Measure Of Darkness

“You, specifically?” Naomi asks, instantly alert.

“A friend.”

Naomi’s eyes drift back to the Journal. “Go through proper channels,” she says. “Being an employee doesn’t mean we drop everything to assist some crony of yours, Jack, certainly not before we’ve finished coffee. Run it by Dane, that’s the way it’s done.”

Jack, normally a very cool customer, responds with an unexpected edge to his mellifluous baritone. “In about three seconds you’ll be removing your foot from your mouth. The man in trouble is Randall Shane.”

The name is not familiar to me, but evidently it is to Naomi because she pushes back her chair and goes, “Why didn’t you say so? Where is he?”

Jack grins handsomely. “Little problem there.”

The Nantz residential garage is located on one of the so-called “public alleys” that bisect the blocks here in the Back Bay. The idea was that tradesmen would approach from the rear, skulking through alleys, rather than contaminating the formal entrances of the main streets. Nowadays there are more green Dumpsters than tradesmen in the alleys, but those town houses fortunate enough to have garages typically face them on the alley. It’s all part of being discreet—there’s no good coming from advertising where the BMWs are hiding. Also handy for smuggling in witnesses or suspects when you don’t want them to be seen entering your domicile.

There are three narrow bays in the Nantz garage, and one of them is filled to overflowing by Jack Delancey’s nearly new Lincoln Town Car. To my way of thinking, Townies have that airport limo look, but Jack favors them for ride and size, and the dapper investigator would never be mistaken for a limo driver, not unless you want to find yourself cuffed to the bumper, admiring his chrome. Supposedly he hasn’t done that to anyone since he resigned from the FBI and went to work for Naomi, but I wouldn’t advise testing the guy. My read on Gentleman Jack is that he can be charming when he wants to be, and dangerous when it suits him, as many a bad actor has discovered to his or her own chagrin. “Bad actor” is Jack talk for criminal. Most of the time he talks like a cop, except on those rare occasions when he’s relaxed enough to discuss the fine points of professional baseball, when he sounds like just another statistically obsessed Red Sox fan from the North Shore. Jack’s a Gloucester boy, in accent if not at heart. Gloucester being more famous for craggy fishermen in slickers than lightly tanned investigators who favor two-thousand-dollar Italian suits and metrosexual manicures. Probably pedicures, too, although his fourth wife will be happy to hear I’ve never seen him with his socks off.

“There’s a good chance that we’re already under surveillance,” Jack tells Naomi as we enter the garage. “So I did the trunk thing.”

Trunk thing? I start to ask what that means, exactly, when Jack presses his key fob and pops the lid, and out from the voluminous trunk unfolds a man who towers over us all. It’s a very neat unfolding, limbs and knees deployed, a muscular torso rising, and turning into the light a large round head with close-cropped hair and deep-set eyes in need of sleep. A head that keeps rising until it brushes the ceiling.

Randall Shane. Yards of him.

“I really messed up this time,” Shane says, looking forlorn. “I may have killed an innocent man.”

“We’ll see about that,” Naomi says. “My office. Now.”

What Naomi calls her office is really our command center. Think mission control, without all the giant screens, but with a similar sense of purpose, and the ability to communicate with just about anybody, anywhere, over any system, as well as extract data, voluntary or not. The style is spare and cool. Lots of dark laminates, cove lighting, discreetly recessed panels, stacks and servers hidden away. There’s never any doubt about who is in command, either. You can tell because she gets the pivoting seat behind the big curved desk with all the touch screens and gizmos, and we peons get the straight-back chairs with the wide unpadded armrests that are adequate for a laptop or a notebook, or in my case an unfinished cup of Beasley’s coffee and a legal pad.

Randall Shane wouldn’t fit in the peon chairs without a very large shoehorn, so he roams the big high-ceilinged room and finally, at boss lady’s insistence, parks on the far edge of the command desk, his long chino-clad legs crossed at the ankle and his large, muscular arms folded across his very substantial chest. Not a weightlifter type, from the lean-waisted look of him, just built to a larger scale than most. Making all six feet of Jack Delancey seem short and slight in comparison. The neatly trimmed salt-and-pepper Van Dyke beard gives Shane the look of a supersize jazz musician. The watery blue eyes are soulful, but pure cop, always watching.

“Heard of you,” the big man says, focusing on Naomi. “Jack says you’re the best, and that includes me.”

Naomi smiles, shrugs. “We do different things. Or do things differently. Probably both.” After a moment’s pause, she begins again. “Normally when interviewing a potential client I’d wait for the rest of my team to be assembled and then record a formal statement, but since this is hardly a standard situation, please go ahead. We’ll do the legal stuff later, when our attorney is present.”

“There isn’t much time,” Shane responds, fidgeting, his big hands busy making fists. “This won’t be a normal arrest,” he cautions. “Once they take me, I’ll likely be transferred to an undisclosed location for interrogation. A form of in-country rendition. No lawyers, no communication. That’s how they do it.”

“Who are ‘they,’ Mr. Shane? Please be specific.”

“Randall, please, or just plain Shane.”

“‘They’?” Naomi persists. “Explain. Elaborate.”

“Sorry. Whatever covert agency is about to frame me for the murder of my client.”

“Your client?”

He nods, looking mournful. “Joseph Keener, MIT professor. His son, Joey, is missing, that’s why he contracted me. In all likelihood I’m responsible for Professor Keener’s death. I didn’t kill him, but they’ll make it look that way. The evidence will be rock solid.”

“What covert agency?”

Shane shakes his head. “I’m not sure,” he begins, “but my best guess is an agency associated with the Department of Defense. Or possibly Homeland Security. My client was working on a top-secret project, and it’s possible that—”

And that’s when the windows explode, covering us all in diamonds of shattered safety glass. The security alarms start to whoop but there’s no time to react, let alone flee to the safe room. Through the sudden breach swing half a dozen gun-wielding thugs wearing black ski masks. In less than a heartbeat there’s a second explosion and somehow a wire net engulfs Randall Shane, and they take him down like a wild animal, hitting him with several tranquilizer darts through the net, until he sighs and stops struggling.

Unconscious, maybe dead.

That’s all I can see from under my little desk, face burrowing into the thick carpet. That and the shiny black boots standing an inch from my head.

Chapter Two

Tea & Sympathy, Not

The first time I ever laid eyes on Naomi Nantz she had a bad toothache. I was the office manager for an association of dentists in Cambridge and she came in as an emergency appointment. Barely got through the door before fainting from the pain. By which I mean she stated her name and then her eyes rolled up and she dropped to the floor. Apparently she’d been ignoring a deep abscess in a lower left premolar for a couple of weeks, due to being involved in a case, and finally her body said that’s enough, we’re turning off the lights. That’s how Dr. Pavi, our really excellent oral surgeon, explained the situation when she regained consciousness. Then he ever so gently put her back under, did whatever he needed to do, successfully and with a minimum of fuss. From then on Naomi Nantz was one of our loyal patients. Came in every three months for a deep cleaning and, because she misses nothing, apparently took notice of how I managed the office. One time her appointment coincided with me having red eyes from days (and nights) of crying and she asked what was wrong and for some reason I told her, which was strictly against the office rules (written by me) of sharing personal or family troubles with patients (we were there to serve, not kvetch), and Naomi said she’d see what she could do, and I said my husband has vanished and my savings account is empty, what can you possibly do?

She’d smiled and said, let me get back to you.

Two days later she called me into the Back Bay residence—sent a driver for me, actually—had me take a seat and then proceeded to explain, very calmly and deliberately, that my husband wasn’t the man I thought he was, and for that matter my marriage had never been legal. The man I knew as Robinson “Robbie” Reynolds was in reality a handsome, charismatic con artist born William J. Crockett—“Wedding Willy” to the bunco squads—who wooed and married two or three victims at a time, then drained their assets. My assets had been a personal savings account (fairly substantial because I’m very careful with money and always keep to a budget) and my parents’ four-bedroom home in Newton, which I’d been managing as a rental since Mom died, the income being split between my sister and me. Somehow or other Robbie had got my signature on a legal document and he’d sold the big house in Newton, as well as our small but very comfortable condo in Arlington, cleared the bank accounts and then vanished. Leaving me more or less homeless and with my sister ready to kill me because she’d “always known Robbie was bad news,” although I’d never noticed that, what with her giggly jokes that were variations on “if you ever get sick of my little sister, you know where to find me!” Can’t blame her, really, Robbie was irresistible. I’m the living proof.

Anyhow, Naomi saw to it that he’d been arrested in Toronto on a similar charge—yet another “marriage”—where he’s currently serving time and supposedly writing a book about his exploits. None of the money was ever recovered because aside from his habit of proposing to foolish females who had a few bucks socked away, Robbie liked to trade on the currency markets, highly leveraged, and he lost every penny.

So, that’s my sad little story, and the upshot is that Naomi offered me a job managing her office, at twice the salary and double the benefits, and that’s how I happened to find myself face to the floor, and boss lady somewhere above me demanding, “Show us the warrant! Where’s the paper?”

During and after the snatch-and-grab of Randall Shane, Naomi Nantz is highly indignant, demanding legal justification for the home invasion. None is forthcoming, because no one on the assault squad ever says a word. They simply do not respond. Not a word. Not to Naomi, not to anyone. That kind of black-masked silence is truly scary, in a way much scarier than the invasion itself.

The only good thing about the whole awful mess is that it’s over in less than two minutes. They break in through the windows, seize our client and seemingly vanish into thin air, back out the same way they came in. By the time we call Beacon Hill Security and tell them not to bother sending a car, the crisis is already over.

As the security alarms cease whooping, I get up from the floor, still shaking. “Where’d they go? For that matter, where’d they come from?”

When Jack Delancey finally speaks—not a peep of protest out of him during the snatch, and no show of resistance—he says, tersely, “Had to be stealth helicopters. No other explanation.”

Naomi grunts, as if she hates the very idea.

“Hey! What happened?”

Standing in the doorway, looking as befuddled as a child, is our resident computer genius, Teddy Boyle, his ungelled Mohawk sadly drooping. Apparently he fell asleep wearing headphones and consequently didn’t hear a thing.

“Sorry I missed all the fun,” he says, convincing no one.

Mrs. Beasley, coming up to see what set off the alarms, glances at the wreckage of the command center, shakes her head and issues a command of her own. “Tea and scones, kitchen table.”

Like obedient children we all follow her down to the kitchen.

When angry I tend to raise my voice. Naomi gets all quiet and focused. Gave me chills at first, watching her cool down over a case. Wouldn’t want to be the object of her wrath, because she never, ever gives up. If she fails, and supposedly it has happened now and then—not on my watch, not so far—it’s usually because the bad guy has already died, taking essential secrets to his grave. “His” because most of our cases involve males, from my experience, although boss lady has no problem going after female criminals whenever they make the mistake of crossing her path.

Utterly calm, she begins to lay out assignments while we dutifully sip Beasley’s perfectly brewed tea and munch on her crumbly, jam-smeared scones. “Jack, everything you know. In order, please.”

Our chief investigator takes a moment, gathering his thoughts. “I was awakened by a phone call at 6:15 a.m. Shane needs my help, can I meet him in Kendall Square? There was the usual early-commuter traffic, so by the time I found him it was 7:10.”

“This was at the crime scene?”