fueling himself on her French press coffee while he makes phone calls to various sources. He joins us in the command center in exactly the time that it takes him to bound up the stairs.
“What have we here?” he asks, focused on the big screen. “If I’m not mistaken, that’s the Keener residence. Taken with some sort of night-vision camera. High quality, from the look of it.”
“Play,” Naomi commands.
The scene doesn’t change, even though the clock is ticking off the frames. Professor Keener’s home on Putnam Avenue, as seen from a slight angle that covers the front porch as well as part of the south-facing side of the house. Obviously, from the steadiness of the scene, the video camera had to have been mounted on some sort of tripod or steadying device. The windows are dark, as if the house itself is sleeping. A minute ticks by. Lights flare onto the front porch and I hold my breath, but it’s only headlights from a passing vehicle.
“My guess, this is a remote,” Jack says. “An operator would have instinctively panned toward the light.”
“We know Gatling had Professor Keener under surveillance,” Naomi says. “Remote cameras make sense. Probably automatic feeds.”
“Right there,” Jack says, pointing.
The guy has good eyes, I’ll grant him that. He’s the first to spot an approaching visitor, screen left. A male of average build, seen from the back as he emerges from the dark of the sidewalk to the slightly more illuminated area of the front porch. The pool of lesser darkness is apparently the result of an unseen streetlight. Whatever the source, the night-vision camera is sensitive enough to show that he’s wearing jeans, sneakers, windbreaker and a ball cap.
“Pause,” Naomi instructs, and this time Teddy obeys. The image on the porch freezes. “Ring any bells?”
Jack shrugs. “Not yet. I’d say young rather than old. Slender rather than fat. Male rather than female.”
“Note the time stamp,” Naomi says. “It could be faked, of course, but it corresponds to the day Keener was killed. 05:10. Military time for 5:10 a.m.”
“A further observation,” Jack says. “Whoever that is on the porch, it’s not Randall Shane.”
“Continue,” Naomi says.
We watch the visitor ring a doorbell, wait. A light comes on upstairs.
“Oh man,” Jack says. “Makes me want to shout out ‘don’t answer the door!’”
But he does answer the door. We follow his progress as lights come on, and less than a minute after the bell was pushed, the door opens.
“Freeze,” says Naomi. “Now try zooming in.”
Teddy makes a face, sucking his teeth. “What if I screw up? We could lose the whole thing.”
“Nonsense. This has been sent to us because he wants us to see it. Just try the normal zoom, centering on his face.”
It works. Teddy sighs with relief.
“Do we all confirm that the man at the door is Joseph Keener?”
We do. The video continues. Keener opening the door wider, the visitor stepping into the hall, the door closing behind him.
“I wonder if they had a camera inside,” Jack says.
I’m hoping there was no inside camera. It’s sufficiently horrible as it is-I really don’t need to see an actual snuff film, thank you very much.
“Are we going to sit through this or fast-forward?” Jack wants to know when nothing happens for another sixty seconds.
“Patience,” Naomi says. “We watch every frame. It can’t be long.”
Long depends on what you’re waiting for. In this particular case, five minutes seems to be an eternity. Finally it happens. No sound-there’s no audio track-but a distinct flash of light from the ground floor, no doubt from the kitchen area.
“God rest him,” Naomi says.
Ten seconds later the front door opens. The man-the killer-steps out, one hand shoved into his windbreaker pocket, the other reaching up to tug down his ball cap.
“Freeze and zoom,” Naomi says.
“I’ll be damned,” Jack says. “I’ve seen his mug shot. That’s Micky Lee. Aka Mr. Baked Alaska.”
Chapter Fifty
Even though I’m a head taller and longer of leg, I still have to run to keep up with Dane Porter. The petite attorney power-walks her way through life, elbows pumping. We’re rocketing through the halls of MGH to bring the good news to Randall Shane, who has just been proven innocent of murder to our satisfaction, if not yet to the D.A.’s. There’s still a uniformed officer outside his door, and Dr. Gallagher, making notes on her chart, wants a word before we enter.
“It’s a good news, bad news kind of deal,” the young doc says, glancing down at her charts. “The good news is, Mr. Shane is recovering faster than we ever expected, considering the physical and mental trauma he sustained. The bad news is, because he’s so much better they’re pushing to have him transferred to the Middlesex Jail.”
“Old news,” Dane assures her. “The real killer has just been identified. The D.A. will come around once he’s had time to digest the latest evidence.”
The doctor breathes a sigh of relief. “I knew he couldn’t be guilty after I checked him out on Google. Do you know he’s rescued something like twenty kids?”
“We were aware of that, yeah,” Dane says with a grin.
“They offered him a TV show,
Inside the suite we find Randall Shane sitting up in his chair, massaging the thick plastic band of the ankle monitor. Looking, as his doctor implied, pretty darn chipper for a man who had been tortured half to death not so long ago. In addition to radiating health he also looks faintly embarrassed, possibly as a consequence of being gushed over.
“Hey, big guy.”
That’s Dane Porter, popping through the door like a gorgeous little cuckoo expelled from her clock.
“Did you know that’s what they call you, your fans? I mean the medical staff. The Big Guy. I need to be more formal, being an attorney, so I’m thinking maybe of going with The Large Dude.”
“Please don’t.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Dane says, effervescent with good tidings. “Shane you are and Shane you shall be. Did Dr. Gallagher happen to mention Tommy Costello is getting a little antsy? She did? Well, we’re here to put your mind at rest. We just received evidence, physical evidence, that’s going to result in all charges being dropped. Maybe not today, but in the next few, that’s guaranteed.” She makes a sweeping gesture in my direction and says, “Alice? Tell him the wicked good news.”
When I tell Shane about the surveillance video that identifies the shooter he shakes his head and says, “Who the hell is Micky Lee?”
“He may have been an acquaintance of Jonny Bing, the entrepreneur,” I say. “We’re running that down. We’re assuming this was a hired hit, but we don’t yet know who did the hiring or why, exactly.”
Dane says, “The point is, you’re off the hook, or soon will be. Plus there have been some interesting developments. One of whom just happens to be drop-dead gorgeous.”
Over the course of the next ten minutes, the attorney tells him, very succinctly, about the extremely large- caliber bullet fired into the residence, as well as the arrival of Michelle Chen, also known as Ming-Mei, her triad background as the mistress of a dragon head and the real circumstances of Joey’s abduction.
“So that’s what happened,” Shane says when the summation is complete. “That’s why everything changed. The kid was being bounced between the two sides, both trying to get leverage on his father. Chasing the dream of a functioning quantum computer. You say your boss is convinced that Gatling is the one who had the boy lifted from
