Chapter Forty-Five

I KNEW OF Nick’s presence long before he arrived at the door of the dining room where Susan and I sat. Between Susan’s clicking at her laptop, I heard the unmistakable ca-chunk of metal parts as Effie actioned her massive rifle somewhere upstairs, keeping lookout over the property. A car door shut out by the garage. Boots on gravel. Nick looked edgy and tired as he greeted us wordlessly and slid into a chair opposite me.

“You want the bad news or the worse news?” I asked.

He considered this, his eyes wandering over the scrapes and cuts Susan had suffered in the shootout in the forest.

“Start bad,” Nick decided finally. “Let it get steadily worse.”

I told him about Shauna Bulger, the headless body in the forest, the local crime lord who now lumped us in with the vengeful older woman. Nick’s fists slowly clenched as I relayed Angelica’s story about Driver coming to the house and humiliating her. Nick put his face in his hands and rubbed his eyes hard.

“Man,” he growled. “We don’t need this right now.”

“We don’t need this any time,” Susan countered.

“Just tell him,” Nick said. He lifted his face and shrugged, hard and angry. “Tell Driver what’s happened. Just say, ‘Look, dude. There’s been a mix-up. We didn’t know we were driving your dead girl’s body around. Your beef is with Shauna Bulger.’”

“Well, it was,” Susan said evenly. “But now it’s with us. Driver’s men ran me and Bill off the road. They shot at us. Driver himself came into our house and terrified one of our nearest and dearest. We’re going to kick his ass.”

“We’re in league with Shauna, Nick,” I said. “Whether we like it or not.”

“But, I mean, whatever she does now, she’s representing us,” Nick said. “You don’t think that’s a major, major problem? This chick sounds like a loose cannon. Going and shooting up the guy’s house? That’s crazy. Driving around with a body in a vacuum-sealed bag, coming here and dumping that body on you, Bill? That’s crazy-crazy-crazy. Yes, OK, we gotta kick Driver’s ass. But we’ve also gotta disconnect from Shauna. Because we don’t know what she’s going to do next. She could be hiding under this guy’s bed right now with a flamethrower, for all we know.”

“A flamethrower would be an interesting addition to the narrative,” I said and rested my chin on my palm. “Did you know about the hand grenades in Effie’s room?”

Nick scratched his neck, his eyes on the ceiling.

“That’s what I thought,” I said.

“What do we know about this guy?” Nick asked. “What’s his weak spot?”

“Well, we know he’s powerful,” I said. “An ex–FBI agent who shall remain nameless at this time managed to pull his file. He’s been investigated in connection with the sudden increase in drug traffic in several cities along the East Coast.”

“The houses,” Nick said. “You guys said he works asbestos. He must be using the houses as labs. It’s obvious. If he’s been investigated a bunch of times, how come he hasn’t been picked up? Just raid the damn houses.”

“It’s not as simple as that,” Susan said. “His operations are so big. So diverse. So mobile. He currently has eleven properties in operation that we know of. He’ll have a couple of warehouses, too. He has a fleet of twenty or more trucks constantly moving between those locations, and suppliers and dump sites. His staff would be dozens of men strong, and he’ll likely have some local law enforcement on his pad who can warn him if anybody tries to set up surveillance. Catching Norman Driver would be like trying to catch a rabbit in its warren. Too many tunnels. Too many escape routes. I sympathize with anyone who’s tried.”

“Guys like Driver usually know how to judge when it’s time to move on and become somebody else’s problem, too,” I said. “I’ve seen it before on the job. You have a nightmare criminal like that, you’re thinking it’s going to take everything you have, personally and professionally, to bring him down. Then suddenly, just when you’re reaching the end of your rope, he disappears. Moves on. It’s a relief.”

“When do you get to the weak spot?” Nick asked.

“Shauna,” Susan said. “We have to find her. Firstly, because she is a loose cannon, just as you said. She’s in over her head with this guy and she’s going to get herself killed. And secondly because she’s the key to shutting this whole thing down.”

“She is?” Nick asked.

“Yes. She has something both we and Driver want,” Susan said. “She has the evidence that could put him away for good.”

She turned her laptop toward us. On the screen, a woman with a big smile and wavy, almost white-blond hair was sitting on a garden wall in the sunshine. She was midtwenties, staring right down the camera lens, fiercely full of life and potential. Or maybe I was just recognizing that in her, the way I did with most pictures of murder victims. How full of energy they seemed, now that I knew they were dead.

“This is Georgette Winter-Lee,” Susan said. “She was twenty-three, living in an apartment complex in Lower Roxbury, when she was raped and strangled to death. Police believed she let the guy in, poured him a glass of water, then he took her to the bedroom and made her empty the contents of her underwear drawer for his perusal.”

Nick’s nostrils flared. I watched him trying to control the rage slowly building, drumming his fingers on the tabletop, his knees jogging under the table.

“Georgette had a hole in her drywall, and had told her neighbor the day before that she’d met a guy on the subway who said he could repair it for her. Crime scene techs logged the discovery of a construction-style glove that had fallen behind the bed after Georgette’s body was found,” Susan said. “The glove appeared to have blood on it. It was a masterful find. The glove would have had the perpetrator’s DNA on the inside, and Georgette’s DNA on the outside.”

“But that glove never made it into evidence,” Nick concluded.

I nodded.

“The boy messed up.” Nick gave a mean smile. “He might be a very talented drug king but he slipped up as a scumbag lady killer. There’s no hiding from that in your rabbit warren.”

“So now we’ve gotta get to Shauna before Driver does,” I said.

“And before he gets to us,” Susan said.