The Front (17 page)

Bank robberies and copper thefts from all over this area. Excluding Cambridge, where Cal goes to school. And Boston, where he's from, Win thinks.

He tries Lamont, and his call rolls over to voice mail on the first ring. Either on the phone or she has it turned off. He tries Stump. Same thing. He doesn't leave a message for either one of them as he runs out of the courthouse, grabs his motorcycle gear out of the hard case, speeds off. A light rain smacks his face shield and makes the pavement slick as he weaves in and out of traffic toward Cambridge.

Lamont's car is in the driveway of the Victorian ruin on Brattle Street, not a single light on, no sign of anyone.

Win touches the hood of her Mercedes. It's warm, and he notes the quiet clicking sound car engines usually make right after they've been turned off. He goes around to the side of the house, out of sight, waiting, listening. Nothing. Minutes pass. Every window is dark, has nothing to do with the candle he took from the room where he found the mattress, the wine. Something else is going on, he can tell by looking through the window he broke the other night. The alarm panel is dead, no green light. He walks around, looking for cut power lines, for any indication of why there might be an electrical failure. Nothing, and he returns to the back door.

It's unlocked, and he opens it, hears footsteps on the wooden flooring. The impatient flipping of switches. Someone walking room to room. Switches flipping. Win shuts the door behind him, loudly, so whoever it is—Lamont, he's sure—will know someone has just come in.

Footsteps head his way, and Lamont calls out, “Cal?”

Win walks toward her voice.

“Cal?” she calls out again. “There are no lights anywhere. What happened to the lights? Where are you?”

A switch flipping on and off in the room beyond the kitchen, what may once have been a dining room. Win turns on his tactical light and shines it obliquely so he doesn't blind her.

“It's not Cal,” he says, directing the light at a wall, illuminating the two of them.

They're standing maybe six feet apart in the middle of an empty, cavernous room with old wooden flooring and ornate molding.

“What are you doing here!” she exclaims.

He turns the light off. Complete darkness.

“What are you doing!” She sounds scared.

“Shhhh,” he says, moves toward her, finds her arm. “Where is he?”

“Let go of me!”

He leads her to the wall, whispers for her to stand right there. Don't move. Don't make a sound, then he waits by the doorway, no more than ten feet from her, but it seems to be miles. He waits for Cal. Long, tense minutes, and a noise. The back door opens. The beam of a flashlight enters the room before the person does, and then confusion as Win grabs someone, a struggle, and footsteps from all directions, and Stump is yelling, and then nothing.

“Are you all right?”

“Win?”

“Win?”

He opens his eyes, and the lights are on in the house, and Raggedy Ann is standing over him. Dressed a little differently this time. In a polo shirt, cargo pants, a pistol on her hip. Stump, Lamont, and some big guy in a suit, thick, gray hair.

“It's my damn house. I have every right to be here,” Lamont is saying.

Win's head hurts like hell. He touches a huge lump on it, looks at blood on his hand.

“An ambulance is on the way,” Stump says, crouching next to him.

He sits up, sees black for an instant, says, “You hit me, or do I have someone else to thank.”

“That would be me,” Raggedy Ann says.

She introduces herself as Special Agent McClure, FBI. The big guy in the suit is New Scotland Yard's Jeremy Killien. Now that Win knows the complete cast of characters, he suggests they might want to broadcast a “Be on the Lookout,” a BOLO, for Cal Tradd. Since he's probably a bank robber, and a copper thief, and his luring the district attorney here was for purposes of blackmail, bribery, threatening her. Monique and Win set the whole thing up. All part of a sting operation that just got blown to hell. Lamont watches him spin the story. Not a glint of gratitude in her eyes that he's saving her ass.

“What sting operation?” McClure asks, baffled.

Win rubs his head, says, “Monique and I have been on this guy for a while. The way he follows me around, then started following her around, not to mention his maniacal obsession with covering the very crimes we were suspicious he was committing. Typical sociopathic behavior. This seventeen-year-old whiz kid—well, actually sixteen, birthday's next month—sheltered and controlled all his life, until he finally left home for college, younger than the usual freshman.”

Nothing registers on Lamont's face. But Win has no doubt she didn't know. Even she wouldn't stoop so low as to have sex with a minor, if that's what the two of them have been doing when they rendezvoused in the very house Cal probably vandalized, stripped of copper. Then photographed. For souvenirs, just as he's done at so many other places. Thrill crimes. Not because he needs the money. Imagine that. Super Thief. Reporting on your own copper thefts and bank robberies, getting chummy with the very people investigating your crimes, even screwing the district attorney. What a wunderkind.

“This is completely embarrassing,” Killien says in disgust.

“Whose bright idea was it to have the power turned off ?” Win looks at McClure. “Oh. You guys. The F-Big-I. Then what?” Rubbing his head. “You call the power company and have it turned back on? Pretty cool to have connections like that. No pun intended.” To Stump. “I don't need an ambulance.” Touching the knot on his head again. “Fact is, I feel smarter. Isn't it true some people who get hit on the head with a flashlight end up with a higher IQ?”

“What sting operation?” Stump isn't amused.

No one is. Everybody looking at him with hard faces.

“You never mentioned any sting operation to me,” Stump says.

“Well, you weren't exactly forthright with me, either. At least not about Special Agent Raggedy Ann.”

“It's McClure,” says the FBI agent.

“A print on a Fresca can,” Win says to Stump. “A print on a note delivered to my apartment. No hit in AFIS, meaning the person who left them sure as hell didn't spend time in prison for stabbing her pimp. Sure as hell has no arrest record at all. And now that I know she's FBI, some undercover whatever, I'm not surprised she has no prints on file for exclusionary purposes.”

“I couldn't tell you,” Stump says.

“I get it,” Win says. “Of course, you couldn't tell me that this Raggedy Ann criminal was really an informant who is really an FBI agent who is spying on me because she's really spying on Lamont.”

“I believe you should lie back down,” Killien says to him.

Stump continues to explain. “When you were so determined to follow her, Win, I had to come up with the Filippello Park scenario, have her deliver the note and all the rest. So it would appear I had no choice but to admit she was an informant, ensuring you would back off before you figured out she's FBI. You know how it works. We don't give up our informants, and had I offered that information easily, you would have been suspicious. So I had to script something. I had to make it appear I had no choice but to blow her cover and order you to stay the hell away from her.”

They hold each other's gaze for a moment.

“I'm sorry,” Stump says.

“So why the party?” Win says to everyone. “Why are we here? Because it's not about Janie Brolin. And it's not about Cal Tradd.”

“I believe the easy answer is we're here because of your district attorney,” Killien says to Lamont. “Romanian orphans. Large transfers of cash. Which flagged you, brought you to the attention of the FBI, Homeland Security. Finally, the Yard, unfortunately.”

“What I should do is sue the hell out of every last one of you,” she says.

And McClure says to her, “Your electronic communications with . . .”

“With Cal.” Lamont steps into a role no one plays better than she does. The DA again. “I think Investigator Garano's made it clear what we've been doing since these serial bank robberies, copper thefts began here in Middlesex County. That part of our sting operation was my communicating with Cal, who's been, to put it mildly, of interest.”

“You knew she was e-mailing Cal Tradd?” Stump asks McClure.

“No. We didn't know who she was e-mailing. The IP came back to Harvard. A machine code isn't helpful unless you can find the machine to compare it . . .”

“I know how it works.” The look on Stump's face.

She probably liked McClure better when she was Raggedy Ann.

“The most recent e-mail indicating you would be meeting this person of interest . . .” McClure starts to say.

“Cal,” Lamont says. “Meet him in the usual place at ten. Meaning here at ten.”

“He didn't turn up,” Killien says.

“Probably saw a posse thundering on the horizon and scuttled away,” Win says. “The kid's used to dodging cops. Has cop radar. So you guys show up and blow everything Monique and I have been working on for months. And that's the problem when you monitor electronic communications, now, isn't it? Especially when you're undercover and monitoring somebody else who's undercover, one sting operation investigating what turns out to be another sting operation, and everybody gets stung.”

 

 

 

Two nights later, the Harvard Faculty Club.

Georgian Revival brick, oil portraits on mahogany-paneled walls, brass chandeliers, Persian rugs, the usual arrangement of fresh flowers in the entryway—so familiar and intended to make him feel out of place. No fault of Harvard's, just another Lamontism. She always summons him to the faculty club when she needs to feel powerful, or more powerful than usual, because she either is secretly insecure or needs him, or both.

Win sits on the same stiff antique sofa he always sits on, the tick-tock of a grandfather clock reminding him Lamont's one minute late, two minutes, three, ten. He watches people come and go, all these academicians, visiting dignitaries and lecturers, or prominent families visiting to investigate whether they should send their prominent children here. One thing he loves about Harvard, it's like a priceless work of art. You never own it. You never deserve it. You just get to visit it for a while, and are a far better person for the association, even if it doesn't remember you. Probably was never even aware of you. That's what he finds sad about Lamont, no matter how much he dislikes her at times, finds her despicable at times.

What she has will never be enough.

She walks in, furling her umbrella, shaking rain off her coat as she slips out of it, heading to the cloakroom.

“You ever notice it always rains when we meet here?” Win asks her as they walk into the dining room, sit at their usual table by a window overlooking Quincy Street.

“I need a drink,” she says. “How about you?” A tight smile, scant eye contact.

This can't be easy for her, and she searches for the waiter, decides it might be nice to have a bottle of wine. White or red? Win says either.

“Why did you do it?” Smoothing her linen napkin in her lap, reaching for her water. “We both know, and for the record, this conversation not only will never happen again, but it didn't happen at all.”

“Then why bother?” he says. “Why did you invite me to dinner if all you wanted was to talk about not talking and exact the promise that we'd never talk about not talking again? Or whatever you just said.”

“I'm in no mood to be glib.”

“Then fire away. I'm listening.”

“Foundation of International Law,” she says. “My father's foundation.”

“I believe all of us know what FOIL is by now. Or what you turned it into. A limited liability company, a front to protect and shield the person behind the purchase of a multimillion-dollar Victorian ruin that will take years to renovate. Too bad you didn't pick some other name, can't help but wonder about the karma of using a name associated with a father who always treated you like . . .”

“I really don't think you're in a position to discuss my father.”

The waiter arrives with a silver bucket of ice, a fine bottle of Montrachet. He uncorks it. Lamont tastes it. Two glasses filled, waiter gone, and Lamont starts looking at the menu.

“I can't remember what you usually get here.” She changes the subject.

Win retrieves it. “More than anyone you know, I'm in a position to discuss your father. Because at the end of the day, Monique, he's why you got yourself into a mess that could have . . .”

“I don't need to hear your version of what it could have done.” Drinking her wine. “Are you really surprised I'd buy another house? Maybe not want to live in the same one? Maybe spend very little time there. Almost none. Actually, I rented an apartment at the Ritz, but driving back and forth from Boston isn't much fun.”

“I understand why you bought a house. I understand why you want to get rid of the one you're in—never understood how you could spend another night there after what happened.” All said carefully. “But let's look at the chain of events and how underlying emotional issues set you up for something you don't want to repeat. Ever.”

She looks around, making sure no one is listening, looks out at the rain, at gaslights and slick cobblestones, her face touched by sadness for an instant.

“Your father died last year,” Win continues in a quiet voice, leaning into their conversation, elbows on the white tablecloth. “Left half of everything to you. Not that you were hurting before, but now you have what most people would consider a fortune. Still doesn't account for your subsequent behavior. You've never been a have-not. So for you to become a wild, crazy spender means something else is going on. Hundreds of thousands of dollars on clothing, a car, who knows what else, all cash. Millions on a house when you already own a multimillion-dollar house, and you rent a place at the Ritz. Cash, more cash, all this cash moving from a French bank to a Boston bank, to who knows how many banks.”