16. Farrow
Chapter sixteen
Farrow
Eamon had made the call at six a.m. “Farrow takes the café. Dane stays with Wiley.”
Dane hadn’t argued. He stood at the kitchen window and looked out for a long beat, then turned back into the room and said, “Agreed.”
“Farrow reads as a man drinking coffee on a Thursday. Dane reads as a man waiting for something to happen. Henry’s been in that café every week for eighteen months. He won’t register Farrow as a watcher.”
“I’m flattered,” I said.
“I’m not flattering you. I’m casting.”
The café smelled of burnt sugar and steamed milk. I’d been sitting at a table pretending to read a paperback I’d bought across the street at a used bookshop so I’d have something with the right crease on the spine.
Naked Lunch. Pleasure reading with teeth.
The table I’d taken was second from the front window, on the left as you came in, which put me four feet behind and slightly off-axis from where Cabot had said Henry sat.
It was the only seat in the room with a sightline to Henry’s chair, the front door, and the chrome housing of the espresso machine reflecting the room.
Three sightlines for the price of one. I’d take it.
I was on my second cortado. The first was good enough to make me forgive the café its exposed Edison bulbs. The second was cover. A man who orders two coffees in forty minutes is reading something he cares about. A man who orders one is an amateur.
I had my earpiece in. Dane had contacted me three times since I arrived.
Once as confirmation. Once to flag a suspicious delivery van that turned out to be a normal delivery van, and the third to tell me Collins and Reed were set.
I’d answered each time with one syllable, low, so the woman at the next table reading the Globe on her phone wouldn’t raise an eyebrow.
I’d logged everyone who’d come and gone.
There were two regulars, both women. The first, in a long camel coat, kissed the barista on both cheeks and ordered without looking at the board. The second, a sixty-something with a small dog in a tote bag, ordered an Americano in a porcelain cup.
The dog didn’t make a sound. It was better trained than half the men I’d slept with.
A barista shift change took place at eight-fifty. The new one came in through the front, hung his jacket on the hook behind the counter, and tied his apron. He was late twenties and left-handed with a sleeve tattoo on his right forearm.
He glanced at me twice. The first glance was the standard scan. The second one, five minutes later, lasted longer.
It could have been flirting. On a different morning, I might have found out.
Cabot walked in at eight-fifty-five, right on Eamon’s schedule.
He didn’t look at me or anyone else, and he took the table he’d been told to take, two over from Henry’s chair, on the same wall, with his back to the front window.
He set his messenger bag on the seat beside him and pulled out the menu.
The barista brought him water. He ordered eggs and coffee without lifting his eyes from the menu.
Then there was the window shopper I didn’t like.
Navy jacket, dark beanie, mid-forties. He’d come up to the front door at eight-thirty-six and stopped. He didn’t step inside. Instead, he put his hand on the door, looked at his phone, and then walked away east.
He’d come back at eight-forty-nine. It was the same approach, and he left again.
I tapped the comm.
“Dane, the navy jacket from earlier reappeared. Same action.”
“Eamon has him from the corner. Two blocks east, sitting at a bus stop. One bus has come and gone.”
“Lovely.”
“Stay seated.”
Henry entered at five past nine.
He didn’t scan the room. Cabot was right about that. He walked in and hung his coat over the back of his chair. He nodded and raised a finger to the barista. After a return nod, the barista started up the espresso machine.
I watched Henry in the espresso machine’s chrome reflection.
He was thinner than the image in my head. The bags under his eyes showed he had not slept well in a long time. He wore his dark hair cut close at the sides. He wore a charcoal sweater over a white shirt. No tie.
Henry opened The New York Times to the second page without reading the first.
His coffee arrived in ninety seconds. He thanked the barista by name. Marco.
I lifted my cortado. Henry was reading The Times. Cabot was waiting for his eggs. Neither of them looked at the other.
I watched Henry in the espresso machine’s chrome.
For six minutes, nothing.
Henry turned a page. He sipped his coffee before turning another.
Cabot’s eggs arrived a few minutes later. He ate them without looking up. He opened a slim notebook in front of him. It was a prop.
At nine-twenty-six, Henry looked up.
He looked across the room, past two empty tables, and found Cabot’s face. He stared for two full seconds. Then he looked back down at the Times.
I tapped the comm and spoke low. “Contact made, no escalation.”
Cabot wrote three lines in the notebook. The angle of his pen signaled short sentences scribbled in the left margin.
At nine-thirty-eight, Henry folded the Times.
He set it on the chair beside his coat and drank the last of his coffee. Standing, he pulled his coat off the chair and shrugged it on. He walked toward the front door at an unhurried pace.
I let my hand fall into my lap. The sidearm was holstered at the small of my back.
Henry passed Cabot’s table. He didn’t slow down or stop. He looked straight ahead. His left hand, the one farthest from me, dropped a folded white napkin. It landed beside Cabot’s water glass without Henry breaking stride.
The bell above the door rang as he left. Through the front window, I watched him turn left.
Across the street, the navy jacket was back. He moved in the same direction as Henry on the other side of the street, approximately twenty feet behind. He matched his stride to Henry’s.
It was a clean tail.
I tapped the comm.
“Dane. Navy jacket following Henry. Eastbound. Opposite sidewalk.”
“Eamon has him. Stay where you are, Farrow.”
Through the window, I watched Eamon come into the frame from the right. He crossed against the light at a relaxed angle, hands deep in his coat pockets, head slightly down, looking for all the world like a man who had just realized he was on the wrong block.
He intercepted the navy jacket at the corner.
He stopped in front of the man while holding his phone and gestured in the opposite direction from where Henry had gone. It was the body language of a tourist asking for an address.
The navy jacket stopped. He had no choice. Eamon stood wide and rubbed his ginger beard.
It took forty-five seconds. He angled his phone, frowned, scrolled, and asked another question.
The navy jacket answered with one syllable and tried to step around him.
Eamon moved a half-pace into the line of escape and apologized with his whole upper body.
He waited one beat longer than was comfortable. Then he finally stepped aside.
The navy jacket broke off east at a faster pace than before.
By then, Henry was a block ahead and around the corner, according to Dane in my ear. The tail was broken for now.
Eamon turned a quarter-turn and was already crossing back toward the café.
Inside, Cabot had not moved.
He sat at his table with the napkin beside his water glass. He hadn’t picked it up, and he was waiting for me to release him.
I tapped the comm.
“Dane. Should Cabot read?”
“Wait thirty seconds. He leaves first. Then you.”
I counted thirty in my head.
Cabot picked up the napkin. He didn’t unfold it at the table. Instead, he set it inside the slim notebook between two blank pages and closed the cover on it. He paid in cash, left a generous tip on top of the bill, and stood.
On his way to the door, he glanced across the room at me. I gave him a single nod.
I waited for two minutes. I closed Naked Lunch on a page I had not read and left a five and a ten on the table.
Reed and Cabot were already gone. Collins had his SUV idling at the cross street. I climbed in and pulled the door shut.
Dane was in my ear. “I did not write the letters.”
“Did I—“
“The napkin. It’s written on it in black ink, in Henry’s hand. Cabot’s rattled.”
I watched Collins take a corner without signaling.
Dane was in my ear again. “Eamon called. Henry didn’t go home.”
“Where did he go?”
“The Park Plaza Hotel. He checked in under his own name ten minutes ago.”
“He’s burning the cover,” I said.
“He’s burning the cover,” Dane agreed.
Henry had spent eighteen months pretending nothing had changed.
Going home from the café meant going back to whatever Onyx Bay had on him—the phone they monitored, the watcher on his block, and anyone who’d been told to flag any deviation.
He couldn’t go home and act normal, not after the napkin.
So he’d checked into a hotel under his own name and made himself findable.
Findable by us. Findable by them.
“He thinks he has hours,” I said.
“He probably thinks he has less than that.”
“We can’t wait for the wedding. We have to get him out now.”
The line went quiet. Collins caught my eye in the rearview and changed lanes without being asked, cutting east toward Brookline.
“Eamon’s calling everyone in,” Dane said. “Be at the carriage house in twelve minutes .”
Seven minutes later, Dane came back on the line.
“Farrow, Eamon just got a call from a contact at Park Plaza security. Shots were fired on the eighth floor. Three minutes ago.”
I gripped the seat beneath me and watched the rain on the windshield. The streetlight reflected off Collins’s hands at the wheel.
“Confirmed?” I asked.
“Shots, yes.”
I didn’t ask the next question. Dane didn’t make me.
“Stay on the line,” he said.
Collins glanced at me in the rearview mirror. He’d heard enough to know, and he didn’t change his pace or his route. He drove the way he’d driven from the café—ten over the limit, no signal at the lane changes, and no expression at the wheel.
The rain turned steady. Somewhere on the eighth floor of the Park Plaza, a man I had watched an hour ago might be dead.
“Dane.”
“Here.”
“How long until they know?”
“Minutes.”
I watched a gull land on the railing of the bridge ahead and lift off again before we passed under it.
I listened to Dane’s breathing. In the background was Eamon’s voice, too low to make out.
“Farrow,” Dane said.”Park Plaza confirmed. Single victim. In the hallway outside room eight-seventeen.”
“Confirmed dead?”
“Yes.”
I closed my eyes for half a second.
“How?” I asked.
“Twice. Close range. Three doors down.”
“They were waiting,” I said.
“Likely.”
It all took less than half an hour. Henry had been alive when Collins pulled away from the curb in the South End. He had been dead before we crossed the river.
I thought about his face in the chrome. Thinner than the image I’d had of him. The bags under his eyes. The way he’d thanked the barista by name.
“Where’s Cabot?” I asked.
“Reed is bringing him in. He doesn’t know yet.”
“Don’t tell him on the comm.”
“We won’t.”
I looked out the window. The trees on the parkway had gone bare in the last week. The rain on the glass made the sodium light on the road ahead break into long yellow streaks.
“Dane. He came to us.”
“Yes, he came to us, and we had him for an hour and a half.”
“Don’t tell me it’s not on us.”
A beat.
“It’s on us,” Dane said.
The SUV took the turn onto the drive that led to the carriage house. Collins pulled up and killed the engine.
Through the windshield, I could see the kitchen window of the carriage house lit from inside. Dane was at the window, looking out, waiting for the SUV he had just heard pull in.
I opened the door and got out into the rain.