3. Dane
Chapter three
Dane
Isteered Cabot past the elevator bank without breaking stride.
He caught the redirect a second late, but he didn’t argue. He never would. Men raised the way Cabot was learned early that visible irritation was a working-class indulgence. He just adjusted his grip on his messenger bag and followed me into the stairwell.
“Two flights,” I said.
“I gathered.”
“You’ll live.”
“I’m less worried about the stairs than about whatever’s waiting at the top of them.”
Eamon had called me last night. He launched into details without an introduction. Stanley Cabot. Society reporter at the Globe. He’s had Harcourt family access for the last fourteen years. Threats started two weeks ago, and the pattern’s wrong. I want you on him. I’m already in Boston.
I’d asked if Cabot knew. He’ll know in the morning. I’m telling him at seven. You pick him up at his home at nine.
Eamon didn’t fly out from Seattle or move that fast unless he had solid reasons. He was trying to get ahead of a running clock by hours, if not days. I didn’t ask. He’d tell me when it mattered.
I’d done what I could with the hours I had. I pulled Cabot’s bylines and read the last year of his work on the Harcourts. Checked his apartment building on Marlborough on a late drive past, the side entrance at the Globe, and the routes between. The rest I’d put together on the fly.
The Guardians took clients who could be told the truth. It was Eamon’s rule, which made it mine. Cabot had been told the truth at seven this morning and had two hours to adjust.
The Globe’s stairwell smelled of old paint. It had concrete steps and steel rails. I listened on the way up. No sounds but our steps.
I pushed through onto the second floor and was hit by a wall of sound. Forty different conversations mingled in an open floor plan. It was a mid-morning newsroom in motion.
Cabot’s frame loosened by half an inch the moment we crossed the threshold. He wasn’t looking for sightlines. He was looking for who was at their desk and who wasn’t.
A copy editor lifted her hand in a brief wave without looking up from her screen. He returned it.
“Sixty seconds at your desk,” I said. “Whatever you need for the next eight hours. Then we’re out.”
“I thought we were meeting here.”
“We’re not.”
He didn’t ask any additional questions. He led me down a row of desks instead, past a cluster of empty chairs to a spot near the window. There, he tucked a notebook into his bag and picked up a coat from the back of the chair.
A man in a Sox cap two desks over was eating a bagel and watching the elevator bank. Two interns by the printer were having a quiet, vicious argument about a byline. Cabot didn’t look at any of them.
He shouldered the bag. “Where, then?”
“Walk with me.”
“I’m walking.”
His voice dropped a register to a tone meant only for me. “Wiley Priest covers militias and money laundering. I cover charity galas. I’m trying to work out what kind of situation this is.”
“I’m as in the dark as you. That’s why we’re meeting.”
We hit the stairwell again on the way down. The side door emptied onto a Financial District side street where a black SUV idled at the curb with its parking lights on. I checked the plate against the one sent at eight-forty. It was a match.
The driver was a Guardians contractor I’d worked with twice before. He didn’t speak. He unlocked the rear and waited for me to put Cabot inside.
Cabot slid across to the far seat without being told. “Where are we going?” he asked.
“Rowes Wharf. Boston Harbor Hotel. Eamon rented a suite.”
“For a meeting?”
“Yes.”
The SUV pulled away from the curb and worked east through the Financial District. State Street was sluggish at this hour, full of luxury cars and couriers. Pedestrians walked faster than the traffic.
“You don’t rent a hotel suite for a routine briefing,” Cabot said.
“No.”
The harbor came into view through the windshield as we crossed Atlantic. Colorless, low-angled November light flattened the boats in the distance. A tanker was clearing the channel, riding high, on its way out. The water looked like cold liquid iron.
We pulled under the Rowes Wharf arch. The driver stopped at a side entrance I’d used twice for principals I couldn’t walk through a lobby.
I got out first. Then I opened Cabot’s door.
“Stay on my left.”
The service corridor was wide and brightly lit. The man at the door, wearing a black suit and earpiece, walked us to a service elevator and keyed in the proper floor without a word. He didn’t get in with us. He stepped back into the corridor and watched the doors close.
Eighteen floors. Cabot stood against the back wall, eyes on the floor indicator. He didn’t speak.
The elevator opened onto a quiet hallway. A single housekeeping cart stood at the far end, abandoned mid-run.
We walked to suite eighteen-twelve at the end of the hall. I knocked once, low. The door opened from the inside before I could knock a second time.
A man I didn’t know held the door for us and stepped back. He closed the door behind us and resumed his position against the foyer wall with his hands loose at his sides.
The suite opened into a sitting room. Cold harbor light shone through tall windows. A round conference table filled the center of the space. It had four chairs and a pitcher of water.
Two people had already arrived. Wiley Priest sat at the table. I recognized him from the photo on the Globe website.
His bodyguard stood beside him.
It was Farrow. The same man who’d been in my bed three weeks ago.
He’d placed himself precisely, standing wide, with his body angled so he could watch both the door and the man at the table.
He saw me come in, and his expression did one specific thing: a small acknowledgment that landed somewhere between hello and we’re going to have to talk about this, and then he composed himself for Cabot.
Farrow wore dark jeans and a black henley pulled tight across his chest, sleeves shoved to the elbows. He’d draped a charcoal leather field jacket over the chair beside him, burnt-orange lining showing where the fold fell open. His boots showed slight wear with brick-red laces, double-knotted.
His blond hair was shorter than the last time I’d seen it; the dark roots were no longer visible. He wore it cropped close on the sides, longer on top.
I pulled my gaze away and took in the rest of the room.
Wiley was at least thirty pounds lighter than the byline photo. The weight loss exposed his facial bone structure and cast veins on the back of his hands in sharp relief.
Cabot spoke first. “Stanley Cabot.”
Wiley blinked himself out of whatever was running in his head and stood. “Wiley Priest.” He extended his hand.
“I know your byline.”
Farrow waited until they finished shaking. Then he looked at me.
“Dane. You’re running him?”
“Yes.”
“Only you?”
“For now.”
Farrow tipped his head a fraction toward Cabot. “Mr. Cabot, good to meet you.”
“Mr.—“
“Blaise Farrow. Most simply call me Farrow.”
The door opened behind me. A prickle ran up the back of my neck. Eamon Price had arrived.
He entered without ceremony, pulling the door shut. Cabot straightened a little. Wiley stopped turning his pen.
“Sit, everyone,” Eamon said.
I took the chair beside Cabot and angled it so I could see the door, the glass behind Wiley, and Farrow in the corner of my eye. Farrow sat close to Wiley, with his back to the wall.
Eamon set a thin folder on the table and didn’t open it.
“Two weeks ago,” he said, “the Harcourt family began receiving threats. They were hand-written and anonymous, mailed to four separate addresses over a ten-day window.”
Cabot’s pen stopped above his notebook. “USPS.”
“Yes.”
“Nobody mails anything anymore.”
“That’s the first interesting element.”
Wiley leaned forward. “What’s the second?”
“The messages are coherent and grammatically correct. It’s the same voice across all four. They read almost like they hired a professional editor.”
“Drafted,” Wiley said. “Drafted, edited, printed, and then mailed. That’s a process.”
“Yes.”
Cabot tapped a finger on the table. “And you’re telling us this is connected to him?” He nodded toward Wiley.
“Yes,” Eamon said.
“Spell it out,” Wiley said.
“Onyx Bay.”
Wiley stopped moving his pen.
“Are you sure?”
“As sure as we can be without seeing them sign a letter.”
“What’s the connection?”
“The vocabulary in the threats matches the vocabulary in the chatter you’ve been flagging for Patterson. Same constructions. Same phrasing patterns. Same hand.”
Wiley exhaled.
Cabot looked between them. “Patterson?”
“My senior editor at the Globe,“ Wiley said. He didn’t take his eyes off Eamon. “I’ve been bringing him my Onyx Bay tracking for almost two years. Two weeks ago, I flagged a vocabulary shift in their channels. It was a new phrase showing up in places it shouldn’t. Symbolic event.”
“It’s the same language that’s in the threats,” Eamon said.
“Patterson’s my editor too,” Cabot said.
Wiley turned his head. “You file through him?”
“The Harcourt features. He pulled me in three weeks ago after the last piece ran. Asked what else I had on the family. He wanted to know if there was anything I held back from print.”
“Did you tell him?”
Cabot hesitated.
“We’re off the record here,” Eamon said.
“Off the record, I only told him the general context. He said he was considering a longer piece on legacy political families.” Cabot’s hand moved a fraction along the seam of his trousers and stopped.
“Which is why we’re sitting in this room,” Eamon said. “You got the call about coordinating.”
“I did,” Wiley said.
“Did he tell either of you why?”
“No,” Cabot said. “He only mentioned this meeting.”
“He saw an overlap,” Eamon said.
Farrow had been quiet through all of it. He spoke now, low and even.
“Is Patterson clear? How obvious is the connection? Does it make sense for him to make it?”
Eamon said, “We don’t know yet. We’re going to find out. For the moment, we treat him as compromised. Nothing passes through him.”