11. Dane #2
“Patterson was trying to break the chain. He couldn’t break it from inside. He couldn’t email the information. He had to write it down and walk it to us, but they found out he was doing that, and they couldn’t let him.”
“Yes.”
“We have to finish breaking the chain.”
“Cabot.”
“I’m not asking.”
“I know you’re not, but you have to know what comes with that. The minute you sit at this table with Wiley and start putting names against names, you become the man they have to stop, a target, like Patterson.”
“I’m already that. It’s the reason Patterson hired you.”
My phone buzzed. It was a text.
Farrow: Cleared. Moving. Twenty out.
I gave Reed the twenty-minute call and went back to the parlor.
“Farrow’s moving. Two vehicles will arrive within the half-hour. When they get here, you stay where you are until I bring Wiley to you.”
“Understood.”
Twenty-three minutes later, I heard a vehicle take the corner at the head of the street. I checked the camera feed. Collins pulled up to the curb.
Reed waited for the cadence. Three raps, pause, two more.
“Farrow,” he said.
“Open it.”
Farrow came in first. He’d put Wiley behind him and to his right. He saw me at the end of the hall.
He looked at me and held the gaze for maybe two seconds. That was all it took. I clocked the line of his shoulders and how he carried his weight on the balls of his feet. I was inside him the night before, pinning him against the wall.
He moved his hand to Wiley’s elbow, and the moment was gone.
Wiley was walking under his own power. His hands were in his coat pockets, and he held his shoulders a little high.
“Wiley, did you hit anything on the way down?”
“My shoulder, I think.”
“Move it,” I said.
He pulled his hand out of his pocket and rolled the shoulder. He didn’t flinch. It might be bruised, but he’d live.
Farrow took Wiley’s coat and hung it on the hook by the door.
Six inches. That far to the left and the round took him out instead of embedding itself in the wall near the elevator.
“Parlor,” I said. Wiley went past me, and Farrow followed.
Cabot was on his feet by the time we cleared the doorway. He’d set the pad down on the coffee table. He crossed the room before I got there myself and placed a hand on Wiley’s upper arm.
“You’re here.”
“I’m here.”
Wiley sat on the couch, and Cabot took a chair. Wiley immediately retrieved his laptop from the coffee table and opened it. I stood in my corner, with Farrow by the window.
“What did Cambridge PD find?” Wiley asked. “Tell me everything.”
I gave him all the information cleanly. When I was done, he was quiet for a count of four.
“Read me the vendor name again.”
I read it.
“They’re the third intermediary on the second tier of my map. I put a star by them in red two nights ago. Until now, I haven’t been able to attach that entity to a person.”
“Now you can?” I asked.
“I think it’s Helen Patterson, but probably an unwitting one. I don’t know whether she realized what they were before she died. Patterson didn’t have my research yet.”
“That makes sense,” I said.
“But after I fed Patterson, he could put it together. He understood how they were using Henry, and he saw what his wife had unknowingly funded. He sat on it long enough to figure out who at the Globe he could trust with it, which turned out to be no one, and that’s why he asked Eamon for a meeting instead. ”
“Yes.”
“So, he isn’t compromised. Not the way I thought,” said Wiley.
“He was trying to stop what his wife helped set in motion,” Cabot said.
They looked at each other across the coffee table. Cabot and Wiley were a team now.
“Cabot, the sixth name. Spell it,” Wiley said.
Wiley typed as Cabot spelled. He turned his laptop a quarter turn so they could both see.
“That’s a match,” Cabot said.
Across the room, Farrow was still. He’d seen the same thing I had: our two principals at one screen, with two threats merging into one, more than twice as dangerous as before.
The doorbell rang.
All four of us froze. Then Farrow was in motion toward the door. I followed.
“Reed, what is it?” I asked.
“A male in his mid-twenties. Globe satchel. He has a bike helmet under his arm.”
Farrow and I took positions on opposite sides of the door. I had my hand on my sidearm.
“Cabot. Wiley. Stay where you are,” Farrow said.
“Reed, open it,” I said. “Four inches.”
The door cracked four inches. I heard the courier’s voice, slightly winded and reciting the line he’d been given.
“Hand delivery for Wiley Priest. From the Globe. Front desk said to bring it personally.”
I stepped forward. “ID?”
“Yeah, hold on.”
He pulled out a Globe lanyard. “Who signed out on it at the desk?” I asked.
“Donna. She always signs out the bike runs.”
Wiley nodded from the parlor. “Donna is the one who would do that.”
“Slide it through,” Reed said.
“Through the —“
“The gap. Slide it through.”
A thin manila envelope, business-letter size, came through the four-inch opening and dropped onto the hardwood. The kid pulled his hand back.
“Step back onto the sidewalk.”
“Do I —“
“Step back onto the sidewalk.”
Reed waited until the camera feed showed the kid down the steps and turning at the curb. Then he closed the door and threw the deadbolt.
I crouched beside the envelope.
Farrow stepped up to my shoulder. He’d already pulled a pair of nitrile gloves from the kit by the door, and he handed me one without being asked. I pulled it on.
I lifted the envelope by one corner and weighed it in my palm.
It was light, but not light enough to be empty. The seal was smooth, either machine-applied or a gum strip.
I turned it over.
Wiley Priest. Typed label.
I looked up at Farrow. “Open it,” he said.
I pulled out a small blade I kept in my pocket and slit open the flap edge. There was a single page inside. I drew it out by the corner. It had one line, centered, in large sans-serif type.
Stop coordinating. The cost has been quoted.
I read it twice, stood, and brought it to Wiley in the parlor.
He read it and didn’t move. Cabot leaned forward and read it, too.
“They know I’m here, and they know I’m still working,” Wiley said.
“After Patterson,” Cabot said.
Farrow reached for the page and read it for the first time. “Quoted,“ he said quietly. “Not paid. Quoted. A decision made about something planned.”
“Yes,” I said.
“This is like the receipt.”
“The cost,” Wiley said. “They don’t specify. It could mean me, or it could mean Cabot. It could mean Patterson, finishing the job they started in Cambridge. Maybe it means Samuel.”
Cold settled at the base of my spine.
Wiley lowered his voice. “The cost of doing our work.”
Farrow handed the page back to me. “We bag it and send it to Eamon. They can dust for fingerprints. We share it with Boston PD to see whether there is a match with Patterson’s envelope.”
“Agreed,” I said.
“And we move from here,” Farrow said.
“We can’t move tonight. Not in the dark with two principals and a note that just told us they know exactly where we are. We move at first light, using a route cleared by Eamon, and we move to a location nobody in this house has been told about yet, including me.”
I bagged the page in a clean evidence sleeve from the kit and sealed it. I labeled it with the time and my initials.
I turned to Farrow. “All of us upstairs. We’ll plan the move from there.”
“Yes.”
The cost had been quoted.
We had until first light to be out the door.