Brian Mcgrory - Dead Line

But onward. I put both photographs down, my heart now even heavier with the events of the day and the suspicions of the moment. I picked up the papers on the desk and flipped through them, looking for any clue as to her employment. But mostly they were old bills and flyers. I checked through her two desk drawers, looking, perhaps, for a pay stub or an ID card, but there was nothing of any worth inside. I began walking out toward the living room part of the sun-splashed loft when something on the floor caught my eye. It was just a corner of white paper, wedged behind the desk. I hunched down, pulled on it, and was suddenly holding another photograph, this one an image that stunned me.

Oh, it was nothing vulgar or pornographic or even remotely compromising. Black Hair wasn’t even in it, thank God. I was sick of him already. What it showed was the mayor of Boston standing with his arm around Hilary Kane, various clingers-on in the background, at some ribbon cutting ceremony somewhere. Scrawled across the bottom of the picture were the words, “To Hilary, the best lawyer at City Hall. With all my gratitude, Mayor Harkins.”

A couple of points worth making here. First, what kind of jug-head calls himself “Mayor” even to his own staff? At least he doesn’t have the title “Special Mayor.” Second, it obviously meant that she was in the employ of the city, probably as a lawyer in the corporation counsel’s office. Third, it might well indicate that the reason the FBI was investigating her death was because the Feds were probing the mayor on some other issue and were searching for a link to the Kane murder.

All of it was interesting, but not terribly conclusive. Still, the nagging got louder, almost to the point of shrillness. The photograph in my gloved hands was one of those pictures that only politicians and their pathetic groupies love. Hilary Kane obviously wasn’t one of them, given that it had slipped unnoticed behind her desk. She probably never missed it, forgot she had ever even had it, or maybe she had even tossed it toward the trash can and hit the rim. It was meaningless, to her and any normal-thinking person.

But not now. Now it was an important clue that I held in my own sweaty hands. Now it broached some terrifying questions. Now it whispered truths that I couldn’t quite hear. I came here because my very refined reporter’s instinct told me that Hilary Kane was in some way linked to the Gardner Museum heist. This picture indicated that I might well be right.

But when does intuition give way to facts? When does fear turn to anger? Did I cause someone to die? And not just anyone, but did I help end the life of the young and beautiful Hilary Kane, for reasons that I didn’t yet know?

I tucked the picture back behind the desk precisely where I had found it, happy — though that’s probably not a good description of the moment — to have it out of my hands. I picked up another photograph on the desk, this one of Hilary and two other women with remarkably similar features — one about her same age, the other older, no doubt a sister and their mother. They were standing outside of this very building, not posed, but candid. Each of them had a box of some sort in her hands, probably on the day Hilary moved in. I suspected that the lazy no-good boyfriend was the one behind the camera, his way of sneaking a break.

I looked hard into Hilary’s eyes, big and blue-gray, dazzling, knowing. She was a smart woman; you could tell that from even the quickest glimpse. She had that same somewhat practiced smile on her naturally beautiful face. Her hair was pulled back. She wore a tank top and a pair of short-shorts showing legs that were long and carefully formed.

I shook my head. I put the picture back down. I cursed, and the sound of my own voice jolted me from my dark reverie. Well, my voice and the faint rattle of a key in the door on the other side of the room.

With no great embarrassment do I confess to being relatively new at this whole burglary venture, though it does seem that whenever I commit one, Hank Sweeney is somehow involved. This time he apparently let me down in his role as chief scout. The plan had been for him to ring me if anyone was coming into the apartment. My phone, set on vibrate, hadn’t moved.

No time to assess blame. I placed the picture on the desk and bolted for the nearby bathroom door, the only place to take shelter in the entire apartment unless I were to have done the clichéd hide-under-the-bed thing, but it was probably packed with more shoes under there.

I got into the bathroom and pushed the door halfway shut just as I heard the apartment door open and a set of jangling keys pulled from the lock. The lights were off in the medium-size bathroom, but sunlight poured through the one window, showing a fashionable design in tile and slate. The sleek, black slate was in the walk-in shower, beyond the pristine glass doors. I mean, I’ve soaked the Record for enough $300-a-night hotels to give me a some fair standing as a designer, and I never came across anything this nice.

I slowly, silently pulled off the rubber gloves, so as to look slightly less menacing to whoever happened to catch me in there, and shoved them into my back pocket. I glanced out the window to see if there was a balcony, a fire escape, anything that would allow me to get out, but there was barely even a ledge. So I pushed my head closer to the door and listened to what was left in the proverbial store.

There were footsteps, somewhat light, like that of sneakers, moving across the floor away from the bathroom, toward the front of the apartment. It sounded like just one pair, which was a good sign, better, anyway, than half the homicide unit or a bunch of bruisers from the FBI. Why, I wondered, hadn’t Sweeney called?

Then silence. Nothing. Just dead air that lasted several minutes long. I wanted nothing more than to peer through the opening of the door to see who was on the other side. Short of that, I wanted to call Sweeney out on the street and ask him who the flying hell had just come by on his watch. But I couldn’t risk either. I was, in fact, in the act of committing what I think must be a felony — breaking and entering. I’m sure the Feds could add a host of other charges to it as well, like tampering with evidence, just to name one of the bigger ones.

All of which is to say, I remained still and silent and wondering. I strained so hard to hear any foreign, unusual sounds that I felt like Colin Montgomerie on the first tee of the U.S. Open. My senses, on hyperalert, caused me to take in just about every little detail of the bathroom.

On the vanity, she had a container of facial cleanser, a couple of bottles of moisturizers, a tube of some sort of hair product that was something other than mere gel, and a bunch of what I believe younger women call scrunchies — elastics to pull back her hair, in various shapes, colors and sizes. There was a bar of plain old soap, a tube of Colgate toothpaste, a single toothbrush in a white cup, and a floss dispenser. The only makeup I saw was a cylinder of lipstick. This was, as Aretha Franklin might say, a natural woman.

Still, on the other side of the door, silence. I inched closer to the opening, but didn’t dare take a look. I heard the cry of a baby far outside of the bathroom window, and beyond that, the distant sound of a siren, probably that of an ambulance. But inside this apartment, just the unsteady sound of my own breathing, and even that I tried to keep quiet.

And then, footsteps again, coming from the front of the apartment to the back, where the bathroom was located, and more important, where a well-known, otherwise highly regarded reporter from one of America’s truly great newspapers, remained in hiding. As my mind raced and my body braced, the sound of the steps stopped several feet away from the partially open door. Then I heard the scratch of furniture moving along the wooden floor — the chair to the painted desk where I had been a few minutes earlier, I assumed, sliding outward.