“Hey, I apologize for the guys. They can be crass sometimes, but they don’t mean anything by it,” he said.
“Don’t worry about me. I can handle myself.”
He nodded. “Okay. Good. Get home safe.”
“Thanks. See you tomorrow.”
The North End late on a Tuesday night was quiet as the grave. There were no cabs in sight. No people either. Brad crossed the street, his wingtips ringing against the pavement. The blue Volvo with the Red Sox sticker also had those stick figures pasted on its rear windshield. A dad, a mom, two little boys, and a baby girl.
As she watched him take his key from his pocket, something nagged at her. Charlie claimed he needed the make of the car in order to drive by and confirm that Brad was at the restaurant. But Morelli had been there, too. Why not just ask him and confirm Kathy’s information without the bother of a drive-by? Maybe she was wrong about Morelli. Maybe he didn’t work for Charlie after all. Though he’d been strangely aggressive about giving her a ride. Why do that, unless …
He wanted to stop her from getting in that car.
A sick feeling swept over her.
No.
She ran toward the Volvo, waving her arms, screaming.
“Brad!”
The car exploded into a fireball that lit the night. Shop windows blew out with a whoosh and a tinkle of falling glass. A rain of debris fell from the sky, some of it wet and red. Kathryn screamed till her throat was raw, sinking to the ground, feeling the heat of the fire on her face. When the cops arrived, they found her prostrate on the sidewalk, sobbing uncontrollably, her hair and her clothes flecked with the blood of a man who had never been anything but kind to her.
Later that night, Ray came knocking on her door. She knew why he was there. The FBI planned to interview her first thing in the morning. Ray was going to deliver the same message he had years before, when she witnessed that knifing in the hallway at school. This time, her answer had to be different.
Her voice shook as she confronted him.
“Charlie lied to me. He promised no one would get hurt. Brad was a good man. I can’t do this anymore.”
Ray patted her shoulder consolingly.
“I’m very sorry about what happened. I’ll ask him to back off for a while. Give you some time to compose yourself.”
“Not for a while. Permanently.”
“Honey, I’m afraid that’s just not possible.”
“Well, it has to be. You tell him, or whoever pulls his strings, either I’m out or we have a problem. I’ll tell the FBI he’s involved.”
Ray looked alarmed. “Don’t get crazy on me now.”
“I mean it. I just can’t anymore, Uncle Ray. It’s over, even if that means testifying.”
His jaw jutted stubbornly, and his face flushed red, the very picture of getting his Irish up.
“Well, I hate to do this,” he said, taking something small and silver from his coat pocket.
She recoiled.
“Jeez, it’s just a tape recorder,” he said. “You think I could ever hurt you? Not that I can say the same for some of my associates. Sit down. I’ll get you some water.”
He led her to the sofa, bringing her a glass. As she drank, he held up the tape recorder.
“You’re a grown-up now, Kathy. I need you to listen to this, and then I’m going to be very frank with you. We have to stop pretending that things aren’t what they are. For your own sake.”
He pressed Play. It was her voice on the tape, the words spliced together for maximum culpability.
“Brad’s on his way to dinner with the task force guys.… They’re going to Villa Carlotta.… He drives a blue Volvo with a Red Sox sticker on the back.”
She looked at Ray in shock. He just shrugged, like, What did you expect? All those years. All that tuition money. She believed he truly thought of her as a daughter. But that wasn’t his only motive.
“If it was up to me,” he said, “I’d let you walk away, but the people above my head will never do that. You’re too valuable an asset. You need to accept that, or the consequences will be severe. I’m sorry, Kathy, that’s just the world we live in. You belong to them now.”
15
Present day
When Kathryn told people that teaching at Harvard Law was an escape for her, she meant it more literally than they would ever know. She was desperate to make a run for it. But there were eyes on her at all times. At home. At the office. Every place in between. The best-laid escape plans would fail if you were being watched. She’d learned that from hard experience, having tried to run before. It was a disaster, the worst thing that happened to her in her entire cursed life. Because they were watching. They found out. They retaliated. She lost Matthew and would have ended her own life if not for—well, there were other people she loved, who gave her reason to live. People who needed her protection. This time when she ran, she was determined to make it, for their sakes. But achieving that would require something that she lacked. Privacy. She needed a private space in order to make the complicated arrangements necessary to disappear without a trace. A place where her captors couldn’t follow her. A place they wouldn’t object to, where they would allow her to spend time.