The Front (5 page)

She points a latex-sheathed finger at the note, says, “Same spelling and punctuation, same block printing.”

“You should wear cotton examination gloves. Latex can smear pencil, some inks. This piece of paper from the same notepad?” he asks.

“Wow. So you know about indented writing, too.”

“You used electrostatic detection?”

“Holy smoke. And you know about ESDA, too. You're quite the brain trust. As if we have an ESDA, by the way,” she says, annoyed. “And if we'd asked you guys? Well, maybe ten years later you'd get around to it. Anyway, oblique lighting did the trick. Each note shows the impressions of the last note written.”

“The guy wants us to know it's him,” Win says.

“Us? There's no us. How many times do I have to tell you? And you can quit trying to insert yourself into my life, because it's not going to work. I'm not helping you with your publicity stunt.”

“I'm sure Janie Brolin wouldn't appreciate your considering her murder a publicity stunt.”

Stump wishes he would go away. For his own damn good.

She says, “Why might this bank robber want us to, quote ‘know it's him'?”

“Maybe he's showing off. Maybe he's some kind of thrill seeker—gets off on all this.”

“Or maybe he's just plain stupid, doesn't realize each time he writes a note, he leaves indentations of it on the sheet of paper below it,” she says.

“What about latent prints? Anything on the other three notes?”

“Nothing. Not one damn fingerprint, not even a partial.”

“Okay, then he's not stupid,” Win says. “Otherwise, he wouldn't keep getting away with it. Middle of the day. And no fingerprints. Not even partials. You used ninhydrin?”

It is an inexpensive, tried-and-true reagent used to develop latent fingerprints on porous surfaces such as paper. The chemical reacts to the amino acids and other components of oils and sweat secreted from the skin's pores. She tells him it hasn't worked on any of the notes, nor have forensic light sources with various bandwidths and special filters.

“And the tellers aren't touching the notes,” Win says.

“Just leave them right where they are. Bottom line? We've got nothing. And unless this dude's wearing magic gloves that are invisible to the naked eye, there's no logical explanation for why he isn't leaving a trace of his identity on what now is four notes. Even in cases where there's no usable ridge detail, people who don't wear gloves leave something. A finger mark. A smear. A partial print from the side of the hand or the palm.”

“Surveillance videos in all four cases?” Win asks.

“Different clothing, but looks like the same guy to me.”

“You mind if I ask you something?”

“Probably.”

“Why did you become a teacher and then quit?”

“I don't know. Why are you wearing a gold watch? You fix some rich person's parking ticket, maybe let him off the hook for driving two hundred miles an hour in his Ferrari or something? Or maybe you really are a bank robber.”

“My dad's. Before that, his dad's, before that, Napoléon's—just kidding, although he was fond of Breguets,” Win says, holding out his wrist to show her. “According to family legend, stolen. Some of my esteemed relatives in the Old Country could have auditioned for
The Sopranos.
”

“You sure as hell don't look Italian.”

“Mother was Italian. Father was black, and a teacher. A poet, taught at Harvard. I'm always curious why people want to be teachers, and it's rare I come across one who felt the calling, went to all the trouble, then quit.”

“High school. Lasted two years. The way kids are these days, I decided I'd rather arrest them.” Opening cabinets, returning various bottles of chemicals, dusting powders, crime lights, camera equipment, her hands nervous and awkward. “Anyone ever tell you not to stare? It's impolite. You stare worse than a baby,” she says, sealing the bank robber's note in an envelope. “Last resort would be to swab for DNA. But no point, in my opinion.”

“If he's not leaving sweat, not likely he's leaving DNA, unless he's shedding a lot of skin cells or sneezing on the paper,” Win says.

“Yeah. Try wasting state police lab time on that one. Two years now I've been waiting for results on that girl who got raped in the Boneyard. The cemetery near Watertown High School. Not about bones. About smoking joints. Three years I've been waiting for results on the gay guy who got beaten to a pulp on Cottage Street. And forget all the hair salon breaks, what's going down in Revere, Chelsea, on and on. No one's going to take anything seriously until people start getting murdered right and left,” she says.

They step out on the truck's diamond-plate steel platform; she shuts the vertical rear doors, locks them. He walks her to her unmarked Taurus, dull paint job, lots of dings on the doors, and she gets inside, waiting for him to stare at her leg, waiting for him to ask some stupid question about how she drives with a fake foot. But he's subdued, seems oblivious, is gazing off at her two-story brick police department, old and tired and much too small. As is true of most departments in Lamont's jurisdiction, no room to work, no money, nothing but frustration.

She starts the car, says, “I'm not going near the Janie Brolin case.”

“Do what you gotta do.”

“Believe me, I am.”

He leans closer to her open window, says, “I'm working it anyway.”

Her hand shakes a little as she adjusts the fan, and cool air blows on her face. She says, “Lamont this, Lamont that. And you snap to attention, do whatever she says. Lamont, Lamont, Lamont. No matter what, she gets what she wants and everything turns out great for her.”

“I'm surprised you'd say that after what she went through last year,” Win says.

“And that's the problem,” Stump says. “She'll never forgive you for saving her life, and she'll punish you for the rest of yours. Because you saw her . . . Well, forget it.” She doesn't want to think about what he saw that night.

She drives off, watches him in the rearview mirror, wonders where the hell he got that piece-of-junk Buick. Her cell phone rings, and her heart jumps as it occurs to her it might be him.

It's not.

“Done,” says Special Agent McClure, with the FBI.

“I guess I'm supposed to celebrate,” Stump says.

“Was afraid of that. Looks like you and I need to have another little face-to-face. You're starting to trust him.”

“I don't even like him,” she says.

 

 

It's twenty of ten when he parks across the street from the courthouse, surprised to see Lamont's car in her reserved space by the back door.

Just his luck she's decided to work late, and it would be just like her to assume his showing up to clear out some of his desk is a ruse. She's so vain, she'll be convinced his real intention is to see her, that he somehow knew she'd be here at this hour, that he can't stand the thought of not being across the hall from her anymore. What to do. He needs files for court cases, his notes, personal items. It occurs to him it would serve her right if he cleared out his entire office, make her wonder if he's ever coming back. He rolls down his window as his phone vibrates. Nana. Second time she's called in the past hour. This time he answers.

“You're usually asleep by now,” he says.

His grandmother keeps odd hours, takes her superstitious shower right after it gets dark. Goes to bed, gets up around two or three in the morning, starts fluttering about the house like a luna moth.

“The nonhuman has stolen the essence of you,” she says. “And we must work fast, my darling.”

“She's been trying for years, still hasn't touched my essence.” As he watches the back of the courthouse, the top floor lit up. The county jail. Can't get his mind off Lamont. “Don't you worry, Nana. My essence is safe from her.”

“I'm talking about your gym bag.”

“Don't worry about my laundry, either.” He doesn't show his impatience, wouldn't hurt Nana for the world. “I probably won't be able to drop by tomorrow, anyway. Unless you need your car?”

“As I was on the threshold of sleep, the thing came in and I ordered it back out the door. You've gotten mixed up in far more than you bargained for,” she says. “It took your gym bag to steal your essence! To wear you like its own skin!”

“Wait a minute.” He focuses on the conversation. “Are you telling me someone broke into your house and stole my gym bag?”

“The thing came in and took it. I went out into the yard, then the street, and it drove off before I could pin it inside my magic circle.”

“When was this?”

“Soon after it got dark,” she says.

“I'm coming over.”

“No, my darling. There's nothing you can do. I cleansed the doorknob, cleansed the kitchen of the evil energy from top to bottom . . .”

“You didn't . . .”

“Eradicated its impure, evil energy! You must protect yourself.”

She begins her litany of protective rituals. Kosher salt and equilateral crosses. Draw a pentacle over a photograph of himself. White candles all over the place. Octagonal mirrors on all of his windows. Hold the telephone against his right ear, never the left, because the right ear draws bad energy out, while the left ear draws it in. Finally, she exclaims,
“Something bad's going to happen to the one who did this!”
And her Nana laugh, a good-hearted cackle as he ends the call.

She's always been unusual, but when she gets “on her broom,” as he puts it, she unnerves the hell out of him. Her bouts of premonition and clairvoyance, her spates of casting curses and spells, resurrect old feelings of foreboding, distrust, maybe even blame. Magic Nana. What good was she when it came to the worst thing that's ever happened to him? All those promises about what the future held. He could go anywhere, be anything, the world was his to seize. His parents didn't want another child because he was so special, he was enough. Then that night, and Magic Nana never saw it coming and certainly didn't prevent it.

That chilly night when she took her adoring grandson on one of her secret missions, and she had not the slightest sense that something was terribly wrong. How was that possible? Not even the faintest foreshadowing, not even when they got home and opened the door and were greeted by the most absolute silence he's ever experienced in his life. He thought it was a game at first. His parents and his dog in the living room, pretending to be dead.

After that he didn't go on any of Nana's secret missions, has never had any interest in the same mystical guidance so many other people seem to need. All while he was growing up, this parade of strangers in and out of the house. The bereft, the helpless, the desperate, the frightened, the sick. All paying her whatever they could, whatever their commodity might be. Food, hardware, clothing, art, flowers, vegetables, handiwork, haircuts, even medical care. It never has mattered what or how little, but it has to be something. Nana calls it an “equal exchange of energy,” her belief that an imperfect ebb and flow of giving and receiving is what causes everything that's wrong in the world.

Without a doubt, it's the root of what's wrong between Win and Lamont. There sure as hell's no quid for her quo. He stares at her retractable-hardtop black Mercedes, as shiny as volcanic glass, about a hundred and twenty grand, forget pre-owned. She doesn't care what she pays, is too proud to ask for discounts, or more likely enjoys the rush of being able to afford sticker price, afford whatever she wants. He imagines what that must be like. To be a lawyer, an attorney general, a governor, a senator, to have money, to have an extraordinary wife and children who are proud of him.

It will never happen.

He couldn't get into law school, business school, a doctoral program—Ivy League or otherwise—not even if he were a Kennedy or a Clinton. Couldn't even get into a decent college, his application to Harvard probably laughed at, didn't matter that his father had been a professor there. Good thing his parents weren't around when his high-school guidance counselor commented that for such a “bright boy,” Win had the lowest SAT scores she'd ever seen.

Lamont suddenly emerges from the courthouse back door in a hurry, briefcase, keys in hand, wireless earpiece pulsing blue as she talks on her cell phone. He can't hear what she's saying, but it's obvious she's arguing with someone. She gets into her Mercedes, speeds right past without noticing him, has no reason to recognize Nana's car. He has a funny feeling, decides to follow her. He stays several cars behind her on Broad Street, then on Memorial Drive along the Charles River, back toward Harvard Square. On Brattle Street, she tucks her Mercedes in the driveway of a Victorian mansion worth six, maybe eight, million, he guesses, because of the location and size of the lot. No lights on, looks unlived-in and poorly maintained except that the grass is mowed.

He drives around the block, parks a couple streets away, grabs a small tactical light he always keeps in Nana's glove compartment. He trots back to the house, notices the grass and some of the shrubbery are wet. The irrigation system must have been on earlier. A curtained window dimly lights up, a barely discernible glow, barely wavering. A candle. He moves silently and out of sight, freezes when he hears a back door opening, shutting. Maybe her, maybe someone else. She's not alone. Silence. He waits, contemplates barging into the house to make sure Lamont's all right, has a bad feeling of déjà vu. Last year. Her door ajar, the gas can in the bushes, and then what he discovered upstairs. She would have died. Some people say what happened to her was worse than death.