; a young
man was accused of stabbing his girlfriend in the shoulder for looking at another guy; a sixteen-year-old boy was charged as an adult for beating a schoolmate nearly to death while stealing his
bicycle. The parade of horrors went on from ten o’clock until just before noon, and it left Finn with the familiar acrid taste of despair and disgust at the back of his throat.

Finally, visibly worn out by the mundane tragedy of it all, the judge called the break for lunch, crawled off the bench, and headed back to chambers for a brief respite.

Mitchell packed up his files and headed toward the back of the courtroom. Finn caught his eye. ‘What do you want?’ Mitchell asked as he hurried past.

Finn fell in line to keep up. ‘We need to talk,’ he said.

‘We talked already,’ Mitchell said. ‘I didn’t like what you had to say.’

‘Maybe you will now.’

Mitchell turned to Finn, exasperated. ‘You for real? Or are you wasting my time?’

‘Gimme five minutes, and you can decide for yourself.’

They took a conference room down the corridor from the courtroom. Mitchell put his briefcase on the table. He didn’t bother sitting. ‘I’ve got an hour to make
about ten calls and try to get something to eat,’ he said. ‘You’ve got two minutes. Are you giving up Eamonn McDougal?’

‘I can’t,’ Finn said. ‘He’s a client.’

‘Then I’m leaving. We’ve got nothing to talk about.’ Mitchell picked up his briefcase.

‘You told me I had two minutes.’

‘That’s when I thought you were gonna say something I wanted to hear. Doesn’t sound like that’s gonna happen.’

‘So I guess you wouldn’t be interested in busting Joey Slade?’ Finn asked.

Mitchell already had the door open, but he stopped. He didn’t turn around, he just stood there, hand still gripping the handle, looking straight ahead. ‘Don’t mess with
me.’

‘I’m not messing with you.’

‘You serious?’

Finn opened his briefcase and took out a file. He put it on the table. ‘Judge for yourself.’

Mitchell turned around to look at Finn. His hand remained on the door. ‘If you’re bluffing, this is the last time we talk.’ He let go of the door and walked slowly back to the
table. He put his briefcase on the floor, his attention on the folder. He reached down and flipped it open.

He didn’t touch the pages at first. He examined them while still standing. By the time he got to the bottom of the stack, he looked up at Finn, an expression of awe and wonder on his face.
Finn just made a gesture for him to continue with his reading. He sat down, leaning over and flipping through each page in succession. ‘Are these what I think they are?’ Mitchell
asked.

‘What do you think they are?’

‘It looks like documents that show a huge amount of money being funneled to Joey Slade. And a bunch of papers that show payoffs going to politicians.’

‘Then they are what you think they are.’

‘Where did you get these?’ Mitchell demanded.

‘I can’t tell you that.’

Mitchell’s eyes narrowed. ‘Eamonn McDougal,’ he said. ‘He gave these to you, didn’t he?’ He flipped through the documents again. ‘Eamonn is pretty much
the only high-level scumbag whose name isn’t on any of these documents. He’s looking to trade Joey Slade for his boy?’

Finn shook his head. ‘Eamonn McDougal has no idea that I am here, or that I have these documents. Eamonn’s name isn’t in these documents because he’s a client, and it
would be unethical for me to turn anything over to you about his business. He’s not involved in this at all.’

Mitchell looked through the materials again. ‘Well, that’s too bad,’ he said. ‘Without any sort of corroboration or testimony about these documents, Slade will simply say
they’re all lies. Forgeries. They’re useless without testimony.’

Finn pulled out a handheld tape recorder. He held it up and pressed play. A voice, clear and calm, came from the small speaker. ‘It’s not enough,’ the voice said. ‘You
want a guarantee that this goes through, a hundred and fifty grand isn’t gonna do it. You’re talking about putting a thirty-story complex on protected land. I gotta buy off the state
legislature as well as the city council. Plus I got the unions, I got the police, and all the others who are gonna be holding their fuckin’ hands out. You want this to move, I need five
hundred. Either that or . . .’ Finn stopped the tape.

‘You want to hear more?’

Mitchell was nearly drooling. ‘You’re telling me that was Joey Slade?’ he said.

Finn nodded.

‘How do I know that?’

‘Because I’m telling you that.’

Mitchell frowned. ‘You know what I mean. How do I prove that?’

‘You get an expert,’ Finn said. ‘You do a voice comparison. It’s not that hard.’

Mitchell considered this. ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘Still, he’s gonna say the thing is a cut job. Someone duped his voice, edited some other conversation.’

‘Yeah,’ Finn said. ‘He’ll say a lot of things, but the tape is genuine, so he’ll have a problem with that. I’ve got others, too,’ Finn said.
‘Talking about worse things – drug deals and distribution, things like that.’

Mitchell shook his head. ‘But you don’t have testimony.’

‘Slade doesn’t know that. You play this for him, show him the documents, he’ll assume you’ve turned someone on the inside. He’ll give it up quick in exchange for a
deal. Then the whole house of cards starts to fall.’

‘How are you so sure?’

‘Because,’ Finn said. ‘Joey Slade’s been on a winning streak since he was nine years old. He doesn’t know how to handle defeat.’

Mitchell considered this. ‘So, what are we talking about?’ he asked. ‘I drop everything on the McDougal kid, and I get it all?’

‘That’s not it,’ Finn said.

‘What else?’

‘I have some conditions. First, my name stays out of it.’

‘You don’t want your clients to know you’re working with the DA’s office?’

‘Something like that. Second, you wait a couple of days after the charges are dropped against Kevin McDougal before you go after Slade.’

‘Why?’

‘I have some things I need to take care of before the shit hits the fan.’

‘Like what?’

‘You don’t need to know. All you need to know is that this is the way it has to be if you want a chance to make the bust of the decade. Do we have a deal?’

Mitchell shook his head. ‘I can’t make a deal like this on my own. I need to get approval.’

Finn nodded. ‘So get it. But get it in the next few hours, or the deal goes away.’

‘Give me your cell number,’ Mitchell said. ‘I’ll call you.’ Finn pulled out a business card and wrote his cell number on the back. ‘When this is all
over,’ Mitchell said, ‘I want to know what this was all really about.’

Finn shook his head. ‘I wouldn’t count on it. Get back to me soon.’

He looked at the number on the card. Finn could tell that, in his mind, Mitchell was already writing the speech he would give at the press conference when the first arrests were made. Either
that, or he was already rehearsing his stump speech for when he ran for governor. ‘I will,’ he said. ‘I definitely will.’

Finn got back to his office before one o’clock. Lissa looked up from her desk when he walked in. ‘Well?’ she said.

‘We’ll see,’ Finn replied.

‘That’s it?’

‘For now.’

Kozlowski walked in from his office in the back. ‘What’s the word?’ he asked.

Finn shrugged.

‘What, exactly, did he say?’ Lissa pressed.

‘He said he didn’t have authorization to make this kind of a deal. He said he has to go back to his superiors for sign-off.’

‘But he seemed interested?’ Kozlowski asked.

‘Oh yeah, he seemed interested. I thought his eyes were gonna come out of his head when he heard the tape. You could watch him playing out his entire political future as he thought about
what this could lead to.’

‘He’ll make the deal,’ Lissa said. ‘I know he will.’