Chapter 35 #2
During the long drive away from her hometown across the state to take Brian to get his new identity, they had talked about what had happened to bring him to that moment, and he had mentioned the name of the man whose shouts had raised the house. Maxim.
Jane sat in the car for about half an hour waiting for Maxim to come out of the restaurant.
She tried to understand what she had heard and seen.
Over the years she had found herself facing members of American organized crime groups.
In the northeastern part of the country the most common form they had taken was the Mafia, which in the Buffalo area was sometimes referred to as “The Arm.” The bosses tended to be, or pose as, businessmen, wearing good suits and expensive shoes, driving big fancy cars long after the era when that sort of behavior wasn’t dangerous.
The lower-level men, the ones who went around collecting payoffs from restaurants, bars, and small businesses, or collecting the money from football pools and so on, tended to dress less expensively so they didn’t attract attention.
Jane still hadn’t been able to identify a common look for people from this Russian gang, except for the tattoos.
All she had right now was the face of Maxim—not an unusual-looking man.
She only remembered his face so clearly because in that single moment in her house’s driveway, he had been caught in the bright headlights of the car turning at the corner of her street.
And there he was, coming out of the restaurant now.
He was carrying a large, square cardboard box.
It looked cumbersome, and he was being very careful to keep it level.
He was bringing somebody—a group—lunch from the Russian restaurant.
Jane’s heart began to beat faster. She used her phone to film his progress across the street where there was no crosswalk, moving fast but being careful not to tilt the box.
She needed to be sure she didn’t lose sight of him and she needed to get an accurate record of the car he would be driving, so she rested her phone on the door to keep it steady.
He stopped at the trunk of a dark blue Lexus sedan.
He opened the trunk and leaned in to put the box inside, and that gave Jane a chance to take several still shots of the front license plate.
She put her phone away and started her engine while she watched him walk to the front door of the car and get inside.
Jane pulled away from the curb and drove away from him in the opposite direction before he had started his car, so he wouldn’t focus on her.
She turned left at the first small street and extended the maneuver into a U-turn, then stopped at the corner and waited while he accelerated out into the street, waited for two cars to pass by her, and then followed him at a distance.
She assumed that Maxim was on the way to some place—maybe an office or a shell business—in the immediate area, or at least the first mile, but he kept going past that range.
He was driving out of the city westward on Route 9 into the suburbs.
Jane stayed far back, keeping the blue Lexus in sight, but making sure there was always a changing string of other cars between the Lexus and her rental car.
He turned onto Interstate 95 South and Jane stayed after him.
There was no telling how good Maxim was at detecting someone following him, or at drawing a follower to reveal himself.
Jane decided it was good that Maxim was so careful about his box of take-out lunches.
He wasn’t about to speed up or stop abruptly, or to weave in and out of traffic, or to veer across several lanes to take an exit.
When Maxim reached a sign that read “Needham,” he signaled, coasted onto the exit ramp, and turned right at the foot of it.
Jane didn’t signal, so if he saw her at all he would think she was continuing on the highway, but she drifted over one lane to glide off after him just as the Lexus accelerated onto a surface street.
She turned after him, her eyes scanning for the sight of him.
She saw he was approaching a street with a traffic signal, and a pedestrian crossing signal that displayed a red hand.
The green was about to switch to yellow.
Instead of speeding up to make the light, he slowed gradually, and when the yellow appeared, he stopped.
The soup didn’t spill, Jane thought. She slowed to let two cars get into the lane between her and the Lexus, and then followed.
Three blocks later he made a left turn. She gave him time to complete his turn, then turned left, prepared to pull over and stop if necessary.
Maxim kept going. After a few more blocks, he reached a yellow house on Grove Street, turned to pass through an iron gate onto the long, wide imitation cobblestone driveway and up to the broad parking area in front of the house.
Jane slowed down and kept taking pictures as she approached.
As Maxim got out of the Lexus and walked to the trunk, a man opened the front door of the house and held the door while Maxim brought the box inside.
The door closed. Jane kept going five hundred feet, pulled to the curb, and watched the gate in her rearview mirrors, but Maxim’s blue Lexus didn’t leave.
She reviewed her pictures on her phone. This house was big and beautiful.
The paving stones were perfect—not one of them different from the thousands of others or eroded out of place.
The house looked like something out of the late nineteenth century, about ten thousand square feet of it, but it was new.
There was nothing that wasn’t freshly built or planted on this plot of land.
She estimated that, since it was also in a neighborhood where this level of excellence was common, it had cost somebody between five and ten million dollars.
That was not Maxim. That was the man who had sent a crew out to hunt for her.
She was too far away to take more pictures of the house, but she took a few more of the walls and the gate, then started the car.
She spent some time exploring the area, looking for places where she could leave the rental car, and then kept going to the east, back toward Boston.
She stopped in a hardware store and bought a small, powerful flashlight, and went to her hotel to prepare for the night.
She left her rental car parked on a side street a few blocks from the hotel.