Fixer Redux Read online

  Joe thought she was exaggerating, or her memory wasn’t being honest with her. He didn’t think Corrigan Bain could literally vanish. If he could, he wouldn’t have had to walk out of the police station like that. On the other hand, if Joe didn’t have that on camera, he might have been prepared to consider her interpretation.

  “And fixer was what he said his job was?”

  “Right. I asked him why fixer, and he said he fixes accidents before they happen, and I was like, you mean like a guardian angel and he just laughed and said sure thing.”

  Joe nodded.

  “Can we sit?” he asked. He pointed to her futon couch, a modest distance from the altar to Corrigan, which was starting to annoy him.

  “Sure, yeah.”

  She cleared off some books that looked like they carried some import related to computer coding, and they both sat down. He took out his notepad.

  “I’ve been in that station,” he said. “That’s the one with the bronzed gloves next to the escalator, isn’t it?”

  “I think maybe. Truth, I didn’t go back to that station, but I think I remember seeing something like that.”

  “When they finished the station, they bronzed some of the work gloves belonging to the guys that built the place, and fixed them to the flat down-slant between the up and down escalators. I’m pretty sure the real reason was to keep somebody from trying to slide down it and kill themselves at the bottom.”

  “Okay.”

  “What I’m thinking is, if I’m on the down escalator and I see someone about to fall, and I wanted to get over to the up escalator, I’d grab one of those brass gloves and swing over. It’d be tricky, but it could work.”

  “Sure, that makes sense.”

  “Where I’m going with this, Ms. Devereaux, is to say perhaps Mr. Bain didn’t appear out of nowhere but from the down stairway.”

  “Oh yeah, I know exactly what you’re saying. He probably did do something like that, and I was pretty disoriented, so maybe.”

  “So…?” Again, Joe gestured to the altar on the wall.

  “Yeah, no, you still don’t understand. He might’ve done that to get behind me, but he had to know to do that before I started falling. There’s no other way. Plus, he told me he was there to save me. ‘Cuz he followed me through the gate to the street. He would’ve had to pay his fare again, right? I don’t think he was there to catch a train; just me. Hey, that’s pretty good: instead of catching a train, he caught me. I should add that.”

  “To what?”

  “The website. The site’s blown up, that’s why you’re here right? Ooh, can we pretend I didn’t just say blown up?”

  The rat-a-tat of Monica Devereaux’s speech pattern was beginning to give him a headache.

  “Don’t worry about it. But tell me about this website. How did you go from that chance encounter to this whole thing?”

  “Yeah, I can be a bit of an obsessive sometimes.”

  Joe laughed.

  “I know,” she said. “But, so, I told friends about this guy who saved me and how weird the whole thing was, and next thing, I was on local pages telling people about it and asking if anyone had a similar thing happen to them.”

  “You didn’t take that picture?” He pointed to the blurry shot in the middle of the altar, that he was going to be mentally referring to as the Bigfoot picture going forward.

  “No, that was taken downtown by a second-hand witness. Someone who wasn’t rescued, but saw it happen. That’s really rare. So far as I’ve been able to tell, most times the only one who even realizes something happened is the one he saves, so nobody thinks to pull out their phone and get a picture. Up until yesterday, this was the only shot of him we’ve been able to get.”

  “We being everyone on your website?”

  “Yes.”

  Joe spent a little time on the site before reaching out to the site owner for this interview. About three-quarters of the first-hand encounters the contributors claimed to have had with the man in the picture were frankly ridiculous: he could fly, and disappear at will, had incredible strength, and so on. The legend on the main page claimed each contribution was vetted beforehand. He failed to see what the minimum standards were for this vetting, because reality-based was self-evidently not a factor.

  “And none of your contributors know anything else about him, other than what they posted?”

  “You’ll have to ask them, although…you know, everyone uses a handle, pretty much. I only know like five of them in real life, if that’s your next question. But yeah, like I was saying, before yesterday this was all we had. Didn’t have a name for him until the news guys gave it out.”

  “I see.”

  “Maybe if you told me what you were looking for?”

  “We’re looking for him.”

  She laughed.

  “Awesome, so you came to the one person who has documented proof that she doesn’t know where he is? That’s really funny.”

  “I’m open to any insights you may have.”

  “You and everybody else. I gave a radio interview an hour ago, and I’m pretty sure I just got an email from a producer at channel five. But look, the only thing I have to say is, if you think he’s a terrorist or something, you’ve got it wrong.”

  “What makes you think he’s even a suspect?”

  “C’mon, everyone does. You’re all wrong, and I’ll tell that to anybody who asks. I have no idea how he does what he does. He could just be really lucky, I don’t know. But what he isn’t is a guy who’d slip a bomb into the State House.”

  “You know this from one two-minute encounter seven years ago.”

  “Me, and a hundred other people who had the same kind of encounter, yeah. Oldest story on the site’s from nineteen years ago, by the way. He’s been doing this for a while.”

  “We need him to answer questions regarding what happened yesterday. So if you happen to get some information that would be of use, I’d appreciate it if you gave me a call.”

  “Ha, okay.”

  “That’s funny?”

  “If he doesn’t want to talk to you he’s not going to talk to you. I heard he literally vanished from police custody. Like, into-thin-air stuff.”

  Joe shook his head. He was too weary to be surprised that this information had, in some form, escaped into the world.

  “That isn’t the case. He was released prematurely.”

  “Okay, call it that, then. Point is, if he doesn’t feel like being in police custody, things like him getting released prematurely are bound to happen. I think you guys are going about this all wrong. You should be asking for his help.”

  “That’s what we’re trying to do.”

  “No, no, no, you’re asking him like you think he’s to blame. You shouldn’t be asking him how he knew about the bomb, you should be getting him to help you find the next one.”

  If we catch him, there won’t be a next one, Joe thought. He would have asked her what made her think there was going to be another bomb, but in assuming there would be, she was only aligning with the media’s current assessment of the situation, as well as that of his superiors. Better to plan for the worst and be pleasantly surprised.

  “Like I said, if anything comes your way that you think would help, give me a call.”

  He stood and extended a business card.

  “Sure,” she said. “I’ll be happy to.”

  He didn’t think that was true at all.

  “So how do you think he did it, Ms. Devereaux? Really.”

  “How he knew about the bomb?”

  “All of it. But yes, the bomb. You watched the same footage I did.”

  In the brief amount of time he’d had to check, there appeared to be as many theories online as there were people, but the hero/not-hero split looked about even.

  “I’m sticking with guardian angel, detective,” she said. “But if I ever see him again I promise I’ll ask.”

  7

  It was apparently not possible for at
torneys to dress down.

  The young man was seated in the back corner of a particular Brookline sandwich shop at the specified time, sipping a coffee and facing the glass façade. He looked a little nervous, and a lot like a lawyer who was trying not to look like a lawyer.

  Corrigan stood on the other side of that glass picture-window, shading his eyes and peering in. Nothing appeared to be out-of-sorts, either in the present or in the near future, so he went in and sat across from the kid, who nodded at him casually, like he was in the middle of a spy caper, but otherwise didn’t acknowledge that he’d been joined at the table.

  Corrigan silently requested a coffee from the waitress, who was across the room. Then he waited to see if the kid felt like talking first. He didn’t, So Corrigan jumped in.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Bill.”

  “Bill, I’m Corrigan.” He extended his hand for a clumsy, brief handshake. “You look a little nervous.”

  “Sorry. I am.”

  The waitress brought the coffee over, and a menu, and disappeared.

  “Just relax, nothing’s going to happen,” Corrigan said. “You’re meeting with a client, right?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “I’m just a client.”

  “Yes sir, only I can’t really stop there, if I’m questioned, since you just introduced yourself.”

  “You’ll have to pretend I didn’t.”

  He grimaced.

  “I’m kind of hoping nobody asks,” he said, “so I don’t have to confront that particular moral quandary, sir. It’s in the bag under the table, by the way.”

  Corrigan didn’t look, but he kicked the satchel with his foot to confirm the existence of the bag.

  “I had to go to two branches to get that much,” Bill added.

  “It’s not a lot.”

  “Banks don’t carry a lot anymore. Everyone’s electronic.”

  “Well thank you. It should be plenty, until I can clear up this mess.”

  “Yes. About that? I think I’m supposed to tell you to turn yourself in and let us sort things out.”

  “Us?”

  “The…the firm.”

  Bill’s employer was the second-largest law firm on the Eastern seaboard. His reticence to say their name out loud was noted by Corrigan without comment. It was fair to say that most people in the greater Boston area wouldn’t recognize the name of the law firm, but it was still a good instinct.

  Being the second-largest law firm on the Eastern seaboard didn’t necessarily mean much of anything in this context, though, since that law firm only handled estates, property transactions and other legal business settlements. What Bill was talking about seemed to be somewhat outside their area of expertise.

  “I didn’t do anything wrong,” Corrigan said. “And you’re just delivering funds to a client. Nothing illegal about that, is there?”

  “There might be, sir. Since I’m acting under instructions from my boss, and he’s acting on instruction from one of the partners, I think I might be okay. Although if any one of the three of us is going to get arrested, it isn’t them, so…I’m not in a good position, Mr. Bain. I feel the only way to improve that is to once again advise you to surrender.”

  “I’ll consider your advice, then. I just can’t follow it at this time.”

  “Thank you.”

  Bill looked over his shoulder, and around the room, two things that weren’t what he should probably have been doing, which was leaving the diner.

  “I’m not supposed to ask you this,” he said. “But I’m going to anyway.”

  “You want to know what I need the money for,” Corrigan said. He looked into the future for that.

  “As I said, it’s a good deal of cash. If you need to escape Boston, we can arrange to wire funds.”

  Corrigan had a good grip on how his head worked these days. He knew he wrote the message on the nightstand to himself, and he knew this meant he’d gone into the future during the night, rather than dreaming like a normal person would. He was pretty sure this was his unconscious mind’s way of coping with his sense of helplessness: i.e., give him somebody to save so he could feel useful again. The helplessness came out of being unable to predict the future as it pertained to massive explosive devices.

  That didn’t mean he could ignore the date, time and location he’d written down. Regardless of his motivation, it still meant someone was going to need help, and he was the only person who could provide it. Not so long ago, he’d have called Dr. Ames to hash all of this out, but Corrigan couldn’t do that, because he’d buried Ames eighteen months ago.

  “I understand,” he told Bill. “I have an appointment in the city that I can’t be late for. We’ll see what happens after that.”

  Using the law firm was the only way Corrigan could think of to get cash, without alerting the police as to his whereabouts or compromising Maggie in some way.

  He and Maggie were in the midst of the slowest crawl imaginable toward an endpoint that would either be marriage or death from old age, depending on what came first. It was a pace in which living together made sense only if she kept her apartment. They shared a bank account—only for saving up for a vacation—which was the extent to which they were legally entangled.

  The same baby steps defined everything from laundry to dinner, and it was this way because they’d spent so much time in an on-again-off-again thing, it was impossible to tell if they were together for good this time, or if they simply forgot to break up. Every new suggestion—should they refurnish the living room? Buy new dishes? Invite the neighbors for a drink?—was floated with the caution of a landmine sweeper.

  Despite all of that, most of Corrigan’s liquid accounts were either connected with Maggie or were only a step removed from something a clever investigator could attach to her somehow, he was pretty sure.

  It was possible he was being unnecessarily cautious, if not actively paranoid. It had only been about twenty-four hours since he’d left the police station, which was probably not nearly enough time for them to figure out where he banked, and set up some kind of alert system on his funds, provided such a thing was even possible. But if this Detective White was smart, he’d go to Maggie first to find out where Corrigan’s money was, and if Maggie was smart she’d tell him.

  That left the funds Maggie didn’t know anything about.

  This wasn’t actually true. She knew the money existed, but she didn’t know how much of it there was or where it came from. If asked, she would maybe be able to furnish the name of the law firm acting on Corrigan’s behalf, but that was about all.

  It was a lot of money, enough that asking for sixty-thousand of it in small bills wasn’t a problem for anyone other than the kid who had to draw the funds and slide it to him under a table.

  An hour after leaving Bill in the diner, Corrigan turned seven thousand of the cash into a used motorcycle, purchased out of the back of a dealership willing to skip some paperwork for an extra grand. The seller either didn’t recognize Corrigan or didn’t care.

  The next step was to find a place to sleep at night. He figured he was welcome to crash at Sal Wilcox’s money pit of an apartment building as long as he needed to, but that seemed like an innately bad idea. As long as Sal knew where he was and also remained employed by the Boston police, it was an obvious risk.

  There was a motel on Soldier’s Field Road that fit his needs nicely. From that location—and it helped that Corrigan knew his way around the city better than a cab driver—he could get into town five or six different ways, quickly, and get back out of the city just as fast. That was especially true on a motorcycle, as long as he was willing to take the occasional risk.

  It was after three by the time he got himself set up in a room. He had no clothes to unpack—clothes shopping would have to come after his appointment—but he did have a bag of other necessities that were perhaps unique to his particular profession.

  The first of these was a map of the city and the
surrounding suburbs. He took down the motel’s understanding of what framed art was supposed to look like and taped the map up in its place. On the bedside, he put a note pad and paper, and a black magic marker.

  He took the marker and traced the map carefully with his finger until he found the spot he was looking for.

  “Hudson Street, five-twenty PM,” he said. He dotted the spot with the black marker.

  “Maggie, I’m sorry, but that’s the craziest thing I ever heard.”

  David said this with a tiny smile, as if hoping she would reveal that this was all a joke, and allow him to enjoy claiming that he never really believed her, but hey, good try anyway.

  They were sitting alone in an unused office off the main bullpen in the FBI headquarters. It was the end of the day, and they’d both seen direct sunlight exactly twice, in the service of a couple of hasty cigarettes.

  Maggie was bone-tired. She couldn’t remember the last time she felt this exhausted, even on the many, many occasions she worked through the night for a case.

  It was the stress, probably. Corrigan had been missing for more than a day, and she couldn’t pretend that wasn’t bothering her. He might be the most capable person on the planet, but that didn’t make it easier to not know what was happening with him.

  On top of that, there was the shared stress her team was experiencing. Someone tried to kill them, and that sort of thing was usually worth a month or two of mandatory therapy that nobody had time for. The possibility that the assassin was someone they’d let escape—even though the investigation had been closed under protest—only made it all worse.

  Everyone was on edge, on little sleep, and on far too much coffee, paired with not nearly enough food. And they all had the same unspoken question for her: what are you not telling us, Maggie?

  She was keeping things from them, and it had to stop, because if Corrigan was right about the bomber, everyone was going to have to adjust their world view very quickly or a lot of people were going to die.

  David was the test subject. It wasn’t going well.

  “It explains things, though, doesn’t it?” she asked.