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“Do you have any idea the kind of earth the government is willing to scorch to get to you now? And it goes without saying that your pardon’s out the window.”
“I don’t care about the pardon. But I gave you my word I’d look into Devine.”
“So you’ll do it?”
“I’ll look into it. That’s all. Stay out of my way. I’ll be in touch if I need you.”
“You don’t set the rules.”
“Templeton.Really?”
Click.
At HQ Naomi headed along the catwalk, glass-walled offices scrolling by on her right side. Paddy glanced up from his desk as she entered. His wrists looked raw, and a purple-black bruise had bloomed on his cheek.
She flicked him on the nose.
His eyes widened, and he jerked back in his chair.
“Asshole,”she said.
25
A World Apart
The white Colonial clapboard house was accented with a red door and navy shutters so dark they passed for black in the foggy soup of a Massachusetts dusk.
Across the street in the shadow of aNEIGHBORHOOD WATCHsign, Evan sat in a rental car he’d liberated from a Hertz maintenance site in East Boston. The Buick Regal required only light body work on a dinged-up passenger-door panel, but the facility was backlogged, the repair not scheduled until the following week. He’d slipped into the indoor parking lot during lunch break, lifted the key from one of myriad hooks on the service board. The abundance of tools made it easy for him to remove the Lojak, and he’d stashed the NeverLost GPS unit in the trunk of another vehicle before driving off.
He probably could have booked a car safely with one of his fake identities, but he’d been on the receiving end of Naomi Templeton’s focused competence before he’d given her reason to take her pursuit of him personally. He thought it better to raise his securityprotocols from highly cautious to paranoid. So as to leave no footprint at a hotel, he’d returned to the private jet to eat a meal of red wine–braised beef with polenta and take a nap. It was an arrangement he could get used to.
Joey had generated a dossier of the double murder. The bodies had been dumped in Angela Buford’s apartment in a tenement building in Mattapan, a Boston neighborhood south of the city center. Before his death Johnny Seabrook had been beaten up badly, bruised face, torn ACL. He’d been shot once from behind, his hand impaled with a blade, and his throat slashed.
Angela Buford’s head had been raked around on her swanlike neck, sending C2 vertebra fragments into her brain stem. Even for a woman as delicately boned as Angela, it would have taken an enormous amount of strength and expertise to provide sufficient torque to end her.
Evan had tried and failed at this very move once and had been left to contend with an enraged Serb sporting a sore neck.
According to the medical examiner’s report, Johnny and Angela’s time of death had occurred between eighteen and twenty-four hours before their bodies were discovered, which put the murders on Labor Day. Devine’s men had provided investigators with the guest list for the party that evening, establishing that neither victim had been in attendance.
Joey had included Zoom Earth links showing Devine’s Southampton compound. Cushioned on either side with lush green lawns, the mansion perched on the strip of Meadow Lane between the Atlantic and Shinnecock Bay. It was named Tartarus, a wicked bit of wordplay from the original owner, a Scotsman who’d built his fortune producing merino kilts for Royal Mile tailors in Edinburgh.
If in fact the murders had taken place there as Ruby suspected, it would have required a hell of an operation to move two bodies across state lines to throw investigators off the scent. From everything Evan had seen of Luke Devine and his security cadre, they were capable of a hell of an operation.
Evan looked up from the crime-scene photos on his phone to the Seabrook house once more. It was a suburban spectacle. Thebrick walkway picked up the dulled red of dueling chimneys rising from the steeply pitched roof of the second floor. Colonials could be counted on for pleasing symmetry—a forthright rectangular front with a four-columned porch, geometric shrubs, matching windows below, twinning dormer windows above.
Contrasted with the image on his RoamZone—Johnny Seabrook laid out in a broken-limbed sprawl on a tenement floor—the Wellesley house was a world apart. And yet death had strolled up that brick walkway, rung the doorbell, and brought the horrors of the world across the threshold anyway.
Evan wondered what it said about him that he felt more at ease in dump-site tenements than in a proper home like the one before him.
The Seabrooks had upgraded to a “smart system” a few years back, and Joey had jumped Evan onto the Wi-Fi network with credential stuffing via the ecobee thermostat, giving him control of the security cameras, the video doorbell, and even the dimmers should the need for romantic lighting suddenly present itself as a tactical imperative.
Deborah Seabrook, on the cusp of sixty, was a onetime soap-opera actress. Her husband, Mason, was a psychologist. The amusement of Evan’s traveling across the country from Los Angeles to wind up at the house of an actress and a therapist was not lost on him.
He was tempted to avoid both thespian and shrink and talk to Ruby separately, but the thought of someone addressing an issue of this weight with Joey behind his back made him feel murderous. So there it was. A green shoot of familial empathy.
He grimaced, annoyed at himself.
Then he walked up and rang the doorbell, watching his own face appear on the RoamZone as he did.
