The screen cut to an elderly woman with olive skin and a crooked nose holding up a pair of thick glasses. She stood under an umbrella but her stringy brown hair was damp from the rain. She spoke in broken English.
‘I was on the phone talking to my daughter when I hear popping sounds like firecrackers. But didn’t think it was firecrackers so I call police.’
‘How did you know the gunshots came from the Reynolds home?’ the reporter asked.
‘I sit by open window smoking my cigarette and hear
‘What did you see, Miss Fucilla?’
Jamie felt a sickening dread crawling across her skin.
‘I saw a man come walking out of house,’ the elderly witness said. ‘I didn’t get a good look at his face. His head was tilted down because of the rain. He wore Red Sox windbreaker and baseball hat.’
Jamie sighed deeply, the tension dissolving inside her chest.
The screen had switched back to the reporter. ‘Police confirmed that a male victim was found shot to death inside the house but won’t release the name or any further details regarding the human remains discovered inside the basement.
‘Mary Sullivan, mother of Kevin Reynolds, died last month. Local residents have spotted Kevin Reynolds in Charlestown during the past few weeks and told us he was getting ready to put his mother’s home up for sale.’
Now a split screen of the reporter and the newsreader.
The newsreader said, ‘Is Kevin Reynolds a suspect?’
‘Police have refused to comment but cited him as a person of interest,’ the reporter replied. ‘They are asking any resident who sees Kevin Reynolds to call.’
The screen switched again to show a photograph of Kevin Reynolds. The picture had been taken some time ago, Jamie thought. Reynolds had a pie-shaped face and pug nose, but his curly hair was brown, not grey. And his clothing was straight out of the eighties: rose-tinted sunglasses and a thick gold chain draped over a white Champion T-shirt worn so tight it showcased his budding man boobs.
A toll-free number flashed across the bottom of the screen. The reporter promised to bring viewers more details as the story developed.
Jamie felt certain Reynolds was one of the men who had murdered her husband. She knew she had to move on him quickly. First, she had to find a way to bring him out of hiding.
She got up from the sofa, wiping her damp palms on her shorts and nursing the idea she’d been mulling over since leaving Charlestown this afternoon. She was about to shut off the TV – she needed to get Carter out of the bathtub – when the newsreader launched into a story outlining Kevin Reynolds’s history with Frank Sullivan.
On the TV screen, a black-and-white mug shot of Frank Sullivan’s first arrest at twenty-two. He had thick and wavy blond hair and wore a trench coat. He held a Boston Police arrest card a few inches below his freshly shaved chin.
He had a scar on his right wrist – and it was of the same size and shape as the one Ben Masters had had.
She blinked, figuring her mind was playing a trick on her. The scar was still there. Same size, same shape.
She shifted her attention to Frank Sullivan’s big ears sticking out from the sides of his head.
Ben had had the same ears.
Now pictures of a younger-looking Sullivan flashed across the TV screen. She was dimly aware of the horse- toothed newsreader saying something about how Sullivan, an only child born in East Boston to a single mother, had started off his career stealing cars before graduating to armed robbery. He was arrested for holding up a bank in Chelsea and served two years in a Cambridge prison.
Next, a surveillance photograph of a much older Francis Sullivan taken, according to the newsreader, the month before he died during a botched FBI raid on Boston Harbor. Sullivan bald on top, the hair on the sides of his head completely grey. Big ears and a wrinkled curtain of flesh dangling underneath his chin.
Ben had had the same rooster neck when she’d seen him inside her house. He’d had the exact same scar and –
She tuned out the voice as she grabbed the remote control, frantically searching for the pause button. There. She pressed it, freezing the picture, and then dropped the remote and ran for the basement.
33
Jamie opened a drawer in Dan’s desk and took out Ben Masters’s passport and licence. She clutched the items as she ran back upstairs to the living room.
She opened the passport and held the photograph up against the TV screen, next to the picture of an older Frank Sullivan.
Ben had smaller nostrils but his nose was the same long, angular shape as Frank Sullivan’s. Both faces were oblong. Same high forehead. And both men had square jaws and cleft chins.
Differences: Ben’s rooster neck was gone. The skin on his face was tight and smooth, not a wrinkle anywhere. He had a full head of black hair.
Yes, she did.
Frank Sullivan was Ben Masters. There was no question in her mind.
She had encountered a handful of men in Wellesley – successful big-time executives who had undergone minimally invasive nips and tucks that, after a week of healing, left them looking relaxed and refreshed, as though they had taken a long vacation. These middle-aged men were struggling to maintain their youth. Nothing terrified a man more than losing his sex appeal to younger women, who, when you got right down to it, weren’t paying attention to them anyway.
To complete his transformation to Ben Masters, Frank Sullivan had undergone a complete craniofacial reconstruction. He’d got himself a new head of hair but hadn’t tucked his ears or done anything to hide the dimple on his chin. Maybe no one would recognize Frank Sullivan passing by in the street, but if you put these two photographs side by side anyone could see the similarities.
It didn’t answer.
Jamie grabbed the remote and pressed PLAY.
She had to wade through five more minutes of commentary and then came the segment of Frank Sullivan’s death during an FBI raid in the summer of 1983. Two of Frank’s associates had died, along with four FBI undercover agents who’d been placed on the boat – Jack King, Peter Alan, Steve White and Anthony Frissora.
The men’s four pictures came on the TV. Jamie hit PAUSE.
Peter Alan… He bore a close resemblance to the man she’d shot in the basement – and Kevin Reynolds had
