15. Elias
Chapter fifteen
Elias
Michael picked up on the first ring. "Tough game."
"They played fine. Either team could have won, but the Steamers got the bad bounces." I stood on the sidewalk surrounded by the fragrance of the linden trees. "Anything more on Tierney?"
"Quiet, which is what we want. Second call's logged, conditions are logged, and nobody will knock on his door.
The man's spent ten years making himself hard to find, and frankly, his paranoia is better security than anything we could build for him.
He'll keep until the Cup Final is over." A pause. "You holding up?"
"Ask me after Game Six."
I walked one slow lap of the block to let the call drain out of me, then rode the service elevator back up, still feeling a bit sick over the lost game.
I turned the first lock, then the second, and the door swung open. The light was wrong. The lamp by the recliner had been turned to its brightest setting, with the shade tilted.
Nolan stood beside the chair. He squared himself toward the door, as if he were standing on a blue line. My work bag was open on the seat with the side pocket unzipped, and my charging cable lay beside it, partially coiled.
He held a sheet of paper in both hands.
I didn't need to see the seal to know which page it was.
I'd carried the folder with me the entire time I was in St. Louis.
The break-in had already proven why it was necessary to keep it on my body.
Either it stayed with me, or I destroyed it.
It didn't occur to me that Nolan would look for it and find it.
"My phone died," he said. "The cable in the wall's been fraying for a month. You had one in the bag. I watched you take it out in the car this morning."
"Okay," I said.
"That's the whole story. I want you to have it, because you're probably already wondering what I was doing rummaging around in your bag, and the answer is borrowing a charger from the man who sleeps in my bed." He set the page down on the chair arm. "So. I'm going to ask you the question again."
I knew what he was going to ask. I'd dodged it the last time he asked.
"Did the team really send you?"
"No," I said. "At least that's not the full story."
His expression didn't change.
"Sit if you need to," I said. "I'm going to tell you everything."
He didn't sit.
I unpacked everything in order.
"Just days before the Final, a man named Ray Halloran died in his sleep at a retirement home outside Raleigh, North Carolina. He was the equipment manager for the Carolina organization for thirty years. As you probably already know, that included your years there."
I reached my hands behind me, clasping them together, and continued the story.
"He had pancreatic cancer. After he received the terminal diagnosis, he spent a lot of his remaining time trying to reach you.
He left voicemails with the Steamers' front office.
Two certified letters were sent care of the team. "
Nolan shifted his weight fully onto his good side.
"I never got any letters."
"I know. They're in an evidence folder in Seattle.
They never got past the mailroom's forwarding service.
His letters were lost among ten thousand pieces of fan mail.
" I watched him take that in. "He told his daughter, on his last good day, that there was something he should've told one of Hawkins's old teammates a long time ago. "
The name landed. He reached up and rubbed one eye. I kept going, sharing the facts.
"The league's office flagged his calls. When he died two days after telling his daughter out loud about trying to reach a player, they flagged the death.
His daughter accepted the cancer, but she doesn't believe the death certificate.
Neither does the Commissioner's office. They retained my firm to find out what Halloran knew, quietly, and to protect the player he'd been trying to reach. "
I let a beat of silence pass. "That's my assignment. The protection is real, but there's another piece Doyle and the team don't know. That's what you just found out."
"Dates," Nolan said.
"They assigned me the job two days before I flew in and met you."
"The medical thing with the donors and the boring calls. What is that about?"
"The symposium was related to my old work, a movement studies geek's little slice of paradise. Michael found the Tarn name in Hawkins's medical file. He flagged it as unusual. They combed the file, made it unnaturally clean and pretty."
I kept my voice calm. "Now I know that the clinic four blocks from this building is a facility Tarn keeps private. They don't mention it on their website."
"What do you know about the break-in?"
"I think it's part of the picture we're trying to piece together.
We can't prove the connections, but I know they are there.
" I paused and delivered the latest piece.
"There's a living witness, Nolan. He's a technician who ran the protocol in Carolina when you were there.
I've spoken to him twice. He'll tell me more after the Final. "
"The protocol." Nolan's voice dropped to just above a whisper. "What do you know about it?"
"It was a pain-and-damage suppression program.
They weren't giving you performance enhancing supplements.
The chemicals were designed to mask the body's warning signals so athletes could play through physical injury.
" I watched him. "Hawkins was subject one.
He got the active doses while the rest of you took placebos.
Whatever the certificate said thirteen years ago, the league doesn't believe his heart stopped on its own anymore. Neither do I."
Nolan looked away from me. He focused on the distance beyond me, about ten feet in front of him, and his breathing changed, quickened. He reached out for the back of the recliner to steady himself.
"He called," Nolan said slowly. "A dying man called me. No, not just a dying man. I remember him. Halloran called me, and I was—what? Playing hockey? Signing jerseys?" He looked at me. "How many voicemails did he leave?"
"Nine."
He moved the bag and charger and sat down in the recliner, then leaned forward and put his head in his hands. His elbows rested on his knees.
"I want to make sure I've got the story right," he said.
I took three steps closer but continued to leave him space.
"I believe you," he said. "It all makes sense now. I've been lied to at least a little by people who wanted something for most of my life. I know what that tastes like. This isn't that."
"Nolan—"
"The heating pad," he said. "You knew about it before you'd ever been in my bedroom.
I lay awake on it that night, deciding it only meant you were good at your job.
" He rubbed one hand over his knee. "The handshake.
You figured out the hip from my handshake, you told me so, I thought it was the most interesting thing anyone had said to me in years. "
He exhaled.
"I let you all the way into my life. You got to see everything, and the whole time, every piece of it was going into a file labeled subject."
"That's not everything. The nights—"
"You don't get to tell me how to understand all of this.
You lost that tonight." He still didn't raise his voice.
"Here's my question. Are you collecting all of this somewhere to use later?
I've watched you work a room, Elias. Vern's wake.
The card game. Ask, listen, ask. Give them nothing while they think they got everything.
I stood in Eileen's kitchen and watched you do it to three old men, and I thought, he's me.
I thought it made us the same kind of animal.
" He looked directly at me. "It does. That's the problem here. "
My skin prickled at the realization.
"We're both always sincere, but neither of us has truly let the other inside. That piece of paper confirms it."
"But Nolan—"
"Does Mac know about us?"
"No—not yet."
Nolan jumped on the words. "No, you don't get to qualify it.
You sat right there." He pointed to the island.
"You told me the whole bedtime story about your firm's founders.
It was a story about a policy altered to fit the two men who broke it first. That was concocted to make me feel better.
It doesn't matter if you didn't tell him. "
I tried to piece together a response, but it was still scattered in fragments around my head.
"You gave me the rulebook, so I'd stop being scared, but you never filed your report based on it. I bet you wrote the disclosure somewhere, but you sat on it. Sending it would mean Seattle considering the judgment of their man on the ground." He tilted his head. "How'd I do?"
I sighed heavily. "Close to perfect."
"Yeah, thought so." He looked at his hands. "You know what's funny? You're doing it right now."
"Doing what?"
"This." He gestured at me, moving his hand up and down in a slow pass.
"The calm voice. It's almost like a therapist. You breathe slowly so the other guy adopts your rhythm.
I've watched you do it to me since you got here, and I liked it.
" His jaw moved. "My whole world is falling apart, and you're standing there managing me, Elias.
You're working. Right now, in this room, you cannot stop being good at your job long enough to just be a man who did a thing to another man. "
I opened my mouth, but no words came out. He left me standing there.
The bedroom door closed with a quiet click.
I didn't go back to the guest room. I couldn't lie down in the room that meant surrender.
I stood in the living room in the wrong light and did what I do. I remained calm. My hands were quiet at my sides. Somewhere deep in my chest, I was coming apart, but none of that reached the surface.