Michael Palmer - The Society

Patty stared at an item near the bottom of the page. It was from the Ashford Sentinel -the police log from May 27, four years ago.

Domestic disturbance, 94 Martin Road. Dr. Willard Grant taken into custody for arguing with responding officers. No charges filed.

There was no more information.

Taken into custody. No charges filed.

“What was that all about?” she muttered.

The best scenario she could concoct was that Grant’s wife or else a neighbor, or perhaps even one of their children, had called the cops because of a noisy argument. When the officers arrived, Grant refused to calm down or perhaps to leave the house for the night in order to defuse the situation. He was eventually removed by the officers, by force, and then calmed down quickly enough so that no charges were filed. Maybe the responding officers even knew him. Maybe he did some medical work for them or their families. Cops and docs-especially surgeons and ER docs-tended to share the bond of full moons and early-morning crazies.

Just as quickly as that, Patty’s romantic fantasies were gone, replaced by thoughts that were much more serious and sinister-thoughts of a father of two with a bullet in his forehead, and a company CEO, shot through the throat, and finally, a meticulous suburbanite, blown to bits in his driveway. The issues Willard Grant had discussed at Faneuil Hall didn’t exactly qualify as a motive, but there could certainly be more going on. Add an anger-management problem to the man’s passionate dislike for HMOs, and something well might be brewing.

In twenty minutes Patty had showered and dressed and was speeding through the early morning toward Salem along largely deserted streets. The Middlesex state police detectives unit was one floor below the district attorney’s office, located in a small shopping mall near the center of town. Patty used her security code to enter, left the overhead lights off, and switched on the desk lamp in her cubicle. Her desktop, while somewhat cluttered, was still neater than any of the men’s except for Lieutenant Court, who was at times fastidious to a fault. She had a single poster on the wall, sent by her brother, which looked amazingly like a mullioned window looking out on the Cascade Mountains. She had added a rod and set of paisley curtains, tied back to complete the illusion.

Sensing she was on to something, Patty settled in front of her computer and logged in. In moments she would be linked over space and time to the Criminal Justice Information System, an almost inconceivable amount of data on criminals, as well as on everyday citizens with no police record at all. She was about to become something of an expert on one Dr. Willard Grant. Her first stop was the Registry of Motor Vehicles.

Discovery number one was that Willard Grant used the name Will on his driver’s license, which Patty sensed might already be a violation of state law. He had two citations in five years, both for speeding, both paid. His current address was in Wolf Hollow, a modestly upscale condominium development in Frederickston. Backtracking, Patty found a Maxine Grant still living at the Martin Road address in Ashford. Since the domestic-disturbance incident four years ago, Will Grant was either separated or divorced. A quick check of Fredrickston records showed a divorce two years ago. Two children, Daniel and Jessica, both the same age. An adoption, perhaps, but more likely twins. Patty wondered where the children were the night their parents argued and Will Grant was hauled off by the Ashford police.

Seated in the pleasing quiet of the office, Patty logged on to a second site, the WMS-Warrant Management System. It took only a short while to learn that Grant had no outstanding arrest warrants against him. Patty sensed that in spite of herself, she felt strangely relieved at the news. Still, there was the aftermath of the disturbance in Ashford.

With several choices available to her, Patty next logged on to the Board of Probation site. The BOP recorded every court action in the state and was in the process of merging with the data banks of all other state boards of probation, as well. CORI, the Criminal Offenders’ Records Information segment of the BOP, was her first stop. Willard Grant (Ashford address) lit up immediately in the form of a three-month restraining order, taken out by Maxine Grant the day after the incident reported in the Ashford newspaper. Patty opened a spiral-bound pad and noted the information. She had intervened in enough domestic-violence cases to find them totally abhorrent, and that was even before her grisly first homicide case. What little warmth she still held for Grant vanished, replaced by heightened interest in him as a suspect in a string of murders that until now had no suspects.

A few minutes later, that interest expanded like a party balloon.

She had searched through the Interstate Identification Index (III) and the NCIC-the National Crime Information Center-without adding anything to what she already knew, and was about to call it quits when she decided to visit one last site-the Criminal History System Board. The CHSB, located in Chelsea, just north of Boston, was manned twenty-four/seven and contained a vast data bank, overlapping some of the others but also including information on lawbreakers who either hadn’t yet made it onto other sites or had been overlooked for one reason or another.

Willard Grant was forty-one. Teaming up with the night officer on duty, a young-sounding man who introduced himself as Matthew MacDonald, Patty searched through the CHSB for Will or Willard Grant, beginning with the year he turned seventeen. When she reached twenty-one, Will Grant again lit up. It was an arrest at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst for leading a sit-in at the office of the dean. Public service and two years’ probation.

There was no mention of the cause for which the sit-in was held, but the zealous action against a perceived social injustice fit well with the man who, twenty years later, was active in the Hippocrates Society and vehemently opposed managed care.

“There’s more,” MacDonald said from his desk, twenty miles south and east of where Patty was seated. “In addition to being booked for illegally blocking the egress and entrance of a public building, Grant was charged with shoving a security guard. It doesn’t look as if that charge led to a court appearance, but I can’t be sure. There are still holes in some of these reports.”

Patty’s spiral pad was filling up.

Just three years later, there was more-another arrest, this time for assaulting a fellow med student at some sort of book burning.

“Book burning?” Patty asked.

“That’s what it says here,” MacDonald replied. “The other student’s name was Streeter-Owen Streeter. Apparently, no official charges were filed.” Patty was recording the information when MacDonald said, “Wait, this is interesting.”

“What?”

“Will Grant was picked up as a suspect in the bombing of a lab at the medical school. Same year.”

“Arrested?”

“I don’t think so, but the Amherst police were impressed enough to put him in the data bank.”

“I wonder why?”

For a few seconds, MacDonald was silent.

“I think I know,” he said slowly.

“Go on.”

“There was someone in the lab at the time of the explosion-a janitor, it says here. He was killed.”

MURDER!!!

Patty wrote the word across the center of a blank page in her notebook, then added drops of blood coming off the legs of the M and R s. She noted the date and for the time being ended her conversation with MacDonald, but not before extracting his promise to keep searching the intervening years for more on Grant and to call her if anything additional turned up. Her shift was about to begin, and even before this latest turn of events, she was behind in her paperwork. Still, strongly sensing that this was no dead end, she was unwilling to put matters on hold. Using the Net, she jotted down the names and URLs of the newspapers in Amherst, as well as the nearby towns and cities, including Northampton and Springfield. Before she could make her way into those newspapers’ back issues, the door to the office opened. It took just a few seconds to recognize the voices of two men as Jack Court and Wayne Brasco.