Jack O'Connell: Box Nine

Standing next to Welby, looking cocky and impatient, is Lehmann, a Federal cop out of DEA that Lenore has dealt with once before. Once was enough. Lehmann is old-school and not too crazy about women working narcotics. He’s wearing a blue standard-issue windbreaker and jeans, holding his aviator sunglasses in his hands and chewing on the end of one stem.

The third person is a mystery man. He’s the tallest Oriental Lenore has ever seen. She’d put him at six two or three. He looks to be in his mid to late thirties, 175 pounds, all of it tight. Could be a runner, maybe even a marathoner. He’s got a closely cropped head of jet-black hair and a long angular face. He’s dressed in charcoal slacks, a pale blue button-down shirt, a navy knit tie, and a herringbone jacket. Lenore looks to his feet and proves herself right — he’s got on penny loafers.

The guy is carrying a faded leather satchel that bulges slightly in the middle, and as she watches he shifts it from his hand up into his arms to cradle it like a sleeping child. She can’t really guess at his specific nationality. He could be Chinese, Korean, Cambodian. She’s just awful at making the distinctions, even though the Asian population of Quinsigamond has grown tremendously in the past ten years and she knows dozens of Asians personally. She’s embarrassed by this weakness, but doesn’t know how you might effectively cure it. Is there a reference book you could work with?

Zarelli touches her arm and she pulls away at once and moves to the table to sit down between Shaw and Richmond. Mayor Welby sits down in the head seat, Miskewitz on his left and Peirce on his right. The Oriental guy sits down next to the lieutenant. Lehmann takes the end-seat opposite the mayor, and Zarelli slides into the remaining seat.

Miskewitz sits forward and says, “All right, people, I thank you for coming in this morning for this briefing, especially considering how some of you finished up work a few hours ago. Mayor Welby has a few things to say to you.” He sinks back into his chair, clearly uncomfortable with this event.

But the mayor picks up with a casual grace. First he smiles all around the table, lingering, a second too long, Lenore thinks, on Peirce. Then he folds his hands in front of him and says, “Well, you all know who I am. This is Officer Lehmann out from the Boston office of the DEA. Some of you have met him before, I believe. And I’d like to introduce you all to Dr. Frederick Woo, on loan to us today from St. Ignatius, where he’s a lecturing fellow in linguistics and language theory. Have I got that correct, Fred?”

The Oriental guy smiles and gives a small, modest nod.

The mayor continues, “I know that right now you’re all wondering why a bureaucrat is here to waste your valuable time battling what often, I’m sure, seems like an unwinnable situation on our city streets. I wish I could tell you I’m here to bring you some good news”—his voice drops—“but I’m afraid that’s not the situation today.”

He slides his chair back from the table and stands, a little too dramatically. He walks over to the windows that Lenore hates, and gazes outside for a moment, then returns to start a slow, awful pace, in a circle around the table. Lenore can tell Miskewitz hates every second of this.

“I suppose,” the mayor says, “I’m here today as a symbol more than anything else, a suggestion to you of how serious a problem situation we’re in.”

Lenore wonders why the man can’t just say what’s going on. Why does everything have to have a prologue? Why do guys like Welby always have to turn on the dramatics?

“It’s no secret that over the past two years, drug traffic in Quinsigamond has increased geometrically. I’ve got the papers on my desk that prove it. You people don’t need to see papers. You see the real thing, every day, walking around the muck of Bangkok Park.”

Lenore is cringing inside, caught in a spasm between laughter and disgust. What a pathetic actor this guy is. And what an asshole. She thinks he’s taken his dialogue, heart and soul, straight from some low-rent B movie where self-righteous, renegade, vigilante cops fight ethnic, satanic dealers who lurk in the shadows of schoolyards.

“You are an underfunded, understaffed group of civil servants attempting, no, let’s be honest, staking your lives in a battle against what has become in just a few short decades one of our largest, most intricate and ruthless multinational industries. To be frank, people, you are in an absurd situation.”

He takes a breath, comes behind his own chair, grips the back of it like the conference table was a speeding ride in an amusement park.

“And detectives,” he says in a fake-tired voice, “things just got worse.”

He pauses and looks around the table as if he were waiting for people to audibly sigh. No one obliges and he sits back down in his head chair and continues.

“Now, I am not here today to break down what minimal morale you have left. But it is my duty to let you know about the extent of the problem we’re about to face. And I want each and every one of you to feel that we’re facing it together. You have my unlimited support in this effort. We can’t pull any punches here, ladies and gentlemen. The time for polite conversation is long over.”

Lenore wants to lean over the man, scream at him in the same manner she’s grilled dozens of informants and suspects. She wants to be less than an inch from his face, take in a lungful of air, and yell, “Cut the bullshit and tell me what you know.”

“I’m sure I sound melodramatic to some of you. But what you’ll soon hear about today is a worse plague than the crack explosion we suffered two summers ago. Worse than that heroin harvest out of Burma in the fall of …” he trails off, looking to the ceiling for the year.

“Eighty-three,” Miskewitz mutters, and Lenore knows he’s thrown out a random year.

“Eighty-three,” the mayor repeats. “It’s a different animal this time, people.”

He takes a long pause for an effect that just doesn’t pan out and says, “At this point I think it’s best to turn the story over to Agent Lehmann.”

Lehmann stays seated, but tosses his sunglasses out in front of him, like he’s tired of talking before he’s even begun.

“The substance Mayor Welby is talking about is a derivative of methyl-sermocilan. You’ll come to know it more commonly as ‘Lingo,’ the label Dr. Woo has given it.”

Lehmann speaks like a man in a constant, simmering rage over having to walk among inferior people. He slaps a manila folder onto the table and opens it.

“These look familiar to anyone?” he asks, tossing a pile of 8 x 10 black-and-white photos onto the middle of the table. Everyone reaches for a picture. Lenore pulls up a full-body picture of a naked woman, laid out faceup on a silver slab, photographed from above. Even in black and white, maybe more so in black and white, she has that pasty but shadowy look of the dead. There are thick welts and contusions across her abdomen. The standard tag dangles from her toe in the corner of the photo.

Richmond looks over her shoulder and says, “Last week’s murder-suicide up on Grimaldi Drive. Domestic bloodbath. The Swanns, right? He slit her throat and hung himself. Or do I have it backward?”

“You don’t have it at all,” Lehmann says. “Try to follow me on this. About six months back, some of my people based in Boston were asked to put a file together on a married couple, Leo and Inez Swann. Late thirties, both supposedly brilliant, degrees from Princeton, Cornell, and MIT, where they met. They lived here in the Windsor Hills section of Quinsigamond. Money spilling out of both their pockets. They worked, until recently, at the Institute for Experimental Biochemistry. They had a specialty that the doctor here can tell you more about—”