What You See
Authors: Hank Phillippi Ryan
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To my father. For music and poetry, and everything, and especially this:
1971
HANK:
I have no idea what I’m doing, Dad. Every day, I’m just making it up as I go.
DAD:
That’s what everyone’s doing, honey. Just making it up as they go.
It’s not what you look at that matters. It’s what you see.
—Henry David Thoreau
What we see depends mainly on what we are looking for.
—John Lubbock
Things don’t
change
. You
change
your way of looking, that’s all.
—Carlos Castaneda
“
Some
body saw
some
thing. And most of them took pictures of it.” Detective Jake Brogan watched the uniforms try to corral the chaos of tourists and brown-bag-toting Bostonians while two crime scene units unspooled parallel rolls of their yellow plastic tape. Sirens wailed, three EMTs leaped from a red-and-white ambulance, the beeping Walk signal ordered clustering pedestrians to cross Congress Street, and angry drivers honked disapproval as police cadets in orange bandoliers signaled all cars to stop.
Jake had heard screams through the plate-glass window of the Bell in Hand, abandoned his carry-out roast beef sub on the restaurant counter, ran half a block. Found this. Radioed his partner. Lunch hour, now put on hold by murder.
“Wall-to-wall spectators, the good news and the bad news.” Paul DeLuca shaded his eyes with one hand. The two detectives had split up to grab lunch, D opting for the corner Dunkin’s. DeLuca still held his iced coffee, third of the day. “Who called nine-one-one? Anybody run away?”
“That’s what we’re about to find out,” Jake said. “Most cases, nobody saw anything. Here’s the opposite. Too many witnesses. That’s a new one.”
In the center of the circular redbrick plaza, in the noontime shadow of the burnished bronze knee of the Mayor Curley statue, some poor soul in a once-white shirt lay facedown, his running shoes splayed, a navy blue Sox cap teetering on the concrete, the hilt of a knife protruding absurdly between his shoulder blades. Jake had immediately radioed the medical examiner, who was now only minutes away. They’d need to dispatch the cleanup team, too. With the Fourth of July a month from now, the mayor would go ballistic over the growing puddle of red staining this concrete pathway along the visitor-magnet Freedom Trail. So much for the beginning of tourist season.
Across the street, in the teeming marketplace behind Faneuil Hall, persistent vendors offered Sam Adams tricorns,
BOSTON STRONG
T-shirts, and plastic lobster souvenirs. Visitors unlucky enough to witness this noontime stabbing had already received a souvenir they’d likely want to forget. But not until Jake picked their brains. And cell phone histories.
“I want names. I want addresses,” he told DeLuca. “I want their phones and I want their cameras.”
From moment one, Jake knew this would be a mess. Some of these people would lie, some would make stuff up, some would see things that never existed, some would have something to hide. Some would run. Complicating it all, he and DeLuca technically needed individual warrants to seize property. If any onlooker knew the law and gave them grief about it, it’d be even more of a shit show.
He pointed his partner toward the cadets. “The supe sent the new kids to ‘help.’
All
we need. Tell them not to let any witness leave without giving contact information.”
“Where’re we gonna put ’em all, though?” DeLuca sucked a hit of coffee through a clear straw. “The Garden? Maybe they can watch
Disney On Ice
while we get their deets.”
DeLuca had a point. Even the bleachers of the nearby Boston Garden sports arena were no solution. How could Jake keep fifty or so witnesses, from little kids to one guy in a wheelchair, in semi-custody while a group of cadets practiced collecting personal information and asking for photos?
“If we’d gone to Santarpio’s like I wanted, we’d be all the way in Eastie,” Jake said. “Dispatch might have sent someone else to handle this mess.”
“There is no someone else,” DeLuca pointed out. “Vacation time, budget cuts, short staffing. We get the short straw.”
“We get all the straws,” Jake said.
A lanky blue-uniformed EMT wearing lavender latex gloves, black running shoes, and a pencil stabbed through her graying ponytail trotted up to the two of them. She gestured toward the two medics kneeling over the victim.
“Not a whole lot to tell, Detectives. White male, approximately forty-five years old, deceased. Stab wound to the back. Just the one. Happened, I’d say, pretty much instantly,” she said. “We got here at twelve-oh-four. Called it at twelve-oh-five. Knife’s still in, wouldn’t have mattered. Thought the ME should see it as is. We’ll let her look for ID.”
“She’s on the way. Thanks, Doc,” Jake said. EMT Deborah Kratky wasn’t actually a doctor, but she’d been on the job long enough to know as much as any medic. She’d even been there to see a rookie Jake handle his first homicide. It was up in the Blue Hills, a disturbingly arranged female corpse, turned out the victim of a Boston Strangler copycat. Ten years later, Jake no longer felt like throwing up at crime scenes. Not necessarily a good thing. Cops get bored, cops make mistakes. Jake never wanted to get used to murder.
“Anybody know anything?” he asked. “See anything? Say anything?”
“Not to me.” Doc looked back at the crime scene, hands on hips, one eyebrow raised. “Crap. Would
you
stand there? With your little kid? Rubbernecking a dead person? Blood on the sidewalk? I sure wouldn’t, if it wasn’t my job.”
A dusty yellow city bus, emblazoned
GO BSO
, wheezed up to the stop across from the bank. One of the cadets waved both arms at the driver, signaling him to move on. Faces peered from each square window, a puff of exhaust pluming to the curb as the bus pulled away.
“Whoever did it’s gotta be big, lot of muscle. One blow like that?” Jake scanned the crowd for anyone who fit the bill. Would the killer be dumb or strange or crazy enough to hang around? Cadets were taking names, writing on clipboards. Couple of people tried to leave, didn’t succeed. Most were texting, calling, taking photos.
Better not be erasing anything.
Evidence these days was ephemeral. One click of a button, it got zapped into nothing.
“Big? Maybe. Or maybe angry. Or full of adrenaline. Or drugged up. And spattered with blood,” Doc Kratky said. “Maybe. Unless he—or she—has already dropped their clothing somewhere.”
“In which case we’re screwed,” D said.
“One step at a time,” Jake said. “Look at all those phones. Each one’s got a possible photo.”
Might as well try to stay positive. Maybe the days of relying on tiny specks of evidence in glassine bags, untrustworthy eyewitnesses, and fabricated alibis would fade into law enforcement history, as antiquated as a posse on horseback, wiped out by night-scope lenses and twenty-four-hour videos and satellite pings. They’d nailed the Marathon bombers using video from department store surveillance. All they needed to catch this bad guy was someone who’d clicked a cell phone camera at exactly the right time.
“Makes you understand how movie stars feel, right? Paparazzi?” Doc said. “Guess that’s good for you guys, though. Reporters will be here soon, no doubt, trolling for tourist cam photos.”
Ordinarily, Jake would be wondering whether “reporters” might mean Jane. This time he knew it wouldn’t.
“What you see is what you get,” DeLuca said. “Cameras don’t lie.”
“Witnesses do,” Jake said.
Still, whatever was caught on camera could be their ace in the hole. Some of the bars that lined one side of Congress Street, not to mention the monolith City Hall itself on the other side, must have security systems. Those videos they could instantly seize.
“So we won’t transport till the ME—” Jake heard two quick beeps of a horn, Kat’s signal she was arriving. Jake knew she hated the siren.
No rush for me to get there,
she always said.
No need to announce another death.
“Speak of the devil.”
The gawkers turned, each camera and cell phone now pointed toward North Street and the blocky white van, stenciled in black letters
MEDICAL EXAMINER
. The right-side wheels jumped the curb onto the sidewalk. The driver’s-side door clanged open, slammed closed. Jane always referred to Dr. Katharine McMahon as one of those Russian dolls in a doll, all dark hair and red lips and curves. Jane and Kat had taken a month or so to reach feminine détente, but they were okay now. Under her white medical jacket, Jake saw that Kat’s hot pink T-shirt said
LOVE IT LOCAL
.
“See that?” DeLuca whispered. “You bet I will.”
“Have some respect,” Jake said.
“Why start now?” DeLuca said.
* * *
“So why’d you leave the
Register
?”
The very question, word for word, that Jane Ryland feared most. And the very question, word for word, that Jane had no idea how to answer.
Channel 2’s news director, Marshall Tyson, all smiles and pinstripes, office strategically landscaped with award statues and celebrity photos and one duPont gold baton, had sprung it on her, but only after an excruciating half hour of niceties and journalism chitchat, followed by a play-by-play commentary on the A-block of the noon
Eyewitness News
, the broadcast still under way from the newsroom anchor desk outside his corner office.
“Well, it’s complicated,” Jane began.
Complicated
wasn’t even the word. It was a mess, from moment one, a mess.
Jane had walked the gauntlet of speculation, escorted by a chatty assignment desk intern, weaving through the newsroom’s warren of cluttered desks and flickering computer monitors toward Tyson’s office. Jane would be recognized, of course, from back when she was an on-air competitor. In the news business, which “talent” was “crossing the street” to a rival station was the most delicious topic of gossip, even better than who got fired for stealing promotional swag from the mail room, which reporters were getting sued, and why the noon anchor kept so many extra clothes in her office. No outsiders knew the scoop on what happened to Jane at the
Boston Register
last month. And how could she explain it?
In the midst of triumphant headlines at the
Register,
her investigation had uncovered a problem close to home. Jane proved a longtime reporter there had been fabricating stories.
For years.
Bad enough, but the clincher was worse. The newspaper decided to cover it up. Ignore it.
For Jane, that left only two choices.
She could be complicit. Or she could quit.
If she ratted out the paper for using fabricated stories, she’d argued, didn’t it also put articles by
all
the reporters in question? If the public suspected some were partly fiction, would readers ever believe anything?
