The desk in Detective Orr's tiny office was strewn with manila folders and computer printouts. Eddie couldn't help himself; he glanced to the pile, just for a second-he couldn't read anything because the d.a.m.n type was too light.

Don't they replace the toner around here?

Orr frowned, reached for a stack of printouts and flipped them over. "I got a lot of work to do," she said.

To most people that might have sounded like an invitation to scram; to Eddie it sounded like an opening. "I can help," he offered.

He smiled while his inner librarian ransacked his brain for any shred of logic that could explain how giving reporter Eddie Bourque some secret inside blab might aid the police investigation.

"I don't even want to ask."

"It's simple, really," Eddie said, stalling. His librarian was screaming and shoving over the bookcases. Eddie picked one word, almost at random. "Pressure."

Orr perked. "Huh?"

Eddie verbalized the brand-new thought as he was creating it: "You guys publicly released the kidnapper's photos of Roger Lime to turn up the pressure on whoever grabbed him, to educate the public into a tip generator. If they try to move Lime, he gets recognized and your phones light up."

She nodded slowly. "Right," she said, sounding suspicious, still searching for the trap.

Eddie turned an invisible valve in the air. "So crank up the pressure. Let me see the ransom note."

Detective Orr blanched, and Eddie talked faster: "When the kidnappers see their own note quoted word-for-word in a news story running in papers across the country, they'll feel heat. Maybe somebody will recognize the syntax and rat them out. You see what I'm saying? Is it handwritten? If it is, even better. Just leave it near a photocopier and turn your back." Eddie winked. "Presto-you can say you have no idea how that note got to the press, because you didn't see a thing."

Detective Orr looked at him and sighed. She pulled the vinyl-padded chair out from under her desk. The wheels screeched like an old shopping cart. She dropped hard on the seat.

Eddie pleaded, "Don't you want to catch the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds?"

"I can't give you what I don't have," she said, suddenly sounding exhausted.

Delicately, Eddie prodded: "I know it's not exactly, precisely, particularly your case, but you have access-"

"There's no note," she interrupted.

She rubbed her eyes and then looked at her hands. "It's the most publicized case this department ever had, and we have no working leads," she said. "None whatsoever." Then she closed her eyes and ma.s.saged her temples. "And I can't get myself a.s.signed to the case. I'm being shut out. The whole department is focused on finding Roger Lime, except me." She batted a stack of printouts with her hand. "I'm following the suicide of a medical examiner with a guilty conscience, or maybe with psychosis."

"So you think it was suicide?"

She looked at him. "Not for the record, at least not yet. Okay?"

Eddie hated taking tips off the record. He would never burn a source by printing something he had been told in confidence, so an off-the-record conversation sometimes made him feel like he was typing his story in handcuffs. But Lucy Orr was no ordinary source. She was the only friend Eddie had outside the newspaper business.

"Off the record," Eddie affirmed. "But I reserve the right to badger you into going on the record later."

She gave a sad smile. "We don't know what happened to Crane," she admitted. "The rope marks around his neck angle up toward his ears. Those abrasions-and the note, and the ladder-say suicide."

Eddie sensed a "but." He waited.

Orr continued, "But there's a bruise at the base of his skull we can't account for."

"I don't understand. A bruise?"

"Like maybe that's where a killer leveraged his hand when he choked Crane to unconsciousness, before he dangled him from the noose." She demonstrated, jamming her left palm into a make-believe neck, while her right hand jerked an invisible rope. "And then there's the noise you heard," she added. "You might have stumbled onto a murder minutes after it happened."

Eddie's imagination superimposed a life-sized image of the man in the ski mask, a noose in his hand, behind Detective Orr.

Eddie shut his eyes, willed the fantasy away. He looked at Orr. "Let's go with this a minute," he said. "The killer hears me calling for Dr. Crane and beats it. But he can't be sure I didn't spot him. So after your colleague, Detective Brill, releases my name to the headline wh.o.r.es from Boston TV, the killer follows me from home, lies in wait all afternoon and then offers me a body ma.s.sage with his Goodyear radials."

Orr rubbed her palms together. "Could be, Eddie," she said. "But you've been in the news business a long time. We can't say how many people you might have p.i.s.sed off over the years. It could have been an unhappy reader playing out an old grudge."

"There's no such thing as coincidence," Eddie said, stabbing his index finger on her desk for emphasis. His own words brought to mind Henry's tip about the disappearance of Roger Lime. He needed to find Henry's old partner, and Detective Orr could help.

"It's time I come clean with you about something I'm working on," Eddie said. He tapped his notebook. "Gimme half an hour to file this piece on the new picture, so the General and I can pay our rent."

After Eddie filed an eighteen-inch story, he met again with Orr in her office.

She made a few notes in a handheld computer as Eddie described his brother's background, the letter Eddie had received from him and the strange tip Henry had offered during the prison visit.

When Eddie had finished, Orr tapped a stylus on her tiny computer and scrolled through her notes. She looked perplexed, as if in pain and trying to decide if badly hurt.

Finally, she said, "Are you thinking that Dr. Crane invented his testimony thirty years ago, to put your brother away?"

Eddie spread his hands. "I don't want to go that far-yet." The statement was one part lie, one part true. He was eager to believe his brother was not a killer, yet afraid to invest any hope in the long odds that Henry could ever establish his innocence. "I need to check out what Henry is telling me. I can't even be sure his old partner is still alive, or that he ever got out of prison."

Orr rubbed her chin. "Lots of those long-timers don't get out. Once they see how slow the time pa.s.ses, they quit on life and pick up new charges-a.s.saults mostly, occasionally attempted murder, or the successful kind."

Orr turned toward her desktop computer. "If this guy did get out, after all that time, he'll be on the probation rolls for the next thousand years."

She banged the keys.

Eddie laughed. "You type with two fingers-like me."

"I type at the speed I think," she said, pounding the poor plastic keys like they were the skulls of her enemies. "Any extra typing ability would only be wasted capacity."

Eddie smiled. Lucy Orr was practical to the point of being eccentric about it.

"Ah," she said, and stopped typing. "According to this, Mr. James J. Whistle is no longer a guest of the state. Wow-he got out early this year. He's on intensive probation, of course. The probation record is clean and complete, no unexplained absences or positive drug screens."

Eddie sunk to one knee behind her, and leaned in to read over her shoulder.

Orr shifted to block his view. "Sorry, Ed," she said. "These records are private. I can tell you that your man is out of state custody because that's public information, but there's a lot of personal info here that I can't release."

"I understand," Eddie said. He lowered his head in disappointment.

"Thanks."

She waited until Eddie began to stand, and then turned her attention to the spreadsheet on her computer.

As Eddie slowly rose, his chin lifted, as if pulled by a force outside his will. His eyes raked the computer screen, digesting the green block letters on Orr's ancient computer. A moment later he was standing, head bowed like a penitent.

Orr banged one key. The information vanished from her computer. She picked up her handheld organizer and tapped in some notes. "I'll put Mr. Whistle on my list of subjects to interview in connection with Dr. Crane's suicide," she promised. "I'll be interested if anything your brother told you gets a reaction from Whistle."

Eddie smacked a fist into his palm. "Lean on him," he said. "He's gotta know something."

Orr flipped her handheld computer onto a stack of papers. "I can't do that, Eddie," she said. "Your brother's crazy story..." She paused, clucked her tongue, stared at the wall a moment, and then gently started over: "With a perfect probation record, we have to a.s.sume that James Whistle is trying to start a new life. Until there's some evidence otherwise, I'm not going to do anything except ask a few simple questions, all right?"

Eddie couldn't stop nodding. He heard himself say, "Perfectly clear," as his brain worked out the shortest route to the address he had spied on her computer.

Chapter 11.

Jimmy Whistle's apartment house was a tan triple-decker, with cream-colored trim and a brick foundation, in Centralville, a crowded neighborhood chopped up into maddening little streets that unexpectedly dead-ended, merged at odd angles or suddenly became one-way. This neighborhood, like Eddie's Pawtucketville, was north of the Merrimack, and west of where the money was in Lowell. It was hard to avoid a Jack Kerouac connection in any part of Centralville; his family lived all over it. Whistle's place was three blocks from Baulieu Street, where Kerouac's brother, Gerard, died of rheumatic fever in 1926, when Gerard was nine and Jack Kerouac was four. Thirty years later Kerouac wrote a book about Gerard. He never got over losing his brother.

Eddie tipped the cabbie heavy and sent him along. Then he surveyed the neighborhood.

There was a Brazilian restaurant across the street. A sign in the window said, Closed for renovations, which was code around here for "cash flow problems, need another loan." To the left of Whistle's place was another triple-decker, stripped of paint down to the bare gray wood, except the trim, which was pink. To the right was a square patch of yellow sand, weeds sprouting here and there. Whatever had stood there had been recently torn down.

There were no pedestrians in this part of the neighborhood, and no sidewalks. Just cars on their way to someplace more important. Down the street, some of those cars turned into an upscale fitness club, a recent charge by the forces of gentrification.

Eddie climbed the steps and knocked. A window shade moved and a m.u.f.fled voice yelled from inside the house, "Yeah?"

"Mr. Whistle?"

The shade fell back. "That s.h.i.thead's around the side."

Around which side? Eddie walked toward the sand patch. The only door on that side was high above, at the second level, which led out into nothing. Maybe the person who built this place had figured on adding a deck. Or maybe he installed the door for his in-laws.

Eddie continued around the house. The backyard had not been mowed in a long time, if ever; the gra.s.s was waist-high and spitting seeds. Eddie could see an old-fashioned bicycle, single speed, with rust-spotted chrome fenders curved over the tires, on its side a few feet into the gra.s.s, at the end of a skinny track worn through the weeds.

Around the other side of the house, ten concrete steps led down to a white bas.e.m.e.nt door.

Where else could he be?

Eddie stepped down three steps and then caught himself. What cover story would he use? That he was writing about ex-cons? That he wanted Whistle's comments for a retrospective on Greater Lowell's most mysterious double homicides? That Eddie was selling subscriptions to Grit?

I'm here for the truth...I won't lie to get it.

The door had a round window, like a porthole, shrouded by newspaper hung from the inside.

He knocked three times.

Eddie could hear somebody moving around inside, though n.o.body answered.

He pounded harder.

A man growled from behind the door, "f.u.c.k you, b.a.s.t.a.r.ds! I paid for two months on the first, and you won't get another cent from me until the end of next month. G.o.ddam bloodsucker."

Eddie felt his eyebrows levitate. "Mr. Whistle?"

"Did you hear me, b.a.s.t.a.r.ds?"

"I'm not the landlord, Mr. Whistle. I don't want money. I just want to talk to you."

The apartment was silent a moment. Then the door opened twelve inches and a head peeked around. "Talk to me?" He sounded curious, not angry. "Who the h.e.l.l wants to talk to me?" Eddie got a whiff of Skin Bracer aftershave, the original scent that smelled like a barbershop.

Jimmy Whistle was older than Eddie had expected, late sixties, probably. He was Eddie's height, a little better than six feet. He had a reddish complexion, a big swollen nose and wore black-rimmed rectangular gla.s.ses, which magnified his deep brown eyes. The muscles at the corners of his lips were unnaturally tight, locking his mouth in a grimace; it gave him the look of a man forever agonizing over a tough decision. Whistle's voice was deep and clear, and Eddie guessed he probably was a good singer.

The head in the doorway looked Eddie over. "Do I know you," Whistle said, "because I think I know you."

"You don't. I'm a reporter, and I have a couple questions."

Whistle looked into his apartment, and then back at Eddie. "It's a mess in here."

"Two minutes, Mr. Whistle."

Whistle turned away, muttering, but he left the door open. Eddie followed him into a dank living room transported from the 1970s. b.u.t.ter yellow plastic tile covered the walls, under a drop ceiling painted mold-green. The room was furnished with two ancient upholstered chairs that the Salvation Army wouldn't have accepted if you stuffed the cushions with money. The room smelled faintly of cigarette smoke and General Gao's chicken. Takeout food containers, a pizza box and about thirty orange Moxie cans littered the coffee table.

Whistle wore maroon penny loafers, no socks, tan slacks and a loose blue pullover, like something a hospital patient would wear. He looked around the apartment and spread his hands. "A s.h.i.thole, like I said."

He didn't look like a killer. He looked like a lonely old man, as if he had recently become a widower and was struggling to care for himself after a lifetime of depending on a woman to buy his clothes, make his meals, clean his mess and find the TV clicker when it slid under the sofa. Prison had been James J. Whistle's wife. They had been married thirty years.

Looking him over, Eddie listened for the screams of James J. Whistle's victims-not just the armored car guards, shot or stabbed and buried somewhere in a shallow grave that n.o.body had ever found, but for all the people he had victimized early in his career. What had Jimmy Whistle been as a young man? Gang leader? Street punk? Strong-arm robber? How many people did he maim before the men in the armored car? Eddie listened, but heard only the wheeze of an old man.

He took out his notebook and plunged into the interview. "I'm a freelance writer working on a story-"

"What's your name?" Whistle demanded, calm but firm. He lifted his head and peered at Eddie under his gla.s.ses.

Eddie tapped his pen on the pad, stalling. He had promised himself he wouldn't lie to get the truth. And maybe it would help if Whistle knew who he was. He said, "My name is Bourque. You knew my brother."

Whistle's eyes narrowed and he nodded slowly. "Now I see how I know you." He backed up toward an end table made from creamy white plastic. Keeping his eyes on Eddie, he reached down, opened the drawer and took out a gun.

Eddie's throat tightened. He stiffened in place.

Whistle laid the black pistol on the table and stood beside it. Quietly, he said, "What do you want, Bourque?"

Eddie tore his eyes from the gun, and looked at his brother's old partner. Whistle had not pointed the weapon at Eddie. The message was more of a warning than a threat. Eddie said, "Is it legal for an ex-con on probation to have a firearm?"

"Is it healthy to have a nine millimeter slug bore through an eye into your brain? What the f.u.c.k do you care about legality after that?"

Eddie tried to stand at-ease, resting his weight on one leg.

He just wants to scare me.