The Front

  She instructs Mick to get the governor’s chief of staff on the phone. Now. It’s urgent she sit down with Governor Howard Mather immediately. Mick suggests she might have to “grovel,” and she reminds him never to use that word unless he’s talking about someone else. However, she concedes, if she finally acknowledges Mather as her mentor, that will have an impact. She really needs his advice. She’s suddenly found herself in a PR nightmare. She fears it could reflect poorly on him and doesn’t know what to do. Et cetera.

  “That will be hard for him to resist,” she adds.

  “But what if he does? Then what do I do?”

  “Stop asking me to do your job!” she erupts.

  In a very different part of Cambridge is the run-down frame house where Win was raised by his grandmother, Nana. Overwhelmed by ivy, flowering shrubs, and trees, her yard has become a subdivision of bird- and bat houses, and feeders.

  His motorcycle bumps and fishtails over the rutted, unpaved driveway, and he parks near Nana’s ancient Buick. Helmet off, and his ears are filled with the fairylike music of wind chimes stirred by the breeze, as if magical sprites alight on trees and the eaves of Nana’s home and decide not to leave. She says they drive off mean and niggling entities, which should include the neighbors, Win thinks. Selfish, bigoted, rude. Fighting over shared driveways and off-street parking. Staring suspiciously at the steady stream of people who show up at the house.

  He pops the trunk of the old Buick, which of course Nana hasn’t bothered to lock, places his motorcycle gear inside, opens her back door, steps over the line of kosher salt on the floor. She’s sitting in her kitchen, busy laminating bay laurel leaves in wide strips of transparent tape, the TV tuned to a classical music station. Miss Dog—deaf and blind and technically stolen because Win sneaked her away from her abusive owner—is under the table, snoring.

  He sets his gym bag on the kitchen counter, then a knapsack filled with groceries, leans down, kisses Nana’s cheek, says, “As usual, your car wasn’t locked. Your door wasn’t locked, and your alarm isn’t set.”

  “My darling boy.” Her eyes are bright, her long, snowy hair piled on top of her head. “Tell me about your day.”

  He opens the refrigerator, the cupboards, putting away her groceries, says, “Bay leaves don’t deter burglars. That’s why you have an alarm system and good locks. You at least locking up and setting the alarm at night?”

  “Nobody’s interested in an old woman who has nothing worth stealing. Besides, I have all the protection I need.”

  He sighs, does no good to nag her, pulls out a chair, rests his hands in his lap because there’s no room on the table for them, virtually every inch occupied by crystals, candles, statues, icons, talismans, or lucky charms. She hands him two large laminated bay leaves, her silver jewelry clinking, a ring on every finger, bracelets up to her elbows.

  “Put these in your boots, my darling,” she tells him. “One in the left, one in the right. Don’t do like you did last time.”

  “What might that have been?” He slips the laminated leaves in his pocket.

  “You didn’t put them in your shoes, and what did the Husk do?”

  What she calls Lamont. An empty shell, nothing there.

  “She gave you some awful job. A dangerous one,” Nana says. “Laurel is the herb of Apollo. When you wear it in your shoes, your boots, you stand on victory. Make sure the tip points toward the toe, the stem toward the heel.”

  “Yeah, well, I just got another awful job.”

  “Full of lies,” Nana says. “Be careful what you do, because it isn’t about what she says.”

  “I know what it’s about. Ambition. Selfishness. Hypocrisy. Vanity. Persecuting me.”

  Nana cuts off another strip of tape. “Justice is what I need in thought, word, and deed. I’m seeing a revolving sign and rubber marks on pavement. Skid marks. What’s that about?”

  He thinks of Stump’s motorcycle accident, says, “Got no idea.”

  “Be very careful, my darling. Especially on your motorcycle. I wish you wouldn’t ride that thing.” Laminating another bay leaf.

  When the price of gas hit three dollars a gallon, he sold his Hummer and bought the Ducati. Then what a coincidence. About a week later, Lamont came up with a new policy: Only her investigators on call could take home their state police cars.

  “For tonight anyway, you get your wish because I need to fill your old battleship with gas,” he says to Nana. “Will bring it back tomorrow. Even though you’ve got no business behind the wheel.”

  He can’t stop her. So at least he’ll make sure she doesn’t end up stranded on the roadside somewhere. Nana tends to forget about flat-footed realities, such as keeping her car filled with gas, checking the oil, making sure her registration is in the glove box, locking her doors, buying groceries, paying bills. Little things like that.

  “Your clothes will be nice and clean. As always, my darling.” Indicating his gym bag on the kitchen counter. “What touches your skin and the magic begins.”

  Indulging her in another one of her rituals. She insists on hand-washing his workout clothes in a special concoction that leaves them smelling like an herb garden, then wrapping them in white tissue paper and returning them to his gym bag. A daily swapping. Something about an exchange of energy. Drawing negativity out of him as he sweats, while drawing in the herbs of the gods. Whatever makes her happy. The things he does that nobody knows about.

  Miss Dog stirs, rests her head on his foot. Nana centers a leaf on a strip of tape. She reaches for a box of matches, lights a Saint Michael the archangel candle in a colorful glass jar, and says, “Someone’s poking a stick at something and will pay the price. A very high price.”

  “Poking a stick at something is her normal routine,” he says.

  “Not the Husk. Someone else. A nonhuman.”

  Nana doesn’t mean an animal or a rock. Nonhumans are dangerous people incapable of love or remorse. In other words, sociopaths.

  “One person comes to mind immediately,” Win says.

  “No.” Nana shakes her head. “But she’s in danger.”

  He reaches across the table, plucks Nana’s car keys off the outstretched ceramic arm of a small Egyptian statue, says, “Danger keeps her from getting bored.”

  “You’re not leaving this house, my darling, without putting those bay leaves in your boots.”

  He pulls off his motorcycle boots, slips in the bay leaves, making sure they’re pointing the correct way, according to manufacturer’s instructions.

  Nana says, “Today is the day of the goddess Diana, and she rules silver and copper. Now, copper is the old metal of the moon. It conducts spiritual energy, just as it does heat and electricity. But beware. It’s also used by bad people to channel hoaxes. That’s why it’s being stolen hand over fist these days. Because falsehoods rule. The dark spirit of hatefulness and lies dominates the planet right now.”

  “You’ve been watching too much Lou Dobbs.”

  “I love that man! Truth is your armor, my darling.” She dips into a pocket of her long skirt, pulls out a small leather pouch, places it in Win’s hand. “And this is your sword.”

  He unties the drawstrings. Inside are a shiny new penny and a small crystal.

  “Keep them with you at all times,” she says. “When put together, they form a crystal wand.”

  “Great,” he says. “Maybe I can turn Lamont into a frog.”

  Not long after he leaves, Nana carries a box of kosher salt upstairs to her bathroom, where octagonal mirrors hanging in the corners direct negativity back to the sender.

  Evil this way bent

  Return whence it’s sent!

  She never goes to bed unclean, lest the unpleasantness of the day continue in her dreams. Unsettledness. She feels the presence of the nonhuman. A childish one filled with mischief and meanness, resentment and pride. She pours salt on the shower floor, turns on the water, and chants another spell.

  Rising moon and setting sun,


  My sacred work is never done.

  Breath and light for me are one.

  Warrior of justice, come!

  The salt beneath her feet draws bad energy from her and washes it down the drain, and she ends her shower with an herbal brew of parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme that she boiled in an iron pot this morning. She pours the fragrant water over her head to cleanse her aura, because her work brings her into contact with many personalities, not all of them good, especially this one. The nonhuman. A young one who is ranging about. It is close now and wants something of Nana’s, something very dear to her.

  “My most powerful instrument of magic is my very being,” she says out loud. “I will pinch you between my two fingers!” she warns it.

  In her bedroom, she opens a drawer and retrieves a small red-silk bag filled with iron nails, tucks it into the left pocket of her clean, white robe. She sits next to Miss Dog on the bed, writes in her journal by the light of white candles. Writes her usual musings about Magick and Spells and the Work of the Mage. The journal is thick, bound in Italian leather, and she has filled its pages, the pages of many journals for many years, writing in her large, looping script. Then a heavy fatigue, and candles out, and she has one foot into the land of sleep when she sits up with a start in the dark. She grabs the bag of nails out of her robe pocket and jangles them loudly.

  Miss Dog, deaf and snoring, doesn’t stir. Footsteps downstairs along the wooden hallway between the kitchen and the living room.

  Nana jumps out of bed, jangles the nails again as she flies out the bedroom door.

  “I will punish you by the rule of three times three!” she yells.

  Footsteps moving fast. Stomp-stomp-stomp-stomp-stomp. The kitchen door slams shut. Nana looks out her window, sees a shadow running, carrying something. She hurries down the stairs and out of the house, and wanders about her overgrown property as wind chimes clatter and clang, agitated and angry. She feels the emptiness of what was just there. Then the sound of a car, and far down the street, taillights are the bright red eyes of the devil.

  THREE

  Inside the FRONT’s mobile crime lab, Stump examines the note from the day’s bank robbery, looking for something, anything, foiled again.

  Raising latent fingerprints on paper isn’t the sure thing depicted on all those cop shows, and in the real world, this bank robber has yet to leave a useful clue. She stops what she’s doing as she hears a car pull up. Then her cell phone rings.

  “It’s me.” Win’s compelling baritone voice. “You giving tours? I’m outside your big-ass truck.”

  She pulls off her latex gloves, opens the tailgate. He climbs up the steps, squints in the bright lights as she lets him in, shuts the heavy doors, slam-dunks the used gloves in the trash, yanks a new pair out of a box.

  “How did you know I was here?” she asks.

  “You had a bank robbery today. Remember?” He moves close to the countertop where she’s working. “And let me see. You aren’t at your shop. So I called your dispatcher and asked where I might find you.”

  “You’re offensive and presumptuous, and I’m not amused.” Pulling on the latex gloves, having a bit of a struggle with them.

  “What you got here?”

  If there’s one thing she detests, it’s a guy who’s so perfect, he looks like a friggin’ Calvin Klein underwear ad and, if that’s not annoying enough, assumes he can charm the birds out of the trees. Well, not this tough old bird. Besides, if she runs him off, she’s only doing him a favor.

  “What I’ve got is nothing,” she says irritably. “It’s as if he’s wearing gloves, only I know he’s not.”

  “You sure? Absolutely?” He moves closer.

  She can smell him. The hint of a spicy, masculine cologne. Probably expensive, like everything else he’s got.

  “I’m sure this will shock you,” Stump says, “but I recognize gloves when I see them.” She rewinds the surveillance tape, says, “Help yourself.”

  The bank’s glass front door opening. White guy—or could be Hispanic—acting normal, perfectly at ease, with baggy blue sweats, sunglasses, dark hair, a Red Sox baseball cap pulled low, smart enough to know where the cameras are and to divert his face from them. No other customers inside. Three teller windows, one occupied by a young woman. Smiles as he approaches, slips her the note. She stares at it, doesn’t touch it, terror on her face. Fumbles with the cash drawer, fills a deposit bag. He runs out of the bank.

  “Another look at his hands.” Win leans closer.

  She backs up the video, pausing it so he can get a good look at the robber’s hands as he’s sliding the note under the teller’s window. She can feel Win’s closeness, as if he heats up the air.

  “No gloves,” he agrees. “Same thing in the other robberies?”

  “So far.”

  “That’s a little strange.”

  The note from this morning’s case is on clean butcher paper covering the counter, and he stares at it for a long time, as if he’s reading an entire page of print, not just the same simple ten words the robber writes on every note.

  EMPTY CASH DRAWER IN BAG. NOW! I HAVE A GUN.

  She explains, “Neatly written in pencil on a four by six-inch sheet of white paper, torn from a notepad. Same as the other three cases.”

  “Watertown, Somerville, now Belmont,” Win says. “All of them members of the FRONT, unlike Cambridge, which has yet to join your private club, and . . .”

  “And why do you think this is?” she interrupts. “Lamont’s headquarters is in Cambridge, and she has her own private club called Harvard, which pretty much owns Cambridge. So could that possibly have something to do with why Cambridge hasn’t joined the FRONT and probably never will?”

  “I was going to add that your robber also hasn’t hit Boston,” Win says. “What’s going through my mind is Watertown, Somerville, and Belmont border on Cambridge. And Boston is close by as well. Certainly there are a lot of banks in Cambridge, not to mention Boston, yet your robber’s avoided both places. Coincidental?”

  “Maybe they’ll be next.” She’s got no idea where he’s going with this. “If so, I guess yours truly here won’t be helping out, since Cambridge and Boston cops do their own crime scene investigation, handle their own evidence.”

  “That’s one point I’m trying to make,” he says. “Boston PD has its own labs, and if we’re honest about it, Cambridge gets priority with state police labs because of Lamont.”

  “And because Cambridge hasn’t joined the FRONT, and if we’re honest about it, departments that join us get punished for it. Get treated as if we’ve committed treason.” Rudely. She doesn’t know why he seems to bring out the worst in her.

  “If I were a smart bank robber,” Win continues, “I would definitely pick targets where police resources are limited and the evidence analysis is going to take forever, assuming it’s done at all.”

  “Well, that would be most of Middlesex County. So I’m missing your point.”

  “My point is maybe you should think about where he’s not committing his crimes as opposed to where he is committing them. Let’s just say this guy’s avoiding Boston and Cambridge. Then why? Maybe for reasons I just cited. Or maybe because he lives in Boston or Cambridge. Is afraid someone might recognize him.”

  “So maybe you’re the one robbing the banks. Since you’ve got that nice apartment in Cambridge.”

  “Says who?”

  “I check somebody out when he’s on my radar screen,” Stump says. “You sure live like you rob banks.”

  “You don’t know the first thing about how I live. You just think you do.”

  She points a latex-sheathed finger at the note, says, “Same spelling and punctuation, same block printing.”

  “You should wear cotton examination gloves. Latex can smear pencil, some inks. This piece of paper from the same notepad?” he asks.

  “Wow. So you know about indented writing, too.”

  “You used electrostatic det
ection?”

  “Holy smoke. And you know about ESDA, too. You’re quite the brain trust. As if we have an ESDA, by the way,” she says, annoyed. “And if we’d asked you guys? Well, maybe ten years later you’d get around to it. Anyway, oblique lighting did the trick. Each note shows the impressions of the last note written.”

  “The guy wants us to know it’s him,” Win says.

  “Us? There’s no us. How many times do I have to tell you? And you can quit trying to insert yourself into my life, because it’s not going to work. I’m not helping you with your publicity stunt.”

  “I’m sure Janie Brolin wouldn’t appreciate your considering her murder a publicity stunt.”

  Stump wishes he would go away. For his own damn good.

  She says, “Why might this bank robber want us to, quote ‘know it’s him’?”

  “Maybe he’s showing off. Maybe he’s some kind of thrill seeker—gets off on all this.”

  “Or maybe he’s just plain stupid, doesn’t realize each time he writes a note, he leaves indentations of it on the sheet of paper below it,” she says.

  “What about latent prints? Anything on the other three notes?”

  “Nothing. Not one damn fingerprint, not even a partial.”

  “Okay, then he’s not stupid,” Win says. “Otherwise, he wouldn’t keep getting away with it. Middle of the day. And no fingerprints. Not even partials. You used ninhydrin?”

  It is an inexpensive, tried-and-true reagent used to develop latent fingerprints on porous surfaces such as paper. The chemical reacts to the amino acids and other components of oils and sweat secreted from the skin’s pores. She tells him it hasn’t worked on any of the notes, nor have forensic light sources with various bandwidths and special filters.

  “And the tellers aren’t touching the notes,” Win says.

  “Just leave them right where they are. Bottom line? We’ve got nothing. And unless this dude’s wearing magic gloves that are invisible to the naked eye, there’s no logical explanation for why he isn’t leaving a trace of his identity on what now is four notes. Even in cases where there’s no usable ridge detail, people who don’t wear gloves leave something. A finger mark. A smear. A partial print from the side of the hand or the palm.”