tomorrow?” he asks, puzzled. “What’s she going to do?”
I think about it. “My guess? She’s going to call the Benefactor.”
Our young computer genius says not a word to that, but looks like he’s seen a ghost.
Part 3
Chapter Forty-Three
Over the course of the next forty-eight hours absolutely nothing of interest happens. Okay, the Red Sox did somehow manage to win, barely, all three of their away games at Toronto. And a city councilman from Dorchester was found gamboling in the duck pond at the Public Garden, having declared his intention to interfere with the swans. He was stark naked. Lucky for the big birds he was too drunk to accomplish his task. Or maybe lucky for him, considering how aggressively swans tend to respond when under attack from naked councilmen. In Revere, a group of rowdy teens was arrested for underage drinking at the beach, and in Lexington a possibly rabid fox terrorized a neighborhood before lying down to take a nap on someone’s porch and being identified as a perfectly healthy Pomeranian called, appropriately enough, Barker. The dog was taken into custody without incident and returned to its owner.
Okay, so I take it back about nothing of interest happening. I’m learning to be more specific: nothing of interest happened concerning our current case, at least nothing we knew about. We being everyone but Naomi, who spent hours on her secure line, waving me away whenever I happened to approach in a vain attempt to eavesdrop. Whatever she’s up to, she won’t discuss it, although my bets are all placed on our mysterious Benefactor, who, as we know from previous cases, has influence in very high places. Jack occupies himself with legwork, following up on the late Jonny Bing’s possible connection to the frozen corpse found at the foot of his bed in the vain hope that it might somehow, improbably, lead to Joey Keener. Teddy continues to plumb the depths of the World Wide Web, hoping to uncover something that will prove Taylor Gatling’s complicity in the murder of Professor Keener or the abduction of his missing son. Dane has been spending most of her time at the hospital, where Randall Shane continues to improve both physically and mentally, to the point that she’s worried the politically ambitious Middlesex County District Attorney will change his mind and put Shane behind bars while he awaits trial. Everything Shane has recalled in the past couple of days confirms what we already know, which is gratifying but essentially useless.
We still don’t know what we don’t know, and it’s making me as crazy as that overactive Pomeranian snapping at ankles in historic, upscale Lexington, birthplace of American liberty and Rachel Dratch. Our only suspect, Pentagon darling Taylor Gatling, has a motive for silencing the professor, who he suspected of treason, and for framing Randall Shane, revenge served cold, but what possible reason would he have for stealing and keeping Joey Keener? Teddy, whose eyes are beginning to rotate in his head like the cherries on a slot machine, has been unable to find any link with Keener and Gatling, other than the obvious connection having to do with Gama Guards contracting to provide security for QuantaGate. Despite the coincidence of both victim and suspect being from New Hampshire, the two men seem to have had nothing in common. Gatling was raised in the southern part of the state, on the seacoast, to a moneyed-at-the-time family, and Keener bounced around foster homes in the north. Moreover, Keener being ten years older than Gatling, he was already out of state as a Caltech undergrad when Gatling was pulling pigtails in elementary school. Their one undeniable connection is that both profited from Pentagon contracts, but the same could be said of thousands if not tens of thousands of individuals.
In the late afternoon of the second day of nothing, Jack finds me on the roof, where I’ve been watching the dinky sailboats to-ing and fro-ing on the Charles.
“Those are dinghies, not dinkies, and they’re tacking, not to-ing.”
“I say they’re to-ing and fro-ing. Tacking is something upholsterers do.”
Jack laughs, shaking his handsome head. As usual he looks like he just stepped out of the pages of
“What did you tell him?”
“Identity unknown to me. And that if he tried to dig something up, and somehow managed to establish a possible connection between Naomi and a wealthy and influential individual who might be financing this enterprise, he would be fired so quick his Mohawk would smolder from the friction.”
“Fauxhawk. And did you really?”
“I didn’t actually mention his hairdo. But I did remind him that when he came aboard as a full-time employee he signed a document pledging to respect her privacy.”
“There’s nothing there for him to find,” I suggest.
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because if it was there to be found, someone would have found it by now and used it against her. There have been many enemies, many opportunities.”
“Yeah,” he says. “There have at that.”
“Pledging not to look doesn’t mean we can’t speculate. So far I’ve narrowed it down to a former spouse or lover, or a Saudi prince who owes her big-time. Or it could as easily be the Wizard of Oz.”
“You think she has family?”
“Everyone has a family, even if they’re all deceased.”
“Or it’s all Naomi and there’s no Benefactor. That’s just an excuse to tell us we can’t use the jet or whatever.”
“You think she’s been talking to herself for the last two days?”
He shrugs. “I guess not. Sounds stupid when you put it like that.”
I look up at the sky, endless blue but for a few wispy clouds out over the harbor. “Is that an eagle?”
Jack studies where I’m pointing. “Turkey vulture,” he says. “Sometimes mistakenly referred to as a buzzard.”
“But definitely not a drone.”
“Definitely not,” he says.
“I keep thinking of Predator drones equipped with Hellfire missiles.”
Jack takes off his sunglasses, looks me in the eye. “Put it out of your mind, kid. They’d never dare do that on U.S. soil. This is Boston, not Afghanistan.”
“You’re sure?”
“Pretty sure. I’ll be downstairs if you need me.”
“Thanks.”
Can’t say why, exactly, but I sort of like it when he calls me “kid.”
The result of Naomi’s secret machinations arrives in the evening, shortly after dinner (Mrs. Beasley’s special variation on chicken tikka) when we’ve been instructed to take our coffee and lemon cookies into the library and wait quietly like good little employees. The excellent coffee is quaffed, the cookies devoured to the last crumb. Many minutes pass uneventfully. There is much twiddling of thumbs, and some interesting speculation about swans and inebriated councilmen, and the nerve of a certain very private investigator who refuses to drop even the smallest hint about what is supposed to transpire on this fine, early-summer evening
Teddy, haunting the street-side window, finally announces, “It’s a limo.”
We all crowd to the windows. The streetlights are on but the twilight has lingered and the only impediments
