15. Elias #2
It wasn't always like that for me. I'd built the model of stillness in the face of chaos in the aftermath of my swimming accident.
Flat on my back in a hospital bed with my life cracked down the middle, I learned a way to survive.
When the worst things arrived, I didn't let them take me down with it.
My term for it was adaptability. I taught my students the mechanics of it. What I never once said out loud was my way of surviving feeling the worst was teaching myself to stop feeling everything.
I could have written a paper on it.
You cannot stop being good at it, Nolan had said, long enough to just be a man.
He was right. I couldn't. I hadn't been able to do that for seventeen years, and I called it a gift.
I turned off the lamp and lay down in the dark, and the calm held me all the way under, like I was lying at the bottom of a swimming pool staring up into dark water.
***
Maddie Brickner woke me. Rise and grind, old man. It was muffled through the wall. The living room was still dark. I'd slept for maybe two hours.
I heard the double thump of Nolan's feet, and his routine started without me. We'd been exercising together, both of us breathing in the dark like two rowers in one shell. Now, the muffled sound made it feel like a stranger's exercises in the next hotel room over.
He followed it with a shower and then walked down the hall. He wore jeans and a gray zip jacket. A Cardinals cap I'd never seen was pulled low over his forehead.
He grabbed his keys.
"Nolan."
He stopped with his hand on the deadbolt and his back to me.
Routine work questions surfaced in my head. Where are you headed? What's your route? They weren't right for the moment.
"I'm sorry I didn't tell you. I knew better."
He paused for a moment longer before leaving.
I walked to the window, and a minute later, he appeared, a gray shape under the sweetgum tree. The air was foggy. It sat in the streets below the rooflines, and I watched the man I was assigned to keep from being alone walk down the street until he left my sight.
Following him would have confirmed everything he now believed about me, but staying was nearly unbearable.
I typed a text to Doyle's man who watched the Colchester from the outside:
Elias: Mercer's out on foot in the CWE, personal time, do not approach, do not follow close. He is not to know.
I sent the watcher because I could live with being the villain of the morning. I couldn't live with what might happen without it.
There was nothing to guard and nothing to investigate, so I did the one useful thing left to do in the condo. I moved myself out of Nolan's space.
It didn't take long. My toothbrush and razor retreated to the guest bathroom. I removed my watch from the left nightstand. Three of my shirts hung in his closet. They were at the end of the rod with an inch of air between them and his suits, as if they'd known not to get comfortable.
I collected it all in an armload and carried it down the hall to the guest room. There it was, with the bed made up for me. I packed the shirts into my duffel instead of hanging them in the closet.
The second mat was still in the bedroom, rolled and standing in the corner on what had been my side. I left it—going back would mean entering the room again, and there would be a cost for that.
The neighborhood woke up on schedule. At six-fifteen, the little man came around the corner with Baxter, right on time. The dog's enormous black head moved through the fog like the prow of a tug.
Across the street, in a second-floor apartment window I'd logged as unoccupied the day I arrived, there was a woman looking out. She was older, wearing a powder-blue robe, while watering a window box that was new. Red petunias spilled over the edge.
She must have set them out yesterday while most of the city focused on the action in the arena. I looked at the petunias until my eyes stung, and I told myself it was the fog.
Scrubs began moving in singles and pairs toward the medical campus. It was the morning shift change.
Across the street, at ground level below the petunias, a man in a Steamers t-shirt opened the door, picked up his paper, and looked up and down the block both ways.
None of them knew about the events in Nolan's condo. The whole neighborhood continued without noticing. The words I'd spoken about Nolan came back to me—Most of the real work is private.
I'd told Frey that at a hotel bar on Euclid, six blocks from where I stood. I said Nolan's maintenance program was disciplined like you wouldn't believe.
Baxter and the little man turned the far corner, the scrubs crossed the intersection, and the street was empty again. The fog was thinning at the top of the sweetgum, changing from dirty gray to light pearl.
My phone rang.
"Elias." It was Michael.
"You've got news?"
"Russ Tierney is dead."
For a second, I didn't say anything. Tierney was only a voice on a burner phone two states away, but he'd touched a nerve. He asked me did Ray suffer? We'd made plans for a future conversation. Death wasn't part of the equation.
"When?" I asked.
"Found yesterday afternoon. A cousin does a weekly grocery run for him.
She let herself in when he didn't answer and found him in his chair with the TV going.
" Everything was silent on Michael's end, not even the sound of typing.
"It cleared the sheriff's blotter overnight and tripped my monitoring an hour ago.
I've been sitting here reading it over and over, expecting it to say something different. "
"Cause?"
"Apparent accidental overdose, but here's the thing, Elias.
You're ready to question that, like me, but it holds.
It's entirely plausible. Tierney filed a workers' comp claim in 2013 for repetitive strain, and he's been on pain management ever since.
There's a trail of prescriptions from three doctors across two states. "
"Coincidence?"
"I'm not ready to say that, but the drug history means it's not an autopsy priority.
The coroner isn't interested. A rural county with a four-man police force isn't going to spend money trying to figure out why a man on those pills for that long finally took too many.
" A pause. "It's not going to be investigated because there's nothing to investigate. It's a death that looks like nothing."
"That fits."
"Fits what?" Michael asked.
"Halloran's heart stopped two days after he got chatty. We know that, but from the outside, it looks like his body waved the white flag at the cancer."
"And Hawkins's death thirteen years earlier was a cardiac arrest, too." Michael's keyboard started. "Three deaths, Elias. Too many connections."
"He told me he wouldn't open the door for anyone: census worker, missionary, or lost pizza kid." I heard Tierney's voice in my head.
"Maybe he didn't answer the door." More typing.
"He asked me if Ray suffered," I said. "He'd read the obituary, and he wanted to know if the peaceful part was true.
Tierney was going to give us everything, Michael.
Names, dates, and the protocol details. He was the only living human who could corroborate the medical side, and he said he would talk until he was done or until he heard something he didn't like.
The only thing he asked was that we wait for the hockey spotlight to dim. "
"I know."
"I was waiting."
"Elias, I know where you're going. You think it was the landline.
Yes, that first call lives in the carrier's billing records.
In theory, someone could have pulled it but not this fast. Nobody converts a phone log into a dead man in a few days through a subpoena.
That call was not how someone found him.
" The typing stopped. "All we have is the obvious question. Mac's going to ask both of us."
"What's the question?"
"Who knew about Tierney," Michael said, "and when did they find out."
He hung up.
Doyle's man texted me.
Rollins: subject in Forest Park, bench above the Grand Basin, alone, no approach
I stuck the phone in my pocket. Nolan was safe. That was the key point of the text.
Who knew the name existed, and when. I wrote it in my notebook and began the list.
Michael. He knew first. Michael being the leak was absurd on the surface. If it were true, he had access to the entire investigation. I cleared him.
Mac. He knew because all of Michael's reports went to him. Mac built the firm with his partner, Eamon, out of the wreckage of being a target himself. Writing his name on the list at all felt like a small crime. He was clear.
Kate Halloran. I never told her. She was clear.
Doyle. He was a crucial element in the security cover. Keeping him out of the Tierney loop kept him away from information he didn't need. Clear.
The league's counsel channel. They had Halloran and Tarn, but as far as I knew, Tierney hadn't made it there yet. They were off the list.
Nolan. I'd told him a living witness existed, but that was just hours ago. It was after Tierney's death, according to the timeline Michael gave me. I drew a line through his name and winced.
I stopped writing. All clear, but I knew there was a seventh item.
Can you spell it? I heard him ask the question in my head. I'd spelled the name for him letter by letter.