“I know,” I said.
“You said he was a bully. Was that all?”
“How do you mean?”
“I need to know what the man was capable of.”
“He was capable of anything, Agent Bolton.”
Bolton nodded, leafed through his file. “Emma Hurlihy was committed to the Della Vorstin Home in seventy-five. Before that, there was no record of mental illness in her family, nor did she evidence any disturbing behavior until late seventy-four. Diedre Rider’s first arrest for drunk and disorderly occurred in February of seventy-five. After that, she was getting picked up by police on regular basis. Jack Rouse went from being a slightly corrupt corner-store owner to the head of the Irish Mafia in five years. Reports I obtained from the Organized Crime Bureau as well as BPD’s Major Crime Unit say that Rouse’s rise to power was allegedly the bloodiest in the history of the Irish Mafia here. He attained power by killing anyone who got in his way. How did this happen? How did an extremely low-level bookie get the stones to become a made man overnight?”
He looked at us and we shook our heads.
He turned another page in the file. “District Attorney Stanley Timpson, now here’s an interesting guy. Graduated near the bottom of his class at Harvard. Reached only the middle of his law school class at Suffolk. Failed his bar twice before he finally passed. The only reason he got in the DA’s office at all was because of Diandra Warren’s father’s connections, and his early performance evaluations were low. Then, starting in seventy-five, he turns into a tiger. He earns a reputation, in night court mind you, for refusing to cut deals. He graduates to superior court, more of the same. People begin to fear him, and the DA’s office starts throwing him felony work, and his star continues rising. By eighty-four he is considered the most feared prosecutor in New England. Again, how did this happen?”
The RV swung off the expressway in my neighborhood and headed for St. Bart’s Church, where Bolton was holding his morning debriefing.
“Your father, Mr. Kenzie, runs for city council in seventy-eight. The only thing he seems to do while in office is acquire a reputation for ruthlessness and power-craving which would have made Lyndon Johnson blush. He is, by all accounts, a negligible public servant, but a ferocious politician. Again, we have an obscure person—a fire fighter, for Christ’s sake—who rises far beyond any normal expectations one would hold for him.”
“What about Climstich?” Angie said. “Burns killed himself, but did Climstich show signs of a transformation?”
“Mr. Climstich became something of a hermit. His wife left him in the fall of seventy-five. Divorce affidavits attest that Mrs. Climstich cited irreconcilable differences after twenty-eight years of marriage. She stated that her husband had become withdrawn, morbid, and addicted to pornography. She further stated that said pornography was particularly vile in nature and that Mr. Climstich seemed obsessed with bestiality.”
“Where are you going with all this, Agent Bolton?” Angie asked.
“I’m saying something very strange happened to these people. They either became successful—rose beyond any reasonable expectation of their stations in life, or”—he ran his index finger over Emma Hurlihy and Paul Burns—“their lives fell apart and they imploded.” He looked at Angie as if she held the answer. “Something altered these people, Ms. Gennaro. Something transformed them.”
The RV pulled up behind the church and Angie looked down at the photograph and said it again:
“What did these people do?”
“I don’t know,” Bolton said and shot a wry smile my way. “But as Alec Hardiman would say, it definitely had impact.”
29
Angie and I walked to a donut shop on Boston Street with Devin and Oscar following at a discreet distance.
We were both well beyond tired and the air danced with transparent bubbles which popped before my eyes.
We barely spoke as we sipped our coffee by the window and stared out at the gray morning. All the pieces seemed to be falling together in our puzzle, but somehow, the puzzle itself still refused to take on a recognizable image.
EEPA, I had to assume, had had some sort of encounter with either Hardiman, Rugglestone, or potentially, the third mystery killer. But what kind of encounter? Did they see something that Hardiman or the mystery killer believed compromised them? If so, what could that have been? And why not just knock off the original members of the EEPA back in the mid-seventies? Why wait twenty years to go after their descendants, or the loved ones of their descendants?
“You look beat, Patrick.”
I gave her a weary smile. “You too.”
She sipped her coffee. “After this debriefing, let’s go home to bed.”
“That didn’t sound right.”
She chuckled. “No, it didn’t. You know what I mean.”
I nodded. “Still trying to get me in the sack after all these years.”
“You wish, slick.”
“Back in seventy-four,” I said, “what possible reasons could a man have for wearing makeup?”
“You’re stuck on this point, aren’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know, Patrick. Maybe they were very vain men. Maybe they were covering up crow’s feet.”
“With white Pan-Cake?”
“Maybe they were mimes. Or clowns. Or goth freaks.”
“Or KISS fans,” I said.
“That, too.” She hummed a bar of “Beth.”
“Shit.”
“What?”
“The connection’s there,” I said. “I can feel it.”
“You mean to the makeup?”
“Yes,” I said. “And the connection between Hardiman and EEPA. I’m certain. It’s staring us in the face and we’re too tired to see it.”
She shrugged. “Let’s go see what Bolton has to say at his debriefing. Maybe that’ll make sense of everything.”
“Sure.”
“Don’t be a pessimist,” she said.
Half Bolton’s men were working this neighborhood for information, others were staking out Angie’s place, Phil’s apartment, and mine, too, so Bolton had gotten permission from Father Drummond to gather in the church.
As it usually did in the mornings, the church bore the burnt aroma of incense and candle wax from the seven o’clock mass, a stronger scent of pine solvent and oil soap in the pews, and the sad smell of wilting chrysanthemums. Mottled dust spun in the pewter shafts of light that slanted through the east windows over the altar and disappeared in the middle rows of pews. A church, on a cold fall morning, with its smoky browns and reds, its whiskey-hued air and multicolored stained glass just warming to a frigid sun, always feels as the founders of Catholicism probably intended—like a place cleansed and purified of earthly imperfection, a place meant to hear only whispers and the rustling hush of fabric against a bending knee.