The Last Orphan -
Chapter 25
The white Colonial clapboard house was accented with a red door and navy shutters so dark they passed for black in the foggy soup of a Massachusetts dusk.
Across the street in the shadow of a NEIGHBORHOOD WATCH sign, Evan sat in a rental car he’d liberated from a Hertz maintenance site in East Boston. The Buick Regal required only light body work on a dinged-up passenger-door panel, but the facility was backlogged, the repair not scheduled until the following week. He’d slipped into the indoor parking lot during lunch break, lifted the key from one of myriad hooks on the service board. The abundance of tools made it easy for him to remove the Lojak, and he’d stashed the NeverLost GPS unit in the trunk of another vehicle before driving off.
He probably could have booked a car safely with one of his fake identities, but he’d been on the receiving end of Naomi Templeton’s focused competence before he’d given her reason to take her pursuit of him personally. He thought it better to raise his security protocols from highly cautious to paranoid. So as to leave no footprint at a hotel, he’d returned to the private jet to eat a meal of red wine–braised beef with polenta and take a nap. It was an arrangement he could get used to.
Joey had generated a dossier of the double murder. The bodies had been dumped in Angela Buford’s apartment in a tenement building in Mattapan, a Boston neighborhood south of the city center. Before his death Johnny Seabrook had been beaten up badly, bruised face, torn ACL. He’d been shot once from behind, his hand impaled with a blade, and his throat slashed.
Angela Buford’s head had been raked around on her swanlike neck, sending C2 vertebra fragments into her brain stem. Even for a woman as delicately boned as Angela, it would have taken an enormous amount of strength and expertise to provide sufficient torque to end her.
Evan had tried and failed at this very move once and had been left to contend with an enraged Serb sporting a sore neck.
According to the medical examiner’s report, Johnny and Angela’s time of death had occurred between eighteen and twenty-four hours before their bodies were discovered, which put the murders on Labor Day. Devine’s men had provided investigators with the guest list for the party that evening, establishing that neither victim had been in attendance.
Joey had included Zoom Earth links showing Devine’s Southampton compound. Cushioned on either side with lush green lawns, the mansion perched on the strip of Meadow Lane between the Atlantic and Shinnecock Bay. It was named Tartarus, a wicked bit of wordplay from the original owner, a Scotsman who’d built his fortune producing merino kilts for Royal Mile tailors in Edinburgh.
If in fact the murders had taken place there as Ruby suspected, it would have required a hell of an operation to move two bodies across state lines to throw investigators off the scent. From everything Evan had seen of Luke Devine and his security cadre, they were capable of a hell of an operation.
Evan looked up from the crime-scene photos on his phone to the Seabrook house once more. It was a suburban spectacle. The brick walkway picked up the dulled red of dueling chimneys rising from the steeply pitched roof of the second floor. Colonials could be counted on for pleasing symmetry—a forthright rectangular front with a four-columned porch, geometric shrubs, matching windows below, twinning dormer windows above.
Contrasted with the image on his RoamZone—Johnny Seabrook laid out in a broken-limbed sprawl on a tenement floor—the Wellesley house was a world apart. And yet death had strolled up that brick walkway, rung the doorbell, and brought the horrors of the world across the threshold anyway.
Evan wondered what it said about him that he felt more at ease in dump-site tenements than in a proper home like the one before him.
The Seabrooks had upgraded to a “smart system” a few years back, and Joey had jumped Evan onto the Wi-Fi network with credential stuffing via the ecobee thermostat, giving him control of the security cameras, the video doorbell, and even the dimmers should the need for romantic lighting suddenly present itself as a tactical imperative.
Deborah Seabrook, on the cusp of sixty, was a onetime soap-opera actress. Her husband, Mason, was a psychologist. The amusement of Evan’s traveling across the country from Los Angeles to wind up at the house of an actress and a therapist was not lost on him.
He was tempted to avoid both thespian and shrink and talk to Ruby separately, but the thought of someone addressing an issue of this weight with Joey behind his back made him feel murderous. So there it was. A green shoot of familial empathy.
He grimaced, annoyed at himself.
Then he walked up and rang the doorbell, watching his own face appear on the RoamZone as he did.
“So let me get this straight.” Deborah Seabrook folded her hands on a stockinged knee peeking from the hem of a conservative tweed A-line dress. “You won’t tell us who you are or what you do. You won’t tell us your last name. You want to talk with our nineteen-year-old daughter to help solve the murder of her brother in response to an ask for help she made a year ago on FlipFlop—”
At this her husband stirred. “TikTok.”
Deborah refused to lose steam. “—and we’re supposed to facilitate this?”
Evan had to concentrate in order not to fidget on the upholstered settee. They were in the family room or living room—he’d never figured out how rich people named their spaces of leisure. Deborah leaned forward in her armchair with beautiful straight-backed posture, but Mason was looser-limbed, on a slightly slumped thoughtful recline that—from Evan’s limited engagement with popular culture—seemed proprietary to therapists. Bearded, with glasses, he stayed silent and paid attention.
Evan said, “Yes.”
A cramped doorway revealed the breakfast seating area of the kitchen, above which CNN murmured from a mounted TV. A fan-shaped graphic of blue and red dots depicted the deadlocked Senate vote on the president’s trillion-dollar environmental bill above a split screen of talking heads, their muted mouths flapping. A good half of the kitchen table had been overrun by an abandoned jigsaw puzzle, its thin frame completed and little else. A jumble of loose pieces were mounded in the middle for long-term storage. Beyond several items of abstract art he failed to decipher and a central staircase, Evan couldn’t make out much more.
California open-concept floor plans to which he’d grown somewhat accustomed served as a rebuke to the distinct rooms of New England houses like this one. Specified spatial purpose, increased privacy. But formality didn’t seem primary in the Seabrook household; they’d invited him right in and listened to his macabre sales pitch. They were serious people who understood the utility of a light touch. And now Deborah was leading the charge right to the heart of the matter.
“Are you … what’s the word? Official?” Deborah asked.
“Sanctioned,” Evan said.
“That one.”
Evan took a moment to consider the question. In the kitchen the news had moved on to another dreary commissioning of another combat ship in a Wisconsin shipyard, the military-industrial complex feeding itself.
“In a manner, yes,” he said. “At the highest level.”
“Why should we believe that?” The left side of Deborah’s face bore the faint memory of a stroke, her handsome features slightly reluctant to follow the lead of her expressions, though her speech was barely impeded. She was unnervingly poised. “It’s not like you’re a door-to-door brush salesman. Given the gravity of the situation and the vagueness of your claims, how should we be expected to trust anything you say?”
Evan took a moment to think about it. There was little sound aside from the susurration of the television. A former vice president droned on at a lectern, Secret Service doing their best to stand at attention among the crisp rows of sailors.
“Would you mind if I made a quick call?” Evan asked.
Mason dipped his head in the affirmative.
Evan dialed the familiar number, reaching the main switchboard. When the featureless voice answered, he said, “Dark Road.” A pause while he was transferred to a security command post, and then he said, “Extension thirty-two.”
The line rang and rang.
Deborah and Mason watched him, motionless.
The voice, flattened out in annoyance. “What?”
“It’s me,” he said.
A terse half-second pause and then, “Do you have any idea the kind of response your actions will draw?”
“I’m on the mission as you requested.”
“You can’t just call me as if I’m some—”
“I’m going to put you on speakerphone. Tell the nice people I’m sitting with that I’m sanctioned so they’ll trust me.”
“You’re not sanctioned. Not anymore.”
“Should I stop?”
A longer silence. And then, slightly muffled, “Tell the Latvian president to hold.” Back to Evan. “Go.”
He hit speaker, held the phone aloft.
President Donahue-Carr’s voice lifted from his RoamZone, rendered in 3-D sound waves. It asked, “Do you recognize my voice?”
Deborah and Mason stared slack-jawed at the phone. “Hello,” Mason said dumbly, eliciting a curt glance from Deborah.
“This man can be trusted. He’s on”—and here the president’s voice sounded slightly strained—“the right side.”
Deborah said, “Why should we believe her? I’ve worked with plenty of voice impersonators.”
“Jesus Christ,” the commander in chief said. “I don’t have time for this shit. I’m having you transferred to Templeton.”
A click. A hum of the paused line. Then ringing. Naomi picked up on one ring.
“Excuse me,” Evan said, taking the phone off speaker and turning away for privacy. In a muted voice, he told Naomi what he needed.
Then he hung up and said, “Follow me, please.”
In a sort of stupor, Deborah and Mason followed him into the kitchen and stood before the TV. Evan pointed to the grandstand behind the dais, indicating the black-suited man nearest the podium.
“Secret Service will scratch his nose,” Evan said.
Twenty seconds passed. Perhaps thirty.
Then the agent touched his ear. Caught the eye of the camera. And scratched his nose pointedly.
Deborah said, “Holy hell.”
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