Chapter 35
One of the attitudes among Jane’s ancestors, even up to the present generation, was that when they prayed, they didn’t do it to ask for favors.
They did it to give thanks. It was a sense of proper behavior and the relationship between people and the universe.
Jane walked up behind the farm buildings to the woods alone.
She thanked the universe for having allowed her and her family and friends to survive the latest attacks.
She gave thanks, as she was taught, in the timeless order, from beneath her feet upward and outward—the earth, the waters, the fish, the plants, the edible plants, the medicinal herbs, the animals, the trees, the birds, the four winds, the thunders that bring rains, the sun, the moon, the stars, all spirit messengers, the Creator.
She walked back down to the farm buildings to be with her family for a few more minutes, and then she said, “I’d better get going.” She hugged and kissed them, starting with May and ending with Carey.
Jane started her car in the barn, then drove out past the farmhouse where Carey and Katie and Carolyn stood on the porch and waved.
Seeing them like that, standing there and waving in some strange, smiling tableau of family contentment and safety, was—her mind had reached for surreal but the world had become so strange that the word was getting faded from overuse, not strong enough, or crude enough.
Crazy seemed closer. She turned her attention toward the highway as she made her way down to the gate.
It was early, but she had a long way to go.
She got out to open the gate, drove past it, then got out again to close it. Then she waited impatiently for cars to pass until she had an opening for a left turn toward the east. She accelerated until she reached the right speed. She caught herself whispering “Obolonsky.”
She set her telephone to use the app that gave her directions, and then she turned on the radio to a rock station.
That seemed to silence the part of her mind that kept repeating the man’s name, but she noticed that the first three songs were ones she had not heard before.
Since May was born, she had not played rock stations when May was with her because she had been trying to talk to her and teach her a couple of languages, and May was with her all the time.
Jane made the best progress she could without violating any traffic laws or speed limits.
She wanted to get there before the bodies of the woman and her crew were either traced to the Boston gang or made it to national news.
She was sure they had been found by now and identified, but she had seen no mention of them in the national media, so there was a chance she’d get there in time.
The first thing was to cover the distance, which her phone said was still 482 miles.
Jane reached the car rental lot in West Springfield, Massachusetts, over seven hours later.
She used the name and credit of Denise Hutchens again to rent the car because if things went wrong, she wanted to give the authorities a chance to go wrong and make up a story about Denise Hutchens avenging herself on a Russian gang.
For the moment she wanted a nondescript car with legitimate Massachusetts license plates.
She parked her Volvo on a residential street lined with single-family homes that was within walking distance.
When she had picked up the gray Nissan Maxima from the lot, she came back and took the suitcase from her car and put it in the Nissan, and then she was gone.
Boston was still a long distance away, but the drive was easy, and most of the traffic in the evening was commuters heading away from the city.
When she arrived in Boston, she checked into the Lexington Hotel and immediately began charging her phone and going down the list she had made of addresses connected with anyone named Obolonsky, re-examining the order that she had arranged to visit them.
She made a few revisions, and then took the knives and the pistol out of her suitcase, reloaded the pistol, selected, and laid out her outfit for tomorrow, choosing her clothes for their ability to hide weapons.
She had already completed a day-long drive, but only after those preparations did she feel that she was ready to run a bath and soak in the hot water. When she had done that, she dried off, put on a warm, soft robe, and sat in the room’s easy chair to think and prepare herself.
She fell asleep in the chair and woke sometime in the middle of the night, turned the light off, and slept again.
In the morning, Jane went over the list of people named Obolonsky who lived in Massachusetts that she had compiled from the internet during the past couple of weeks.
Her problem was that there was no way to eliminate any of them.
Just because somebody put MD or LLD after his name on LinkedIn didn’t mean he wasn’t the head of a Russian crime organization.
The fact that a person named Obolonsky was a woman might mean she had nothing to do with crime, or it might mean she was the gang leader’s wife or sister or mother.
Jane had read that there were neighborhoods in Boston where large numbers of Russian speakers lived.
Gangs made up of immigrants often lived in areas among lots of other people from the same country.
It was easier to be unnoticed there, easier to recruit new members, easier to know a person’s background well enough to detect undercover cops and infiltrators.
The neighborhoods mentioned most often were Allston, Newton, and Brighton, so whenever she could find an Obolonsky whose address was in one of those neighborhoods, she had moved that Obolonsky to the higher-priority list.
She had made a list of Russian grocery stores, but then she had read that the people who missed Russian food the most and frequented these stores tended to be the older immigrants.
The men she had seen and fought were young.
The man she was searching for would not be elderly.
He would be young—someone who had arrived after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
She learned that there was only one Russian Orthodox church in Boston, the Church of the Epiphany, and she knew that being the boss of a criminal gang didn’t necessarily mean he had never been in a church, but on any given day, she was pretty sure that was not a likely place to find him.
Jane took her high-priority list of Obolonskys and began to search for the addresses where they lived.
She used her rental car to give herself tours of the neighborhoods, driving past the addresses she was interested in, and when she could do it without standing out, she would park and walk to get a better sense of what a house or apartment building contained.
She only used the car once for each address, because she was sure that this gang was sophisticated enough to have security cameras and watch the footage to see if one car kept going by.
After three days she bought a seven-day pass on the MBTA and began using the subway to reach the neighborhoods where there were Obolonskys, and walked to the local restaurants and bars to watch for the sort of men who might be part of the Russian gang.
She watched for men who had the sort of tattoos she had seen on the men she had fought, but the tattoos she saw were the sort that anyone might have.
She listened for the Russian language and accents, and she heard a few snatches of conversation—people making phone calls or ordering something—but the talk meant nothing to her, reminding her that expecting it to mean more than that the person was Russian-born was foolish.
After a few days, she started driving around to Russian restaurants that were too far from MBTA stations to visit on foot.
And then, while she was sitting at a table in the back of a restaurant, she saw a man walk in whose face meant something to her.
The last time she had seen his face, he had been trying to climb out of her basement into her driveway.
She stared at him for no more than a second, and ducked her head to look down and turn the other way.
She gave him time to take a few steps. Then she shouldered her purse, took her check to the cashier by the door and left it on the counter beside her with a fifty-dollar bill, and was out the door in five more seconds.
Jane hurried down the street toward her car.
She was feeling the seconds going by, and when she felt enough had elapsed for the man to make it back to the front door, either to see if he had recognized her or see which way she was going, she reached into her purse to put her hand around the pistol grips of her Glock and looked over her shoulder.
He was not on the sidewalk or standing at the front window.
As she walked the remaining steps, she kept her hand in her purse as though she were feeling for her car keys, and when she was at the car, her hand came out with them, and she got in the driver’s seat and stared down the street at the restaurant.
Jane thought about the man. He was the one she had mistaken for Brian in the darkness on the night when she had gone back to her house to try to rescue him.
She had led him as far as the coal door in the basement in the darkness and climbed out, but as soon as his upper body was in the opening and he was pulling himself up to crawl out, a car’s headlights had passed across him and she’d seen his tattoos, kicked the coal door shut on his face, run to the other side of her house, seen the knotted sheets hanging from the upper window, and realized Brian had gotten out.