Next of Kin (40 page)

‘Okay,’ Kozlowski said. ‘Keep low and don’t get shot.’

Long was already moving up the stairs, and Kozlowski joined him. Finn followed a few steps behind. Toward the screams. Toward his father.

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

Coale never heard them coming. He didn’t hear the intercom buzzing; he didn’t hear them kicking in the door. He was too far gone to hear anything at that point.

Buchanan was sitting on a wooden chair in his study, his hands bound behind his back, his feet tied to two of the legs of the chair. He was bleeding from his mouth and nose, and there were
several gashes on his forehead. His head was hanging in exhaustion. He was sobbing.

‘I’m sorry,’ he kept saying over and over again. It was a plea for mercy not aimed at his current tormentor. He’d concluded more than an hour before that pleas to the man
standing before him would be wasted. And so his request for mercy was directed to a higher authority. One to which he was sure he would have his introduction before the morning was over.

Coale was sweating from his exertions. His normally well-combed hair had taken on a wild look, and his sleeves were rolled up. He, too, was talking to himself, muttering his own combination of
recriminations and apologies. The cold, calculating demeanor that had served him well throughout his professional life had been shed, and what remained underneath was pure animal fury.

‘I’m sorry!’ Buchanan screamed, summoning what little strength he had left. Coale turned at him and the hand that held his gun flew from his body, striking Buchanan in the
temple, drawing fresh blood. Buchanan sobbed and Coale kicked him in the chest, knocking the wind from his body. He watched as the senator sat there choking, unable to breathe, spitting up blood as
his face contorted in fear and pain. It made Coale feel good to watch it. He supposed that was the final sign of his damnation – that he could take such warm pleasure from what he was doing.
It didn’t matter to him anymore, though. He’d lived through damnation before.

He used the back of his hand to wipe the sweat from his brow as he thought about what his life might have been. Bending over, he took a deep breath, and slowly some sense of rationality
returned.

It was over, he realized. He’d burned through the last of his anger, and the conflagration had taken everything within him. Someone more righteous might have felt cleansed by the
experience. Not Coale, though. All he felt was brittle and empty and lost.

He walked over and stood behind Buchanan. The man had served his purpose. He understood, or he didn’t; that wasn’t for Coale to decide. All that was left was to end the misery. He
raised his gun and put the muzzle of the silencer to his temple.

‘Police! Freeze!’

Coale looked up. Detective Long was standing in the door, his gun out, aimed straight at Coale’s forehead. A moment later the door was crowded with the lawyer and the private detective.
Kozlowski was pointing a gun at him as well.

‘Drop the gun and step back!’ Long shouted.

Coale surveyed the room from the corner of his eye, keeping his focus on Long. He considered his options and concluded almost instantly that he had none. He had no intention of spending the rest
of his life in the custody of the Commonwealth.

‘Get down on the floor, now, or I will shoot!’ Long shouted.

‘You’re going to have to shoot,’ Coale said. ‘I’m going to have to shoot, too. Are you ready?’

‘Wait, just wait!’ Long shouted. He was in a no-win situation, and they both knew it. If he risked shooting Coale, in all likelihood the force from the blast would cause Coale to
pull the trigger, killing the senator. But if he did nothing and Coale shot the senator while he was standing there . . . well, no cop could live with that.

‘Wait for what?’ Coale asked. ‘There’s nothing to discuss.’ He looked at the two men behind Long, saw a peculiar look in the lawyer’s eyes. For a moment he
felt a wave of guilt rush through him so powerful it almost knocked him off his feet. He pushed it aside, though. There would be no atonement for him. ‘Sorry,’ he said to the lawyer.
‘You were better off without parents.’

‘We can talk,’ Long said. He was trying to keep his voice calm now, following textbook hostage-situation protocol. Coale figured Long had probably taken some one-day course in it
during his career. Rule number one: keep the hostage-taker talking.

Except in this case, the hostage-taker had nothing to say.

‘When was the last time you fired your weapon?’ Coale asked Long.

‘I’m telling you, we can talk,’ Long replied.

‘It was when you shot your partner, wasn’t it? You probably haven’t even been back to the range since then, have you?’

‘Don’t do this.’

The senator was babbling now. Begging for help; crying and apologizing again and again.

‘Are you ready?’ Coale asked.

‘Don’t!’

‘One . . .’ Coale began counting.

‘No!’

‘Two . . .’

‘I’ll shoot!’

‘Thr—’

Both guns fired at once. Coale stood there, suspended. Time stopped and then rushed forward again. The images came at him, released from places in his mind he’d shuttered so long ago. His
father, smiling, running a chamois along the smooth fender of the burgundy Rolls Royce; Morse Pond, out by Wellesley College, where, on off days he would go to swim and to watch the college girls
walk to class; the face of the most beautiful woman he’d ever known, and the look in her eyes when she realized, much to her dismay, that she loved him too.

The dark images came as well. The torment of losing his father, of losing everything; scrapping through his early life, fighting for every morsel of food, every bit of respect; his rebirth as a
killer of uncommon skill and indifference to human life. All of it interspersed with the faces; too many of them to count. Some crying, begging, pleading; some calling out the names of loved ones
as he stood before them with neither judgment not pity. After all, for him it was his only way of living. He had caused so much pain in his lifetime, and yet his final act had been selfless,
hadn’t it? The last thought that passed through his mind was to wonder, almost idly, whether that was enough for redemption.

He was dead before he hit the floor.

‘No!’ Finn screamed as the shots were fired. He tried to rush forward, but Long was blocking the door and Kozlowski held him back. He stood there helplessly
watching as Long and the man with the scar on his forehead pulled their triggers at the same instant. Buchanan toppled forward, the chair tipping over, the spray of blood and brains coating the
floor in front of him. The man with the scar lingered for a moment, a look of bewilderment on his face as the blood trickled down from the hole in his forehead. Then he, too, toppled over, hitting
the floor with his full weight.

‘Let me through!’ Finn yelled.

‘Stay back!’ Long yelled in return. ‘We don’t know that he was alone.’

Kozlowski nodded and kept his hand on Finn’s chest as Long advanced into the room. It was a small space, and it took only a few seconds for him to complete his sweep and give the all-clear
signal. By then, they could hear the sirens of a dozen squad cars pulling up outside the house. There were footsteps on the stairway, and urgent shouting for ambulances and medical personnel.

Most of it swept over Finn. He was still looking at Buchanan, lying face down on the Persian rug, the pool of blood by his head growing larger by the moment.

He pushed his way past Kozlowski and ducked around Long. Kneeling by Buchanan’s body, he reached for his shoulders to roll him over.

‘Leave him!’ Long ordered. ‘The paramedics will be here any second.’

‘He’s my father,’ Finn said simply, as he rolled him over.

He looked better than Finn had expected. The bullet had passed through the top of the skull, entering and exiting above the hairline. There was blood – a lot of blood – and Finn
could see the flash of bone in the hairline where the bullet had traveled, but most of the cuts on the man’s face had clearly been inflicted prior to the gunshot.

He was alive. That, too, surprised Finn, though it did not appear that the condition would last for long. His eyes spun as Finn rolled him over, placing his jacket under his head. Finn wanted to
say something comforting, but he could think of nothing. He just stared at the man, Buchanan staring back, his jaw hanging lax, his eyes losing focus. It felt like there should be something that
could be said or done to take so much tragedy and spin a Hollywood ending of reconciliation. It was not to be, though, and a moment later the life fled from Buchanan’s eyes. What little
muscle tone there had been deserted the body just as the paramedics arrived. Finn stepped out of the way, but he knew that there was nothing that could be done.

He watched them work on Buchanan. Certainly no one there felt authorized to pronounce a United States senator dead, and they continued to pump his chest and bag air into his lungs even as they
rolled him out of the room. There were seven responders working on the corpse.
All the king’s horses
. . . Finn thought.

No one was working on the man with the scar. One paramedic had spent a brief moment examining the body. It wasn’t clear whether he was trying to determine whether he was alive or whether
he was important. He diagnosed almost immediately, though, that he was neither, and moved on to help the others with Buchanan.

Finn walked over and looked down at the man who had killed both his mother and his father. Finn replayed the man’s words back in his head:
You were better off without parents
. He
wondered whether it was true. Certainly nothing that he’d learned about Elizabeth Connor and James Buchanan would recommend either as a candidate for parent of the year. And yet was he really
better off without them? He supposed it didn’t matter anymore.

He should have detested the man lying dead before him. He should have been able to muster a rage for the ages. What person could take so much from another and not feel the sting of his
victim’s hate? And yet Finn felt completely numb looking at him. Perhaps it was the fact that he had no emotional attachment to the parents who had been killed. Perhaps it was because he had
let Finn and Sally walk away from the alley in Charlestown, giving them their lives. Whatever the reason, he couldn’t bring himself to have any strong feelings for the man one way or
another.

‘You’re wrong,’ he said to the corpse. ‘I would have been better off with parents.’ He wasn’t sure why he said it. Perhaps it was just to get the last
word.

‘You okay?’ Kozlowski asked from behind.

‘Yeah,’ Finn said.

‘Long wants us downstairs. I’m guessing we’re gonna be here most of the day, giving statements and talking to the cops.’

‘Yeah. Probably right. You should call Lissa, let her know.’

Kozlowski nodded. ‘You sure you’re okay?’

‘I’m fine. It’s not like Buchanan coached my little league teams. He abandoned me, and he probably gave the order to have my mother killed. I’m not exactly feeling a deep
sense of personal loss.’

‘What are you feeling?’

‘You Oprah now?’

‘I’m just askin’.’

‘Well don’t. I’m fine.’

‘Good,’ Kozlowski said. ‘’Cause you’re gonna need the patience of a saint to deal with the rest of this day.’

‘No shit,’ Finn sighed. ‘We might as well get it over with.’

The rest of the day went by in a blur. Finn was asked the same questions a thousand times by a hundred different officers. Every law enforcement agency in the United States was
involved at some level. The BPD, of course, struggled to maintain its primary jurisdiction, and had remarkable success given the circumstances. But the FBI and Secret Service would not be denied
their place at the table. Even the Department of Homeland Security sent two officers out to make sure it was not the front end of a systemic attack on the nation’s government officials.

The story remained the same, though. Unshaken by innuendo and looks of incredulity, all those involved stuck to the truth, and everyone’s truth seemed to match up, more or less. It was
clear from what the police knew that Elizabeth Connor had been blackmailing Buchanan; maybe McDougal as well. Buchanan and McDougal had been involved in skirting campaign finance limits, and had
likely engaged in some sort of
quid pro quo
in the bargain. In addition, Buchanan and Connor had conceived Finn out of wedlock when they were young. Either would have provided Connor
leverage, though no one knew which was the angle Connor had taken. There were other unanswered questions, to be sure. How much had Buchanan known about Elizabeth Connor’s murder before the
fact? Who had given the order to have her killed? Why had the man with the scar, as yet still unidentified, turned so violently against both McDougal and Buchanan?

These were, though, the types of loose ends that were inevitable in cases this messy. Television cop shows give the impression that in the end, with enough effort and intelligence, all is
revealed, and the motives and motivations of all involved in a crime are known with certainty. That is not the reality, however. In most cases, even those that are solved, questions remain and
uncertainty lingers. No matter how much we think we know about people and their actions, we can never fully explain what drives them to the ultimate acts of violence.

At least Finn and Kozlowski were not required to stay at the Buchanan house for very long. An hour and a half after the questioning began they were taken down to the police station. That was a
relief. Shortly after the bodies were taken away, Catherine and Brooke Buchanan had been brought to the house, and the tension was so thick Finn found it difficult to breathe.

He assumed that they had both been informed that James Buchanan was Finn’s father. Brooke kept looking at him, bewildered. He couldn’t even raise his eyes to her.
He had a
sister
. The thought made his hands shake. He wanted to go over to her, but he had no idea what to say. There were too many complications to allow for a clean reunion. She was grieving over
their father’s death; the father who had abandoned him and likely killed his mother. All he could do was look at his feet and shake his head.