“Really, really, big coincidence?”
She sighed and I could hear her rip into an envelope. “This doesn’t make total sense yet.”
“Agreed,” I said.
“Tell me about Hardiman.”
I did and then I took her through my day as she ripped open more envelopes and said, “Yeah, yeah,” in a distracted tone which would have annoyed me if I hadn’t known her well enough to know she could talk on the telephone, listen to the radio, watch TV, and cook pasta while carrying on a half-conversation with someone else in the room and she’d still hear every word I said.
But halfway through my story, the “yeahs” stopped and I got nothing but silence, and it wasn’t a rapt silence, it was a thick one.
“Ange?”
Nothing.
“Ange?” I said again.
“Patrick,” she said and her voice was so small, it seemed to have no body attached to it.
“What? What’s wrong?”
“I just got a photograph in the mail.”
I stood up from the chair so quickly I could see the lights of the city jerk and slant and spin around me. “Of who?”
“Of me,” she said. Then, “And Phil.”
25
“I’m supposed to be afraid of this guy?” Phil held up one of the photos Angie’d taken of Evandro.
“Yes,” Bolton said.
Phil flapped the photo in his hand. “Well, I’m not.”
“Believe me, Phil,” I said, “you should be.”
He looked at all of us—Bolton, Devin, Oscar, Angie, and myself, packed into Angie’s tiny kitchen—and shook his head. He reached under his jacket and pulled out a pistol, pointed it at the floor and checked the load.
“Jesus, Phil,” Angie said. “Put it away.”
“You got a permit for that?” Devin said.
Phil kept his eyes down, the roots of his hair dark with sweat.
“Mr. Dimassi,” Bolton said, “you won’t need that. We’ll protect you.”
Phil said, “Sure,” very softly.
We waited as he glanced back at the photo he’d left on the counter and back to the gun in his hand and fear began to seep out his pores. He looked at Angie once and then back at the floor and I could tell he was trying to process it all. He’d come home from work and been met outside his apartment by Federal agents who took him over here, where he was informed that someone he’d never met was determined to stop the beating of his heart, probably within the week.
Eventually he looked up from the floor and his normally olive skin was the color of skim milk. He caught my eye and flashed his boyish grin, shook his head as if we were somehow in this together.
“Okay,” he said. “Maybe I’m a little scared.”
The bubble of tension that had hung pregnant in the kitchen popped softly and bled out under the back door.
He laid the gun on the oven top and hoisted himself up on the counter, raised a slightly bemused eyebrow at Bolton.
“So tell me about this guy.”
An agent stuck his head into the kitchen. “Agent Bolton, sir? No signs that anyone’s been tampering with any locks or access areas to the house. We swept for bugs, and it’s clean. Back yard is overgrown and shows no evidence it’s been walked in for at least a month.”
Bolton nodded and the agent left.
“Agent Bolton,” Phil said.
Bolton turned back to him.
“Could you please tell me about this guy who wants to kill me and my wife?”
“Ex, Phil,” Angie said softly. “Ex.”
“Sorry.” He looked at Bolton. “Me and my ex-wife, then?”
Bolton leaned against the fridge as Devin and Oscar settled into chairs and I sat up on the counter on the other side of the oven.
“The man’s name is Evandro Arujo,” Bolton said. “He’s a suspect in four murders in the last month. In every one of these cases, he’s sent photographs to his intended victims or their loved ones.”
“Photos like that one.” Phil indicated the picture of him and Angie which lay on the kitchen table, powdered with fingerprint dust.
“Yes.”
It had been taken recently. Fallen leaves littering the foreground were multicolored. Phil was listening to something Angie was saying, his head down, hers turned toward him as they walked the stretch of grass and pavement which cut through the center of Commonwealth Avenue.
“But there’s nothing threatening about that picture.”
Bolton nodded. “Except that it was taken at all and then sent to Ms. Gennaro. Have you ever heard of Evandro Arujo?”
“No.”
“Alec Hardiman?”
“Nope.”
“Peter Stimovich or Pamela Stokes?”
Phil thought about it. “Both sound vaguely familiar.”
Bolton opened the file in his hand, passed photos of Stimovich and Stokes to him.
Phil’s face darkened. “Wasn’t this guy stabbed to death last week?”
Bolton said, “A lot worse than stabbed.”
“The papers said stabbed,” Phil said. “Something about his girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend being a suspect.”
Bolton shook his head. “That’s the story we leaked. Stimovich’s girlfriend had no ex-boyfriend of note.”
Phil held up the Pamela Stokes photo. “She dead, too?”
“Yes.”
Phil rubbed his eyes. “Fuck,” he said and it came out in a ripple as if riding a laugh or a shudder.
“Have you ever met either of them?”
Phil shook his head.
“How about Jason Warren?”
Phil looked over at Angie. “The kid you were trying to protect? The one who died?”
She nodded. She hadn’t spoken much since we arrived. She chain-smoked and stared out the window facing the back yard.
“Kara Rider?” Bolton said.
“She was killed by this asshole too?”
Bolton nodded.
“Jesus.” Phil came off the counter gingerly, as if not sure there’d be a floor waiting to meet him. He crossed stiffly to Angie, took a cigarette from her pack, lit it, and looked down at his ex-wife.
She watched him the way you’d watch someone who’s just been informed he has cancer, not sure if you should give him space to lash out or stay close to catch him if he crumbles.
He placed a hand on her cheek and she leaned into it and something deeply intimate—some acknowledgment of what rooted them to each other—passed between them.
“Mr. Dimassi, did you know Kara Rider?”
Phil withdrew his hand from Angie’s cheek in a slow caress and walked back to the counter.
“I knew her when she was growing up. We all did.”
“Had you seen her recently?”
He shook his head. “Not in three or four years.” He stared at his cigarette, then flicked ash into the sink. “Why us, Mr. Bolton?”
“We don’t know,” Bolton said and there was an edge of desperate irritation in his voice. “We’re hunting Arujo now and his face will be plastered over every newspaper in New England by tomorrow morning. He can’t hide long. We still don’t know why he’s targeting the people he’s targeting, except in the Warren case where we have a possible motive—but at least now we know who he’s targeting and we can watch both you and Ms. Gennaro.”
Erdham came into the kitchen. “Perimeters of both this house and Mr. Dimassi’s apartment building are secure.”
Bolton nodded and rubbed his face with fleshy hands.
“Okay, Mr. Dimassi,” he said, “here it is. Twenty years ago a man named Alec Hardiman murdered his friend, Charles Rugglestone in a warehouse about six blocks from here. We believe that Hardiman and Rugglestone were responsible for a string of murders at the time, the most notorious of which was Cal Morrison’s crucifixion.”
“I remember Cal,” Phil said.
“Did you know him well?”
“No. He was a couple years older than us. I never heard about a crucifi
xion, though. He was stabbed.”
Bolton shook his head. “Again, a story leaked to the media to buy time and eliminate nutcases who’d confess to killing Hoffa and both Kennedys before breakfast. Morrison was crucified. Six days later, Hardiman went berserk and did the work of ten psychotic men on his partner, Rugglestone. No one knows why, except that both men had large quantities of PCP and alcohol in their systems at the time. Hardiman went to Walpole for life, and twelve years later he took Arujo and turned him into a psychopath. Arujo was relatively innocent when he went in, but now he’s anything but.”
“You see him,” Devin said, “you run, Phil.”
Phil swallowed and gave a small nod.
“Arujo’s been out for six months,” Bolton said. “We believe Hardiman has a contact on the outside, a second killer who either fosters Arujo’s need to kill or vice versa. We’re not positive about this, but we’re leaning that way. For some unknown reason, Hardiman, Arujo, and this unknown third man are pointing us in one direction only—this neighborhood. And they’re pointing us toward certain people—Mr. Kenzie, Diandra Warren, Stan Timpson, Kevin Hurlihy and Jack Rouse—but we don’t know why.”
“And these other people—Stimovich and Stokes—what’s their connection to the neighborhood?”
“We believe they might just be random. Thrill kills, no motivation outside of the kill itself.”
“So why are Angie and me being targeted?”
Bolton shrugged. “Could be a ruse. We don’t know. Could be they’re just trying to rattle Ms. Gennaro’s cage because she’s involved in tracking them. Whoever Arujo’s partner is, they both intended for Mr. Kenzie and Ms. Gennaro to be in this from the start. Kara Rider’s role was specifically designed for that purpose. And then, maybe,” Bolton said, and looked at me, “he’s trying to force Mr. Kenzie to make that choice Hardiman spoke of.”
Everyone looked at me.
“Hardiman said I’d be forced to make some kind of choice. He said, ‘Not everyone you love can live.’ Maybe my choice is between saving Phil or saving Angie.”
Phil shook his head. “But anyone who knows us knows we haven’t been close in over a decade, Patrick.”
I nodded.
“But you used to be?” Bolton said.
“Like brothers,” Phil said and I tried to detect bitterness and self-pity in his voice; I only heard a quiet, sad acceptance.
“For how long?” Bolton said.
“From the crib ‘til we were, like, twenty. Right?”
I shrugged. “Around there, yeah.”
I looked at Angie but she stared at the floor.
Bolton said, “Hardiman said you’d met before, Mr. Kenzie.”
“I never met the man.”
“Or you don’t recall it.”
“I’d remember that face,” I said.
“If you saw it as an adult, sure. But as a kid?”
He handed Phil two photos of Hardiman—one from ’74, the other from the present.
Phil stared at them and I could see he wanted to recognize Hardiman, to have this make sense, for there to be a reason this man had targeted him for death. Eventually he closed his eyes, exhaled loudly, and shook his head.
“I’ve never seen this guy before.”
“You’re sure?”
He handed the photos back. “Positive.”
“Well, that’s too bad,” Bolton said, “because he’s part of your life now.”
An agent drove Phil home at eight, and Angie, Devin, Oscar, and I headed to my place so I could fill an overnight bag.
Bolton wanted Angie to appear vulnerable, alone, but we convinced him that if Evandro or his partner had been studying us, we should appear as normal as possible. And hanging out with Devin and Oscar was something we did at least once a month, though not usually sober.
As for my moving in with Angie, I insisted upon it, whether Bolton gave a shit or not.
Actually, though, he liked the idea. “I’ve thought you two were sleeping together since we met, so I’m sure Evandro assumes the same.”
“You’re a pig,” Angie said and he shrugged.
Back at my place, we settled into the kitchen while I pulled clothes from my dryer and stuffed them into a gym bag. Looking out my window, I saw Lyle Dimmick finishing up for the day, wiping paint off his hands and placing the brush in a can of thinner.
“So how’s your relationship with the Feds?” I asked Devin.
“Deteriorating by the day,” he said. “Why do you think we were shut out of the Alec Hardiman visit this afternoon?”
“So you’re demoted to babysitting us?” Angie said.
“Actually,” Oscar said, “we asked for this specifically. Can’t wait to see how you two do in close quarters.”
He looked at Devin and they both laughed.
Devin found a stuffed frog Mae had left behind on my counter and picked it up. “Yours?”
“Mae’s.”
“Sure.” He held it up in front of him and made faces at it. “You two might want to keep this guy,” he said, “if only to provide some counterbalance.”
“We’ve lived together before,” Angie said and scowled.
“True,” Devin said, “for two weeks. But you’d just walked out on your husband, Ange. And neither of you spent too much time around each other back then, if I remember. Patrick practically moved into Fenway Park and you were always out nights clubbing your way through Kenmore Square. Now, you’ll be forced together for the length of this investigation. Could be months, even years, before it’s over.” He spoke to the frog. “What do you think of that?”
I looked out the window as he and Oscar giggled and Angie fumed. Lyle descended the scaffolding, radio and cooler grasped awkwardly in one hand, bottle of Jack sticking out of his back pocket.
Watching him, something bugged me. I’d never known him to work past five and it was eight-thirty now. Beyond that, he’d told me this morning that his tooth hurt…
“Got any chips around here?” Oscar said.
Angie stood, went to the cabinets over the oven. “With Patrick, a good food supply is never a safe bet.” She opened the left cabinet, rummaged through some cans.
This morning, Mae and I ate breakfast, but that was after I talked to Lyle. After I talked to Kevin. I’d come back in the kitchen, called Bubba…
“What’d I tell you?” Angie said to Oscar and opened the middle cabinet. “No chips here, either.”
“You two’ll get along just fine,” Devin said.
After Bubba, I’d asked Lyle to keep his music down because Mae was still asleep. And he said…
“Last try.” Angie reached for the right cabinet door.
…he didn’t mind because he had a dentist’s appointment and was only working a half day.
I stood up and looked out the window, down into the yard below the scaffolding, as Angie screamed and jumped back from the cabinet.
The yard was empty. “Lyle” was gone.
I looked at the cabinet and the first thing I noticed were eyes staring back at me. They were blue and they were human and they weren’t attached to anything.
Oscar grabbed his walkie-talkie. “Get me Bolton. Now.”
Angie stumbled back along the table. “Oh, shit.”
“Devin,” I said, “that housepainter…”
“Lyle Dimmick,” he said. “We ran a check on him.”
“That wasn’t Lyle,” I said.
Oscar caught on to our conversation as Bolton came over the walkie-talkie.
“Bolton,” Oscar said, “fan your men out. Arujo’s in the area dressed like a cowboy housepainter. He just left.”
“Heading in which direction?”
“I don’t know. Fan out your men.”
“We’re rolling.”
Angie and I took my back stairs three at a time and vaulted the porch railing into my back yard, guns drawn. He could have gone in three directions. If he’d gone west through back yards, he’d still be doing it because there wasn’t a
cross street on this side for four city blocks. If he’d gone north toward the school, he would have run into the FBI. That left south to the block behind mine, or east to Dorchester Avenue.
I took south, Angie went east.
And neither of us found him.
And neither did Devin or Oscar.
And none of the FBI had any luck either.
By nine, a helicopter flew over the neighborhood and they’d brought in dogs, and agents were doing house-to-house searches. My neighbors weren’t too keen on me last year when I nearly brought a gang war to their doorsteps; I could only imagine what ancient Celtic curses they were hurling at my soul tonight.
Evandro Arujo had bypassed the security system by posing as Lyle Dimmick. Any neighbor looking out a window and seeing a ladder propped up by my third-floor windows would just have assumed Ed Donnegan now owned my building too and had hired Lyle to paint it.
The motherfucker had been inside my home.
The eyes, it was assumed, belonged to Peter Stimovich, who’d been found without his own, a detail Bolton had omitted.
“Thanks for telling me,” I said.
“Kenzie,” he said with his perpetual sigh, “I’m not paid to keep you in the loop. I’m paid to bring you into it only insofar as it suits our needs.”
Under the eyes, which a federal ME lifted gelatinously from my cupboard and placed in separate plastic bags, I’d been left another note, a white envelope, and a large stack of flyers. The note said, “sonicetoseeUagain” in the same typeface as the first two.
Bolton took the envelope before I could open it, then looked at the other notes I’d received in the last month. “How come you never came forward with these?”
“I didn’t know they were from him.”
He handed them to a lab tech. “Kenzie and Gennaro’s prints are on file with Agent Erdham. Take the bumper stickers too.”
“What do you make of the flyers?” Devin said.
There were over a thousand of them in two neat stacks bound by rubber bands, some yellowed by age, some wrinkled, some only ten days old. They all showed photographs in the left corner of missing children, with vital statistics listed below the photos, and they all bore the same legend: Have You Seen Me?
Well, no, I hadn’t. Over the years I’d received hundreds of these flyers in the mail, I suppose, and I always looked closely just to be sure, before tossing them in the trash, but in all that time I’d never seen a face I recognized. Receiving them once a week or so, it was easy to forget about them, but now, leafing through them with rubber gloves bound over my hands so tightly I could feel the sweat bleeding from the pores of my palms, it was over-whelming.