“Pete gave me his take on it,” she said. “I’d already gotten another from the papers.”
“You can see why I like using them as tinder then,” he said.
She smiled a little.
“The thought had occurred to me,” she said. “In light of today’s events, it also strikes me that you have a knack for making enemies in the wrong places.”
Ricci hesitated for the barest moment. “You read the version where they say I’m an uncontrollable maverick, or the one where I’m called an outright disgrace to the Boston police department?”
“Both, actually, but I tend to ignore the descriptive nouns and home in on the bare facts,” she said. “A kid falls to his death from an Ivy League campus rooftop. The group of frat boys who were up there with him claim it’s a terrible hazing accident. Too many beers, reckless behavior. As the city’s chief homicide detective, you head what everyone expects to be a perfunctory investigation, until the coroner’s report reveals there was no alcohol in the deceased’s bloodstream. You start digging around, find out the boys who were on that roof are heavily into dealing drugs and other unsavory after-school projects, then find out there’s been some bad blood between the group leader and the kid who was killed. The alpha gets charged with first-degree murder; his friends deal down in exchange for their cooperation as state’s witnesses. There’s a trial and he’s found guilty, which should mean a mandatory twenty-five-to-life sentence. But the jury’s verdict is overturned by the judge and he walks on a technicality. Something about an error in how certain evidence was processed by the medical examiner’s office.” She paused. “How am I doing so far?”
Ricci’s eyes held to her firmly.
“You don’t mind, I’ll wait for the next part before rating you,” he said.
Megan nodded. The log in the woodstove popped and spat sap, flames flaring brightly around it.
“Next you do a spate of media interviews repudiating the judge, arguing that the error shouldn’t have been enough to get the case into Appellate Court, let alone warrant nullification from the bench,” she said. “Even more seriously, you allege that the judge was bought and paid for by the killer’s father. They go on television with their counterclaims, say you have some kind of personal ax to grind. A number of details from your departmental records are leaked to the press, including information that you’d received counseling for problem drinking and depression while on the force. There are stories that you have a bad attitude. When it’s all over, the kid is still free and you’ve turned in your badge. The general impression is that you were given the choice of either resigning or being discharged without pension.”
She sat quietly again, watching him.
“That’s not bad, far as it goes,” Ricci said. “But there’s also what you left out.”
“I didn’t want to sit here giving a recitation,” she said. “It might be better to hear the rest from you. If you care to tell it.”
Ricci nodded. “Sure,” he said. “In the interest of good public relations.”
She waited without comment.
“The murdering little prince’s father was a Beacon Hill millionaire,” he said. “I learned during the trial that the judge belonged to the same A-list country club as Dad, which in my opinion ought to have been enough to have him removed from the case. Prosecution could’ve taken it up in district court, but didn’t, and since it’s their call I couldn’t let myself worry about it. After the trial’s over, though, I hear from a couple of staffers at the club that there were three separate meetings between Dad, the judge, and the oak wainscoting while the jury was in deliberation. One of them’s the manager, a solid guy who’s been working there forty years and has no reason to be spinning tall tales. Came forward out of feeling guilty, like the other two.” He shrugged. “They denied it later on, when I went public.”
“Somebody cured their guilt,” Megan said. “Money and power being the prescribed remedy. If I’m to believe your version.”
Dead silence. Ricci looked hard at her, the fire tossing shadows across his angular features.
“What is it exactly that bothers you about me?” he said at last.
His blue eyes level and probing.
She opened her mouth as if to reply, closed it, and merely stared back at him without saying anything.
“I believe it,” Nimec said, breaking into the silence. “His account, that is.”
Ricci turned to Nimec, leaving Megan surprised by her own relief at being out from under his steady gaze.
“I don’t need an advocate,” Ricci said.
“Your credibility shouldn’t be at issue here.”
Ricci’s features beamed with sudden intensity. “I told you I don’t need to be defended. Not by you or anybody else.”
Megan raised her hand in a curtailing gesture.
“Wait,” she said. “I’m not trying to be antagonistic, and apologize if that’s how I came across. It’s been a wearing day.”
Ricci looked at her in silence, those penetrating eyes back on her face.
“I think we should take a step back,” she said. “Concentrate on your feelings about the job with UpLink.”
Ricci looked at her a while longer. At last he exhaled audibly.
“I don’t know,” he said. “To be straight, I’m not sure it’s something I’d want any part of, or even that I’ve got the background for. This is big stuff. Seems to me you ought to be looking at heavy artillery, not a Police Special.”
Nimec leaned forward, his hands clasped on his lap.
“Except that the background you’re so quick to dismiss includes four years with SEAL Team Six, an elite within an elite created for antiterrorist operations,” he said. “And that’s just for openers.”
“Pete—”
Nimec cut him short. “After leaving the military in ’94 you joined the Boston police, earned your first-class detective shield in record time. Worked deep cover with the Organized Crime Task Force, an assignment for which you were particularly well-suited because of your experiences with ST 6, where one of your special areas of expertise was infiltration techniques. Upon conclusion of a major racketeering investigation you requested a transfer to the Homicide Division and stuck with it until the bad affair we’ve been talking about.”
Ricci knelt there by the stove, looking across the room at him.
“Running down my stats doesn’t change how I feel,” he said. “There are ten years between me and the service. That’s a long time.”
Nimec shook his head.
“I don’t get you, Tom,” he said. “Nobody’s twisting arms, but this isn’t a take-it-or-leave-it proposition. It deserves fair consideration. By all of us. We should at least agree to—”
He abruptly broke off. Set to its vibration mode, the palm phone in his shirt pocket had silently indicated he was receiving a call.
“One second,” he said, holding up his pointer finger.
He took out the phone, flipped open the mouthpiece, and answered.
His features showed surprise, then sharp attention, then a mixture of both.
It was Cody from Mato Grasso.
Speaking in the same tone of controlled urgency he had used with Roger Gordian, Cody ran down the situation in Brazil for the second time in less than ten minutes, his voice routed via that nation’s conventional landlines to an UpLink satellite gateway in northern Argentina, transmitted to a low-earth-orbit communications satellite, electronically amplified, retransmitted to a tracking antenna operated by a local cellular service in coastal Maine, and sent on to Nimec’s handset all virtually instantaneously.
Nimec asked something in a hushed voice, listened, whispered into the phone again, and ended the call.
“Pete, what is it?” Megan said, reading the deep concern on his face.
He kept the phone open in his hand.
“Trouble,” he said. “A level-one in Brazil.”
She looked at him knowingly. His use of the code meant a crisis of the gravest nature had occurred, and that he did not want to go into details about it in Ricci’s presence.
“Roger been informed?” she asked.
