I flew to Logan and got to my loft at about 9:30 p.m. I listened to my phone messages and found one from Julia Bishop. My pulse started to race, partly because the message took me by surprise, partly because Julia's voice took me back to feelings I hadn't felt since splitting with Kathy. It was a voice full of intelligence and worldliness at the same time as it brimmed with vulnerability. She said she needed to meet me, alone, but didn't say why. And I found myself not only willing but wanting to see her, something I should have pegged as trouble right off the bat.
The phone number Julia left on my machine was different from the one directory assistance gave me for the Bishops' home in Nantucket. I dialed it, taking the chance she would be somewhere she could talk.
"Yes?" she answered.
"Frank Clevenger," I said.
"I'm glad you called."
"Where are you?"
"A friend's house. Here on the island. But I have to get back home."
"Are you all right?" I asked.
"Can we meet?" Her tone had urgency and a hint of fear in it. "I could come to Boston tomorrow. Win has a full day of business meetings at the house."
"Of course," I said. "Did you have a specific place in mind?"
"Wherever you like," she said. "I can be in the city by one."
"Bomboa Restaurant," I said. Bomboa was tucked in an alleyway, and quiet in the afternoons. "It's right downtown on Stanhope Street, around the corner from Mistral, if you know that place. I'll wait for you at the bar."
"I'll wait for you at the bar-another sign of trouble," the voice at the back of my mind said.
"I'll see you then," she said. She hung up.
I didn't know exactly why Julia wanted to meet, but I knew I was being invited deeper into the Bishop family's psyche. That reassured me I was burrowing toward their truth. It also worried me because I sensed that the journey would end in a very dark place.
I felt tired enough to sleep. I undressed and laid down, but my mind wouldn't shut down. I kept going over what Billy had told me about being beaten by his father, what I had learned from Darwin Bishop's rap sheet, and what North Anderson had told me about the romance between Bishop and Claire Buckley. If Bishop was hiding behind gentility, if he was someone who had tried desperately to extinguish parts of his life, then he would find it that much easier to extinguish another life. The dying embers of a man's repressed pain have the unwieldy habit of catching fire, spreading underground, and burning down everything nearby.
Billy might even have been expressing his father's destructiveness when he torched property and tortured animals. He could be what psychiatrists call the designated patient-the family member everyone points to as the insane one, the black sheep-when the truth is that that person is simply less able to resist acting on the pathological dynamics alive elsewhere in the household.
But then there was Claire Buckley. A wild card. I knew almost nothing about her, other than that she was playing confidante and counselor to Julia while sleeping with Julia's husband. And she was the one Julia relied on to help care for Brooke's surviving twin, Tess. I felt glad I would be seeing Julia the next day. Maybe there was a chance I could move her to let the baby stay with grandparents, or somewhere else off the Bishop estate.
After half an hour lying there awake, wrestling with my suspicions, I realized a good night's sleep wasn't in the cards for me. I got up, pulled on my boots, jeans, and black T-shirt, and headed out to the truck. I felt like grabbing a drink, so I decided to grab a coffee at Cafe Positano.
Carl Rossetti, my renegade attorney friend (and onetime patient), was standing at the espresso bar when I walked in. His long black hair was tied in a braid. I took the space next to him and nodded at Mario.
"What's new, chief?" Rossetti asked. Before I could answer, he held out his pinkie, showing off a diamond solitaire that had to weigh over two carats. "What do you think?" He took a drag off a cigarette.
"I guess it's okay," I said. "I mean, if you're planning to get engaged and give it to your girl."
He smiled and spewed a thin stream of smoke up toward the silver tin ceiling. He probably thought I was kidding. "I got it off Scotty Deegan as a fee," he said. "I handled a drug case for him before Judge McClure in Federal Court. Possession, intent to distribute five hundred pounds of weed. We did good. Thirty-six months in Allenwood. Easy time. Maybe a halfway house after two years. So it was a score."
"He came to the right person," I said. I meant it. If I were in trouble, my first call would be to Carl Rossetti.
He waved his hand back and forth, admiring the stone as it caught the light. "I would never cough up the cash for something like this, but when it falls in your lap, what the hell, right?" He shrugged.
"It's a little flashy for my taste," I said. "It may even be a little flashy for your taste. And that's saying a lot."
"Sometimes you got to stretch," Rossetti said. He slapped my shoulder. "So tell me, already, what's happening in your world? You still hanging around that beautiful Brazilian from the other night?"
It seemed like more than a few nights had passed. I pictured Justine getting dressed in my apartment the morning North Anderson had rung my doorbell. "She's back in Brazil," I said. "I'd be over there myself if I hadn't gotten called into the Bishop case. You remember: the baby on Nantucket."
"Of course. The Russian kid," he said. "He's pleading insanity?"
"It doesn't look that way. He says he didn't do it."
He smiled. "What else is he gonna say? Does he have a lawyer?"
"Not that I know of," I said.
"Put in a good word for me, if you get the chance."
"Two nights ago you told me the kid was guilty, for sure."
"He's still gonna need an attorney," Rossetti said. "And I could use that kind of payday. My other clients aren't billionaires."
Mario delivered my coffee. I sipped it. Then I bummed a cigarette off Rossetti, lighted it, and inhaled as much smoke as my lungs would hold.
"Can you share anything you've learned about the case?" Rossetti asked.
Rossetti was peculiar-looking, but he was also peculiarly brilliant. I welcomed the chance to run some of what I knew about the Bishop case by him. "One of the things I dug up," I told him, "is that Darwin Bishop-the father of the suspect-has a record of domestic assault. He beat his first wife. He also violated a restraining order she took out against him."
"You're joking," Rossetti said.
"I pulled his rap sheet. It's all right there in the public record."
"Then I respectfully withdraw my previous opinion."
"On?" I asked.
"The Russian kid," Rossetti said. "I hereby rescind his conviction."
"Why?"
"Because, until further notice, the father's your man, Doc. I don't care how many cats the boy strangled, or how many times he pissed his bed."
"But why do you say that?"
Rossetti held both hands in the air, like a conductor. "As if you don't already know all this, men who beat up on women are different than the rest of us. Okay? They're unhinged. Out there. Without feelings. And anyone arrogant enough to violate an order of the court, when it could get him a year or more in jail, is different, too. He doesn't get the idea of boundaries-like, where his life stops and other people's start." He let his hands settle back to his coffee cup. "If you or I were the subject of a restraining order, we'd be twenty miles from ground zero at all times. We're not gonna screw with the justice system once it buries its teeth in us." He paused, sipped his coffee. "Add up the two charges, and what you have here is a violent crime occurring in a household where the father is a violent offender with no regard for the law. Ten to one, he did it."
"Not every domestic abuser graduates to murder," I said.
"That's why it's ten to one and not a million to one. If it was open and shut, the police wouldn't need you. The friggin' department could buy another cruiser with what you're gonna charge 'em."
"There were five people at home the night the baby was killed," I said. "Darwin Bishop and his wife Julia; their two sons, Billy and Garret; and the nanny, Claire Buckley. The D.A. is going to arrest Billy and try to prosecute him. What do you think of his chances for a conviction?"
"Pretty good, with the father's testimony," Rossetti said.
"He's not testifying," I said. "He said he'll do anything necessary to protect Billy from a jail term."
"Very noble. Watch what happens when they call him to the stand, though. My guess? He suddenly remembers something important-and very incriminating-about his son's behavior that night. He may even get all broken up about having to divulge it." He nodded to himself. "Look for tears. You won't find any. Unless the guy's even better than I think."
"I'll keep my eyes open."
"I'd put a pair in the back of your head, too," he said.
"Meaning?"
"You're playing in the big leagues now. Bishop is a billionaire. I don't think you fully understand what that implies. He has one thousand million dollars. That buys him reach you can't imagine. He's got police, politicians, and judges he can call for favors. He has powerful investor friends who rely on him to keep generating money for them. If you're a threat to him, you're a threat to them. They can come for you in a dozen different ways. You're expendable."
"I've been against the wall before," I said. Strangely, what I had in mind wasn't my having joined Trevor Lucas and the hostages he had maimed on the fifth floor of Lynn State Hospital -the case that had all but ended my work in forensics. I had my own childhood in mind-my having been held hostage on the third floor of a Lynn tenement house with a violent alcoholic. Making that connection bothered me. I had to wonder whether any of my suspiciousness of Darwin Bishop could be grounded in the ill will I felt for my father.
Rossetti blew out another long stream of smoke. "Don't get me wrong. I know you can take care of yourself, Franko. But you haven't been up against anything like Darwin Bishop. If you think you have, that's just another advantage he's got over you."
I took a deep breath. "I'll keep looking over my shoulder," I said. After a year away from forensics, just forty-eight hours back in it had put me in harm's way again. But I wasn't about to raise any white flag. "If this kid isn't guilty, he's not going away for life," I said. "I'm not going to let it happen."
"This one's important to you," Rossetti said. "Personally."
"Yes," I said.
"You want a hint where to look for the real Darwin Bishop?" Rossetti asked.
"Shoot."
" Russia. It's the Wild West over there. If this guy successfully adopted a kid out of that country, then he's connected to some very tough people."
"He built and sold two companies in Russia," I said.
"Then he's got loads of dirty laundry hanging out over there. I could put in a call to my buddy Viktor Golov. He runs an oil refinery outside St. Petersburg. He's got his finger on the pulse of business across Russia."
"I'd owe you one." I finished my coffee and put down a ten to cover Rossetti's as well. "I'll take care of us this time," I said. I turned to leave.
Rossetti caught my arm. "Thanks for the round," he said. "Just promise you'll take care of yourself." His face lost every trace of humor. "I mean it. Be careful."
I nodded. "I'll talk to you soon," I said. "Call me with anything from your friend Viktor."
I drove back over the Meridian Street bridge and took the left onto Spruce. I was planning to turn onto Winnisimmet and head home, but I knew home just meant more tossing and turning-at least I convinced myself that it did. I kept going straight, through the Chelsea Produce Market, headed for the Sir Galahad Motel and Lounge.
The Sir Galahad is a down-and-out strip club with cinder-block walls, surrounded by wholesale fruit and vegetable warehouses. The girls don't wear fancy costumes. They don't even bother to lie about being college students. And no one pretends it's a gentleman's club.
I had gone to the Sir Galahad religiously when forensics had been my full-time occupation. I had needed to stay close to the naked truth about human beings, to keep resonating with lust and envy and hatred and all the other emotions that can drive violence.
I had also gone there to drink. And that fact kept me behind the wheel of my F-150 after I parked alongside the building. I sat and watched the pink neon dancer on the Sir Galahad sign as she flickered in the night. And I remembered how living so close to the raw edge of humanity had made me feel the need to take the edge off with scotch or cocaine or, more often, a combination of the two. I remembered how it was a sucker's strategy-letting the interest on my pain compound daily.
I can't be certain what made me get out of the truck. Maybe it was having seen Billy Bishop's scarred back, or having tried to imagine what it might be like for an infant to struggle for air and find none, or having revisited feelings I had once felt for Kathy. Or maybe it wasn't any of those things. Maybe I was just having my old trouble walking a straight line through a world with emotional minefields buried haphazardly all the way to the horizon.
Whatever the reason, I walked inside the Sir Galahad. Music blared from speakers that would have sufficed for a rock concert. Red and blue and purple lights doused the walls and ceiling with color. I took a seat up front, at the runway. A dancer with blond hair who might have been nineteen had stripped down to white panties. She hitched her thumbs inside the waistband, pulling them down a few inches, teasing the twenty or so truckers and bikers scattered around the room. They nodded and winked and smiled at her. Then she pulled them back up, all the way into her crotch. The men burst into applause.
"What are you drinking?" a waitress about fifty-five, wearing skin-tight jeans and a tube top over a stick figure, asked me.
I thought about ordering a Diet Coke-for about one second. "Scotch," I said. "Rocks."
"You got it," she said. She turned around and headed back to the bar.
The dancer peeled her panties to her ankles. She stepped out of them and stepped over to the man two seats from me, who had folded five one-dollar bills over the brass rail. She bent over backwards, spreading her legs and holding herself on all fours, like a crab, opening herself up to him.
My scotch arrived. I paid for it, held the amber liquid up to the colored lights. It glowed rust blue, rust red, rust purple. A magic rainbow of calm. I brought the glass to my lips, smelling the aroma of my father, tasting his warm, alcoholic breath. Then, tilting my head back, I glanced at the dancer and noticed that the lowest part of her abdomen was scarred from a Cesarean delivery.
Part of me truly wanted to be numb, wanted to scramble the chemical messengers in my brain, to blur the images of cruelty floating through it. Because they were too sharp. Sharp enough to do serious damage. But another part of me had started to wonder where the dancer's child might be at that moment. With a grandfather? A boyfriend? Home alone? Dead? I stared at her as she grabbed her knees to spread herself wider, head turned to the side, eyes closed.
I put the drink down without swallowing a drop.
"Ain't she a fucking gem?" the man with the five-dollar bills called over to me. He was about forty, built like a weight lifter, wearing a New England Patriots football jersey and a black nylon skullcap.
"She's all of that," I said.
"What an ass on her," he said.
"What an ass."
"You're a spot welder, aren't you?" he asked.
In a certain way, I guessed I was, but I didn't think he was floating an elegant metaphor for piecing people back together. "No," I said. "Why do you ask?"
"You didn't do no work on the new Chelsea High School? Welding?"
"No," I said. "I'm a psychiatrist."
He burst out laughing. "Right on," he said. "Me, too." He reached into his pocket and pulled out more five-dollar bills for the rail.
I held my glass in both hands and looked into its depths, still smelling my father, hearing the clink of his belt buckle coming loose. I thought about the countless times I had wanted to kill him. And I wondered what had stopped me. Why couldn't I bring myself to do him in? What makes a person finally cross the line? Was that the question that had drawn me to forensics in the first place? Was it the question-and not North Anderson 's plea-that had brought me back into the company of murder?
I pushed the scotch away, caught the eye of the waitress, and ordered a coffee and a Diet Coke. It was going to be a long night.
I finally climbed into bed just after 3:00 a.m. I could sense the expanse of the king-sized mattress all around me. I felt dangerously alone.
Of course, I always had been alone. Isolated. At risk. But now the danger felt especially real. Because I couldn't dismiss what Carl Rossetti had told me; Darwin Bishop could be big trouble-bigger than anything I had faced before. A person with enough appetite and aptitude to accumulate a billion dollars can devour many things. I moved to one side of the mattress and dropped my hand to the Browning Baby semiautomatic tucked next to the bed frame. And with a fistful of cold steel as my pacifier, I fell into a restless slumber.
It didn't last. Not two hours later, the phone woke me. I fumbled for the receiver, dropped it once, then said, "Clevenger."
"Frank. It's North."
I squinted at my bedside clock. "It's four-fifty."
"I know that," he said. "I wouldn't call if it wasn't an emergency."
I sat up in bed. "What's happening?"
"Billy escaped from Payne Whitney two and a half hours ago."
I sat up. "Escaped? How?"
"Believe it or not, he just walked out of the emergency room. He'd been complaining of a cough for hours. They sent him down with an attendant for a chest x-ray. As far as I can tell, the guy kind of lost track of him."
That was easy to believe. Psychiatry units that aren't built for violent offenders don't have true security protocols in place. I had seen inpatients wander away from "smoke breaks" when they were taken outside for a quick cigarette, from AA meetings that took place in another building on campus, and from "supervised" grounds passes to the hospital gift shop.
"I'm sure they've alerted the police in Manhattan and given them Billy's description," I said. "They can pick him up on a Section Twelve and rehospitalize him against his will."
"Actually, they can pick him up without a Section Twelve, if they find him. Billy's timing was flawless. As of seven p.m. last night, there was a warrant for his arrest. Tom Harrigan had everything set to go, including a court order for Billy's extradition back to Massachusetts. They planned to have New York Police arrest him on the locked unit at six a.m. today. Two officers would have accompanied him on a flight to Logan at seven-thirty."
"I'm having lunch with Julia Bishop today. She's coming to Boston," I said. "I'll find out if she has any sense where Billy might have gone."
"You called her, or she called you?" Anderson asked.
"She did," I said.
"Did she say why?"
"No. But she sounded a little panicked."
"She'll be missing Garret's tennis tournament," Anderson said wryly.
"He's in a tournament?" I asked. "Today?"
"The Bishops sponsor a charity competition at the Brant Point Racket Club. Garret Bishop is the top seeded player in his age group. According to the newspaper, he's set to defend his singles title from last year."
"Business as usual," I said. "All the way around Darwin 's world."
"No stopping him," Anderson said. He paused. "Listen, you know I've never been convinced that Billy is guilty of murder. But I have to tell you, having him out of that hospital, on his own, really worries me. Because if he is the one who killed Brooke, he knows he has nothing left to lose."
Those words gave me a chill because I remembered Billy telling me the same thing at the end of our meeting. "If I were you, I'd add a few cruisers to those Range Rovers outside Bishop's 'watch house.' Billy wasn't happy with his father hospitalizing him."
"I tried," Anderson said. "Bishop thanked me for my concern and refused my offer."
"True to form," I said.
"I'll call you right away with anything new," he said.
"Same here." I hung up.
I lay back and stared into the darkness, my heart racing, thinking how I could really use that scotch I had set aside at Sir Galahad's. I wondered where Billy Bishop might be at that very moment. Would he have sought refuge at a homeless shelter? Would he bunk with a friend in Manhattan whose parents were out of town? Was he brazen enough to hide out at the Bishops' own penthouse? Or would he be huddled in a corner of the Port Authority, over on Eighth Avenue, waiting for a Bonanza Bus to take him back to Hyannis, where he could catch a ferry to Nantucket?
More important, what was he thinking of-escape or revenge?