Measure Of Darkness

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Monica shakes her head, shows the hint of a smile. “Just me.”

“Interesting,” Dane says, filing it away under Personal Eccentricities. Because she works for Naomi Nantz the file has numerous entries, starting with the boss. “So. You and Shane go way back.”

Bevins nods, her eyes large. “All the way to boot camp at Quantico. I came in straight out of law school, he’d been on the FBI civilian side for a couple years as a technical expert, then decided to apply for Special Agent. We’re both big, so we got lumped together, sort of. I fell in love with him in about twenty minutes.”

Dane is startled by the confession. “Seriously?”

Bevins shrugs. “He was married, so I kept it to myself. He figured it out, of course. So he played it like we were going to be best friends. And you know what? That’s how it worked out in the long run. I got over the crush after a while, but never the friendship. Randall Shane is the bravest, truest, most decent human being I’ve ever known. Point one. You’re aware of his personal tragedy? Wife and daughter? Ever since, he’s devoted his life to rescuing children. Most of his cases are pro bono. Long as he’s got enough to put gas in that big fat car of his, he’s good to go. Therefore incorruptible as to financial temptation. Point two, to my certain knowledge he’s a red-blooded, salute-the-flag, die-for-your-country patriot who would never do anything to threaten the security of the good old U.S.A. Caveat: unless a child’s life is in danger, then it might get complicated.”

“So you believe there might be national security implications?”

Bevins ever so casually checks the burger crowd to see if anybody is paying particular attention. Satisfied, she puts her elbows on the table, goes into sotto voce mode.

“Genius physicist working on a top-secret project, who just so happens to have a secret Chinese mistress and a missing child? Of course there are national security implications. Not that any agency has admitted to involvement. And believe me, I’ve been asking. Like I said, making noise to let them know we know. Kicked in a few doors, metaphorically speaking. Folks look blank, shake their heads. Never heard of Shane, no business of snatching him in plain sight, cross their hearts and hope to die.”

“Somebody made it happen. From all descriptions, this was a professional, military kind of outfit, precision- executing a mission.”

Bevins nods in recognition. “Covert special ops. Which leaves us with at least a couple of possibilities. One of our agencies dispatched an elite unit to seize and detain a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil and has somehow managed not to share that fact with any of the other interested national security agencies, mine included. Or some evildoer has it in for Shane and sent mercenaries to snatch him.”

“Evildoer?”

“That’s how we talk in the FBI. Saves a lot of explaining. ‘Evildoer’ covers terrorist, dictator, gang boss, Wall Street banker, the Yankees, take your pick of the loathsome.”

Dane looks startled. “The Yankees?”

“I’m from Jamaica Plain. My dad was a Boston cop.”

“No kidding? I should have known that.”

“You can’t know everything.”

“Anything I found on Google, it alluded to you growing up on Long Island.”

Bevins reveals a sly smile. “Evildoers might want to target family. Search engines can provide a useful smoke screen. We call it ‘identity diversion.’ Simple but effective.”

Dane nods thoughtfully. “You’re FBI from Boston and Shane’s your BFF, so you must know Jack Delancey.”

After a slight hesitation, Bevins says, “That’s an affirmative.”

“You could be telling this to him.”

“You’re the better choice.”

“You and Jack don’t get along?”

Bevins shrugs. “We never saw eye to eye, and that’s his problem. Me being tall.”

“What?” Dane does a double take. “Your height? Seriously?”

“He calls me ‘The 50 Foot Woman,’ as in Attack of The 50 Foot Woman, some cheesy horror flick he finds amusing. As I’m sure you’ve noticed, Jack loves women. What you may not have noticed, he only loves ’em if they’re five foot ten or less. Turns out, he can’t handle a female boss who’s taller than he is. Admitted as much. I’m one of the reasons he resigned. The other, of course, is that a higher salary means he can buy more suits. And wives.”

“I’ll give him your love.”

“Do that. Really, it’s not a problem. We get along fine just as long as we don’t have to speak, or see each other.”

The shiny-top table starts to vibrate delicately. Bevins retrieves a cell phone from her briefcase, flips it open, checks the display. “Sorry, gotta go. You’ll keep me informed?”

Dane stands, takes a deep breath. “Monica? One more question. Do you think Shane is still alive?”

The big woman blinks, holding herself still. “Absolutely. I’d bet everything that he’s been taken alive for interrogation purposes. Whoever it is behind this, they think he knows something.”

“What? What could he know?”

Bevins hoists the handbag strap to her shoulder. “If I knew that, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. It wouldn’t be you, it would be Shane, and he’d be buying bacon cheese dogs for two and insisting I eat with him, because life is short but we’re not.”

Chapter Fourteen

The Invisible Man Revealed

The first time I saw Naomi destroy one of her beautiful watercolors, I screamed for her to stop. She gave me a look as flat as Death Valley and kept slowly and methodically shredding the damp paper.

“Get used to it,” she said.

Three years, close to a thousand attempts at perfection, and I’m still not used to it.

Here’s the deal. Almost every day at 3:00 p.m., boss lady goes to the ground-floor solarium, which has the requisite northern lighting, and arranges a still life on a small table kept there for that purpose. Could be cut flowers, or an antique cream pitcher, or a found object, or all three. When she has the arrangement just so, she tapes a heavy, pre-cut sheet of Arches watercolor paper on to a small, horizontally-tilted drawing table. She selects her brushes and colors. She takes a deep breath and does some sort of Zen thing that involves closing her eyes and holding her hands out, palms up. Then she sets a timer for thirty minutes and gets to work. First a quick pencil sketch. That never takes more than a minute or two. Then she wets her brushes and begins. Sometimes the mistake happens right away, in the first pass of the brush. More often the timer will ding and she’ll step back, look at the still-life arrangement, glance at her painted version—almost always lovely, in my opinion—and then calmly peel it away from the drawing board, tear it into strips and feed the pieces into a paper shredder.

Zzzt, zzzt, zzzt. It’s gotten to be a sound that makes my teeth hurt.

Today is no different, except that the arrangement involves a folding carpenter’s ruler, a combination square and a brass bevel, donated to the cause by Danny Bechst, who once told me, in confidence, that Naomi was like van Gogh, except better looking and with two ears. Apparently van Gogh wrecked a lot of his paintings, too. A fact you wouldn’t expect the average carpenter to know, but in Boston there are no average carpenters. Most of them seem to have Ph.D.’s. Anyhow, Danny isn’t as appalled by the daily destruction as I am. Says he understands a quest for perfection and that one of these days when the bell dings, voilà, a flawless masterpiece.

As for Naomi, you’d think that failing on a daily basis would bother her, but she insists that the process is relaxing. Indeed, she always appears to be calm as she methodically destroys her creation. Maybe driving me crazy makes her feel serene. All part of the unwritten job description.

Today the shredder sounds about twenty minutes into the process, cuing me to enter the studio with the latest update on the investigation. Naomi, breaking down the still life, looks up, raises an eyebrow.

“Dane called,” I tell her. “Shuttle delayed out of Reagan National, but they should be wheels down at Logan by five. She has some interesting tidbits about possible evildoers, but nothing solid.”

“Evildoers?”

“Dane does enjoy the evocative phrase.”

“Worth the trip, just to show the flag.”

“Jack’s day has been more productive. He interviewed Jonny Bing, the venture capitalist, and formed, he says, ‘an opinion.’ Declined to specify what opinion, exactly. Before that he made a quick run up to New Hampshire to talk to the foster care folks about Joseph Keener’s childhood. Said he uncovered some ‘facts of interest.’ He’ll fill us in tonight.”