Next of Kin (26 page)

The driver stirred; he reached into his pocket and pulled out a phone. Finn’s finger found the trigger to Kozlowski’s spare gun.

Eamonn McDougal hadn’t intended to return to the office. When he pulled out of the lot for the evening, he thought he was done. Halfway home, he realized he’d forgotten Coale’s
phone number, and the only place it was kept was in the file. Normally, he would have programmed it into his cell, but phones could fall into the wrong hands, and he couldn’t risk someone
else getting hold of the number.

When he got back to the office, he told his driver to wait outside. He unlocked the front door and disarmed the alarm on the front door, then went in. The file was in the cabinet in his office.
It took him only a moment to unlock the drawer and pull out the folder. The number was on the inside of the manila file, written backwards as an added precaution in case the wrong eyes should ever
fall upon it.

He dialed the number and waited. He was facing the wall behind the desk, looking at all the pictures of him with various celebrities and politicians. He’d led a remarkable life for someone
born and raised in poverty in the outskirts of Belfast. As a child, he never imagined that he would be where he was now. He was the true definition of a self-made man, and no one was going to ruin
that.

Coale answered on the second ring. ‘Hello,’ McDougal said. Lost in a self-congratulatory haze, he might have sounded a little too upbeat. ‘Is it done?’

It took a moment for Sally to realize that the man hadn’t seen her. At first it sounded like he was greeting her, that somehow he’d been waiting for her. Then she
saw the phone in his hand.

She looked around, heart pounding. It might have made the most sense to back out of the room slowly, but her momentum was carrying her forward, and fear had sapped too much of her strength to
allow her to change direction. She looked frantically for someplace to hide. The sofa to her right had an angled back, creating a narrow space against the wall, partially hidden. It looked just big
enough, and she let her momentum carry her down in a silent dive. She shimmied her skinny body behind the sofa. Rolling onto her back, she looked down to make sure her feet weren’t sticking
out. She could see only a narrow section of the room – out to where the door to the warehouse stood open.

She held her breath. There was nothing else for her to do.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

‘It’s done,’ said Coale over the phone. His voice conveyed no satisfaction.

‘Was it clean?’ McDougal asked. Everything seemed to be falling into place; he couldn’t have any slip-ups now.

‘I said, it’s done. You don’t have to worry.’

‘I do have to worry,’ McDougal barked. ‘The lawyer made contact with Tesco. I need to know that there are no loose ends.’

‘It was clean,’ Coale said.

‘Good. Call me when you get back.’

McDougal hung up the phone and turned around. He sat heavily in his chair.
Lemons into lemonade
, he thought. That was the way he lived his life. Take the bad and make it good – or
if not good precisely, at least turn it to your advantage. He closed his eyes. With luck it would be over soon, and when it was, he would be better off.

When he opened his eyes, he was looking straight ahead, his vision slightly blurred from the pressure to his ocular muscles. Something didn’t seem right, and he blinked several times to
get his vision to clear. When it did, he frowned.

The door to the warehouse was open.

He stood and walked around the desk. His office was little more than a dry-walled cubby carved out of the main storage area. The door to the back was almost always closed. There was nothing of
consequence or interest that he needed to get at, and the place had a damp musty stench to it that, while not unbearable, was unpleasant enough to make him keep the door closed.

He walked over to the door and poked his head through, flipping on the lights. The place was a mess of bric-à-brac, with tires, old mattresses, carpets, boxes of paper, and documents
stacked up to the twenty-foot ceiling. It had become a convenient dumping ground for all those things accumulated in life and business that were no longer worth keeping, but seemed too substantial
to be discarded.

Stepping into the damp, cavernous space, he strained to detect any sound. ‘Hello?’

He crept down the haphazard aisles created by the random stacks of junk. ‘Hello?’ he said again.

There was no answer, no sound at all, and after a few moments he headed back toward his office. When he got to the door, he turned and gave one last look back toward the warehouse, then shut the
lights off and closed the door.

He stood there in his office, his hand still against the door, running through his afternoon, doing a mental check to recall whether he had opened the door that day. He didn’t think
so.

As he stood there, the shadow in the space between the wall and the sofa caught his attention. It was the only place where someone could hide, and he turned his head slowly. He moved two steps
to his left, pulled his gun out of his pocket. When he was level with the back of the sofa, he ducked down in one swift motion, the gun pointing into the space, and he yelled, ‘Don’t
move!’

Nothing. There was no one there.

Feeling foolish, he shook his head and stood up. He walked over to the desk and picked up the file. He thought briefly about putting it back in the cabinet but reconsidered. He wanted to go over
the information one more time. Things were moving in the right direction, but now was not the time to lose track of the details.

He tucked the file under his arm and headed back out to the front of the building.

Finn watched as McDougal exited the building. The waiting was worse than anything he could remember. He’d lost people he cared about before. People he’d called
friends. People he’d called more than friends. Life on the street was a daily roll of the dice, and the street was where he’d spent his youth.

That was different, though. On the street, the rules were the rules and couldn’t be changed. If you played the game, you knew the risks; everyone was equal in that respect. Even when
people in his crew had gone down, there was regret and anger, but no guilt. No shame at having been unable to change the rules by which they all lived their lives.

Now, as he crouched by the side of the building, gun in his hand, muscles tight and aching with the lactic acid building in them, he understood for the first time in his life what it was like to
have someone depend on you for all they were and all they would become, and to fail them.

As soon as McDougal’s car pulled out of the driveway, Finn stood up and moved quickly to the front door. He wanted to break into a full run, but he knew better. There were still dangers.
The more attention they drew to themselves, the more likely it was that they would all be in peril. He forced himself to walk.

Kozlowski was approaching from the other direction. ‘It’s a good sign,’ he said.

‘What is?’

‘He came out. Alone. If he’d found her, there would have been complications. There would have been activity. She’s okay. She made it.’

‘You seem sure.’

‘I am.’ Kozlowski pulled out his tools and began unscrewing the plastic case to the alarm keypad. ‘We want to be ready,’ he said as he went to work.

The office was still and dark for several minutes after McDougal left. Then slowly, silently, Sally slid her legs one at a time out from under the desk. She stood, shaking, her
arms weak, afraid to move further. Holding her breath, she listened carefully for any sound, any sign that the man might be coming back.

She’d moved quickly as soon as she saw him walk through the door to the warehouse. The sofa provided marginal cover at best, and with the man’s suspicions aroused there seemed little
doubt that she would be discovered as soon as he returned.

Under the desk was the only alternative. It was a calculated risk – if he sat down again, or even walked behind the desk, he would have seen her. She figured the odds were fifty-fifty.
Still, she liked those odds better than staying behind the couch.

She let herself breathe again after a moment, in short shallow bursts, afraid the sound might be enough to bring the man back. Nothing happened, and soon she was breathing normally again.
Another minute and she felt confident enough to begin moving toward the door. Finn and Kozlowski were still out there, waiting for her, she hoped.

The door at the other side of the office led out into a reception area. At least, that’s what it looked like in the dark. She couldn’t be sure. There were windows, but it was a
moonless night, and only faint glimmers from distant streetlights made their way through. It was enough to make out shapes, but nothing more.

She moved through the room slowly, carefully, convinced at every step that someone was lying in wait. She made it to the door at the far side of the room. It felt like she’d been in the
place for an hour, though it had probably been fewer than ten minutes. She knocked three times on the door. There was no response.

‘C’mon!’ she hissed into the darkness. ‘Don’t do this!’ She knocked three times again, this time hard enough to hurt her fists.

Then it came. A single knock from the other side of the door. She reached out to unlock the door and throw it open. Something in the back of her head stopped her, though. She ran through her
memory, trying to recall what Kozlowski had said. She remembered him telling her to knock three times, and he would do the same. She waited, her hand on the knob, fighting every impulse she had to
pull the door open.

It took another minute or two, but finally the knocks came again. This time there were three. She breathed a heavy sigh of relief, unlocked the door and pulled it open. Kozlowski and Finn
slipped in, closing the door behind them. Kozlowski still had the flashlight, and he switched it on, pointing it at her.

‘You all right?’ Finn demanded. She could hear the tension in his voice.

‘Yeah,’ she said, as composed as possible. ‘What took you guys so long?’

They moved quickly through the filing cabinet. Picking the lock took less than thirty seconds, and there were only three drawers. It didn’t take long for them to realize
that there was no information about Elizabeth Connor.

Finn said, under his breath, ‘It’s not here.’

‘Are you telling me I almost got myself killed for nothing?’ Sally asked.

Kozlowski was still flipping through one of the files. ‘It’s gotta be here,’ he said. He gestured to the file with his flashlight. ‘He’s got files on everyone
he’s ever dealt with. Jesus, it looks like Eamonn has a little insurance on everyone.’

Finn looked over his shoulder. ‘He must have taken my mother’s file with him.’

‘These files have an unbelievable amount of information,’ Kozlowski said. ‘Names, numbers, payoffs. There’s enough here to put half of Boston away. He’s even got
tape recordings. Your mother’s file has got to be here.’

‘It’s not,’ Finn said. ‘We’ve been through the entire cabinet. He must have moved it.’

Kozlowski continued flipping through another file. ‘Would you look at this?’ He showed the file he had in his hands to Finn. ‘It’s unbelievable.’

Finn didn’t want to look at it; all he wanted was the information about Elizabeth Connor. He glanced over, however, and something on one of the sheets of paper caught his eye. He grabbed
the file.

‘Hey, what are you doing?’ Kozlowski protested.

‘Give me that for a minute,’ Finn said. He read through the file, the gears in his mind turning. ‘This is it,’ he said. ‘This is the answer.’

‘What’s the question?’ Sally asked.

‘The question is: who murdered my mother?’ Finn said.

‘And the answer is here? In files that have nothing to do with her?’

‘Not the answer, but a way to get at the answer.’ Finn rifled through the rest of the folders and picked out three. ‘There’s a copier in the other room,’ he said.
‘It shouldn’t take more than a few minutes to copy these. I want to look through the tapes, too. Pick out a couple of those.’

‘What are you going to do with them?’ Kozlowski asked.

‘I’m going to turn them into answers,’ Finn said.

Long and Townsend were back at the station house, sitting in the captain’s office. They were staring at each other. ‘What an asshole,’ Townsend said.

‘Buchanan or his pit bull?’

‘Both. I was talking about Carleson, though.’

Long nodded. ‘I’d like to wipe the smug look off his face. Sitting there, looking at us like we’re powerless against him and his client. It pissed me off.’

‘That’s what he was trying to do,’ Townsend said. ‘He wants you mad; he wants you so mad that you’ll make a mistake. That’s how he thinks he’ll
win.’

‘So what do we do?’

Townsend leaned back in his chair. ‘We need to be careful. We move forward and we build a case so solid it can’t be ignored. Can you do that?’

‘Yeah,’ Long said. ‘It may take a while, but there are too many people involved for them to keep it buttoned up. Every single one of Eamonn McDougal’s employees gave
money to Buchanan. If we can find a few who will swear that they were paid by McDougal to do it, that’s the hook.’

‘How do you get them to talk?’

‘I lean on them. Some of these people must have pressure points we can exploit. We figure out where to push, they’ll give.’

Townsend looked skeptical. ‘If I were in their shoes, I’d be way more afraid of McDougal than I’d be of the cops. That’s the sad reality.’

‘Maybe. We’ll see.’

Townsend shot Long a look. ‘Don’t lean too hard, Long,’ he said. ‘You’re already being watched. People around here get a whiff of anything improper, you won’t
last a day.’

Long put his hands up. ‘Don’t worry, Cap. I won’t cross the line.’

‘You’d better not.’ Townsend stared at Long for a few seconds. ‘What happened between you and Jimmy? For real.’

Long stood up. ‘It’s in my report,’ he said. ‘I’ve got nothing else to say that I didn’t put down on paper.’

CHAPTER THIRTY

Coale pulled his black Mercedes into the garage shortly after ten o’clock that night. He was amazed at how tired he was. More tired than he could ever remember being in
his life. Not the pure physical exhaustion that comes from exertion or lack of sleep, but the endless soul-searing weariness that saps the strength more completely. For the first time in his adult
life, he craved sleep not just to recharge, but to escape.