Page 90 of Not a Word

Crane, wearying, closed his eyes for a moment. Catherine finally clued in.

“Oh,” she said.

And here he thought he was done with this kind of work.

The last fifteen years or so had been pretty mundane for Crane. He’d stayed with Wiffel-Smith almost to the end. Evelyn Corby would have been pleased with how things eventually turned out. Her Pentagon Papers weren’t necessary. Wiffel’s addiction to profits was its undoing. The lawsuits mounted. Federal investigations on both sides of the border were launched. Charges filed. Like hanging out in the bunker with Hitler, Crane continued to work for Graham Wiffel right up until the day he went up to the roof of the corporate headquarters and jumped off.

At least, that was how it looked.

Stoking Wiffel’s fears that his office might be bugged, Crane had invited him to the roof to bring him up to speed on his latest adventures in fixing and intimidation. Crane knew the authorities were closing in on Wiffel, and when they did, would he reveal the things Crane had done at his behest?

That wasn’t a chance worth taking.

It couldn’t have been simpler. Crane got Wiffel close to the edge and tossed him off. And on his way back down, he’d left a short note on the man’s desk.

Forgive me.

Crane did a good enough job replicating his boss’s handwriting that the veracity of the note was never questioned.

In his experience, fear was a great motivator. You generally didn’t have to kill people. You just had to scare them. Make them understand there were consequences to not going along. But sometimes, fear wasn’t enough. And when it was your own future on the line, options were limited.

This was looking like one of those times. Crane’s fate was very much tied to Catherine’s.

When and if she got another call, Catherine would see if she could set the hook, then have Crane reel in the culprit.

She got back to him sooner than he’d expected. But it wasn’t about the money drop.

Thirty-One

Alicia had been discharged from Sharnwood first. When Holden got out a week later, she was the first person he phoned.

“How’s it going?” he’d asked her.

“So far, so good. Got a lead on a job but it’s just weekends so I got time Monday to Friday if you want to hang or anything.”

“Let me check with my secretary,” he said, paused, then said, “My schedule appears to be wide open.” He did have a line, he said, on doing some drywall work, but it would be intermittent.

The thing was, Alicia did kind of like him. He was funny, self-deprecating, not full of himself. Did an impression of Ben that was spot-on. And he wasn’t totally wrapped up in himself. He went on one time about frogs, how he used to find them in the pond behind his house, but now you hardly saw them anymore, same with toads, and how if a species vanished, it could throw off the entire ecosystem.

Like she cared about whether toads disappeared from the face of the earth.

But yeah, he was a generally nice, if severely messed-up, guy. So she felt a little badly, lying to him about who her aunt really was.

She’d actually considered coming clean, admitting that based on what he’d revealed, it was as good as certain that his mother had murdered her aunt. But that could go very wrong. He’d probably freak out. And why wouldn’t he? He’d have set his mom up to be arrested. All Alicia had to do was make one phone call and the police would be at Catherine’s door before dinner.

But there was a slight chance that Holden would want to make amends somehow. Be an ally in getting justice for her aunt, even if it meant betraying his mother.

Too risky, Alicia figured.

That was when she started thinking about doing it herself. If you wanted something done right, as the saying goes. Kill the bitch and be done with it. But did she have it in her? She believed she did, but the larger question was whether she could get away with it. She wanted justice for her aunt Evelyn, but she didn’t want to spend the next twenty years in a penitentiary either.

And then she hit on another plan. Something far more poetic. Persuade Holden to get justice for himself.

She would work on him slowly.

The local Tims became a regular spot for them. Coffee, a couple of Boston creams. Talk for hours.

“It’s just so unfair,” she said.