Anonymous Sources (4 page)

“Miss, you mind? We're trying to keep this area closed off a bit longer.” He brushed past me and moved toward the stairs.

“Sure. Sorry.” I nodded. As I backed toward the doors, I watched him duck. Police tape was stretched across the banister and running up the stairs. His radio crackled and another cop appeared on the half landing.

Outside in the sunlight I stood blinking for a minute and trying to get my bearings. Across the courtyard I could see more police tape, still ringing the spot where Thomas Carlyle's body had fallen last night. It didn't look like the bloodstain had been cleaned up yet, but then again it was hard to tell, I was so far away. H-Entry was at the opposite end of the dining hall, almost a hundred yards from where the body had fallen. I could see other neatly labeled entryways now, ringing the courtyard. No cops or police tape at any of the other doors. This didn't make sense. Why would police have cordoned off just one entryway? And one so far from where Carlyle had landed?

I was pondering this when a tall figure emerged from the main entrance. Galloni. He was talking to yet another cop. I looked behind me. The police were there too. I was trapped.

    

    

L
owell Carlyle sat on the edge of his bed and stared out the window.

He had shared this bedroom with Anna for forty years. Forty good years. Their three children had all been conceived in this room. Two daughters, and then a son.

The boy had been born too early and sickly. Over the years, his sisters sometimes teased him about it. About how the runt of the family had grown into a giant. Six feet tall before he turned fifteen, and then he'd kept on growing. A varsity athlete, stroke of the Harvard crew. It was hard to imagine how small he had once been.

But Lowell remembered. Those first days, when no one could say whether Thom would make it, he had lain in the incubator, hooked up to wires and monitors. The nurses had judged him too weak even to breast-feed, and instead they fed him sugar through a tiny tube. Lowell and Anna were not allowed to pick him up or to hold him. But they were allowed, after carefully scrubbing with soap, to reach inside and lay a hand on their son's chest. It had moved Lowell beyond words to realize that when he did this, his son's heartbeat would slow, as if he sensed his father's presence and it helped to calm him.

Lowell was not a religious man; he viewed the world with the ordered mind of a lawyer. But he was a man of faith—faith in his own and his family's place in the world, faith that hard work would get you somewhere, faith that good would prevail over evil. Over those terrifying days in the neonatal intensive care unit, Lowell had sat for hours with his son. He sat and watched and promised: I will love you and you will know it and that will be enough. That will be all that matters. Just live. Just please live.

When had he lost sight of that? Lately he had pushed Thom so hard about law school. Hounded him about it, as if Lowell's approval—as if his love—depended on it. Who cared? What did it matter what Thom grew up to be?

And now . . . Lowell forced air into his lungs. He was in shock, he knew that. The call last night had seemed unreal. It still seemed unreal, even now that he had been to Eliot House, had seen the police tape and the red stain for himself.

Anna had not come with him to Eliot. She was downstairs now. She would want to talk about the funeral arrangements. She would be pushing him to take time off and focus on the family. On healing. But he couldn't bear that. He didn't want to heal.

He picked up the phone from his bedside table and called his secretary at the White House. She answered tearily, babbling sympathies.
He thanked her. Said the family thanked her. And then he asked what he had missed in the office so far. He insisted on scheduling a conference call for later in the day. Pack my schedule as full as you can, he told her. Fourteen-hour days.

Anything to avoid remembering.

    

    

I
t took Marco Galloni a second or two to spot her and do a double take. But even from this far away, the hair was unmistakable. Shit.

He motioned to his colleague to head back and guard the front entrance. Then he jogged over.

“What the hell? Really, what the hell?”

Alexandra James winced. “I'm sorry. I haven't touched anything, and I'm leaving now.”

“You got that right.”

He puffed his chest out and glowered at her. “You know, I could book you right now. For trespassing. Interfering with an ongoing investigation.
Maybe even obstruction of justice. What are you thinking?”

“Well, to be honest, I'm thinking something strange is going on here. He fell from those windows up there, right?” She leaned back and took in the full scale of the building. Five floors of dorm rooms and then the dome of a bell tower rising another hundred feet above. “So why have you got cops and police tape all over the stairs at that end of the house down there? The H-Entry end?”

“No reason. Now let's go.”

“It doesn't make sense. Did something happen there?”

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

“Maybe? Maybe, meaning yes? Come on. Give me something.”

“Miss James. That'll be enough. Let's move it, please.” He took her arm.

“Lieutenant.” She put her hand over his. “I gather you're in charge here today?”

“Er—yes.”

“I would really love if we could find a way to work together. I mean, it would be such a shame if they found out back at the station that I managed to evade the stringent security perimeter set up by the Cambridge PD not once, but twice. That would look so terrible, wouldn't it?”

He stared at her. “Is that a threat?”

“No. Merely a statement of fact. But let's not get ugly.” She smiled up at him. “I know you have to throw me out now. But while we're walking, what about it? What happened down at H-Entry?”

“Unbelievable.” He shook his head. Today was only Wednesday, and already it was shaping up to be a bad week. Monday had kicked off with a reprimand for arriving ten minutes late for work. Then the shift supervisor had gotten on his case for failing to report a smashed taillight on his cruiser. And now this business with the Carlyle kid. He'd been stuck at his desk well past midnight last night, playing referee as the Harvard police, Cambridge cops, and the Feds gleefully worked at cross-purposes, each jockeying for a piece of the action. The chief had gone ballistic this
morning, waving the
Chronicle
around the break room and demanding to know what kind of clowns had let a reporter sneak past the perimeter and into Eliot House.

Galloni had been sent to ensure it didn't happen again. And now, despite the chief's typically subtle promise to break Galloni's balls if there were any problems, here she was again. Galloni was seen as something of a rising star within the Cambridge PD. But he could not afford another mistake this week. The promotion to lieutenant was recent. If word of this got out, the chief would stick him on night shift from now until Christmas.

Galloni sighed. He couldn't decide if it made the situation more or less annoying that the reporter in question was extremely attractive. He'd watched her walk away this morning. Great legs. She looked like she knew it too.

She was still smiling at him. “Please. Tell me what happened. I have to file a story either way. Help me get the facts right.”

He hesitated. Goddamn it. Finally he blew the air out of his cheeks and met her gaze. “You are extremely pesky, you know that? I suppose it's not a fireable offense to tell you it doesn't look like Carlyle fell from the fifth floor.”

“Why not?”

“Well, we talked to the students in all those rooms up there. They didn't know him, never saw him. Now, though, see how there's a big, round window way up there, another twenty feet up from the fifth floor?”

She nodded.

“So there's a little room up there. Inside the bell tower. Some sort of piano room. You get to it from that H-Entry stairwell. That window was propped open, and the janitor says it shouldn't have been. So we're thinking maybe he jumped from there. Or fell. Whatever. Okay, Miss Snoop? Are we done?”

She stood still for a moment. “Why would he have been up there? He'd already graduated, right? He wasn't a student here anymore.”

“Got me on that one. But there were a couple of beer bottles on the floor up there, and the cleaning staff swear that they just cleaned a couple days ago. Nobody's signed out the key since. Who knows. Maybe this Carlyle kid had a key from when he used to go here. Maybe he was looking for somewhere quiet to hang out and get drunk. The thing that . . .” Galloni stopped and looked away.

“The thing that what?”

He shifted and looked uncomfortable. “Nothing. Doesn't matter.”

“Come on.”

“It—you did not hear this from me.”

“Of course not.”

“They will hang my ass out to dry if anyone knows you were back here.”

She touched her hand to her heart and nodded.
You have my word
.

He hesitated again, then lowered his voice. “So the guys bagged up the beer bottles, you know, tagged them for evidence, just in case. Might as well, right? And here's the thing. They dusted for fingerprints, just to be certain this Carlyle kid was up there, that he'd opened the window.”

“And?”

“And nothing. Nothing. Not one print. The window, the doorknobs, the banisters all the way down the whole damn seven flights. The whole place was wiped clean.”