was James Brewster, a big cardiac surgeon. The man’s skill, hot rep, and workaholic schedule made him rich, ended his first two marriages, and turned his son into a bitter, off-the-grid recluse who hadn’t spoken to him for years and seemed happy that he was dead. On that final night, he was heading from the Albany Medical Center to his home in the gently rolling, genteelly moneyed hills outside Williamstown, Massachusetts. With the cruise control on his Mercedes AMG coupe set precisely at the speed limit, the doctor was dictating his response to an invitation to keynote an Aspen meeting of cardiac surgeons. The shards of the recording device he was using were spattered with his brains all over the passenger seat of the car. The fact that it happened a couple of miles over the Massachusetts state line was what finally brought the FBI circus to town.”
“BCI didn’t see that as a big plus?”
This time the laugh sounded tubercular. “Which brings us to the grand finale. Number six. Harold Blum, Esquire, was far from the top of the law profession and, at the age of fifty-five, wasn’t about to rise any higher. Harold was the kind of guy who strove to give the impression that all his striving was paying off. According to his wife, Ruthie, who had a lot to say, Harold was the perfect consumer, always making purchases beyond his means, as though those possessions might make a difference—or at least attract a better class of clients. She seemed pretty fond of him. He was on his way that night from his office in Horseheads to his home on Lake Cayuga, driving his gleaming new Mercedes sedan, whose lease payment, the wife said, was already choking him. According to the accident reconstruction, the Good Shepherd, true to form, came up on his left side and fired a single shot. Harold’s visual cortex was probably blown to pieces before it could even register the muzzle flash.”
“And that’s when Max Clinter enters the picture?”
“Enters the picture with tires squealing. Maxie hears the shot that killed Blum loud and clear. He looks out the window of his parked car in time to glimpse Blum’s Mercedes skidding onto the shoulder and the taillights of the second vehicle speeding away. So he jams his 320 HP Camaro SS into drive and swerves out from behind a rhododendron bush onto the state road in rubber-burning pursuit of the taillights. Problem is, Max isn’t alone, and he isn’t sober. Although he’s married with three kids, in the passenger seat is a twenty-one-year-old he met an hour earlier in one of Ithaca’s college bars and with whom he was having awkward, drunken sex in his car behind the rhododendron. He has the accelerator floored now, the Camaro’s doing about a hundred and ten—but he has no plan, no cell phone, no rational idea of where this is going. This is pure, primitive, animal pursuit. The young woman starts to cry. He tells her to shut up. The guy ahead of him is getting away. Maxie’s out of his mind now on alcohol, ego, and adrenaline. He reaches under his jacket, pulls out his .40-caliber Glock, lowers his window, and starts firing at the vehicle ahead of him. An insane thing to do. Insanely high-risk, insanely illegal. The girl is screaming, Maxie is losing it completely, the Camaro is fishtailing.”
“You sound like you were in the backseat.”
“He told the story to a lot of people. It got around. Hell of a story.”
“A hell of a career ender, you mean.”
“That’s the way it turned out. But if Max had gotten lucky and one of those shots had brought the Shepherd down, if no innocent parties had been injured, or if the injuries had been less serious, if his blood-alcohol level hadn’t been three times the legal limit … maybe the lunacy of firing fifteen shots in eight seconds from a moving vehicle at a poorly defined target on a dark road, occupant or occupants unknown, while proceeding at a recklessly endangering speed … maybe all that could have been softened or reexpressed in a way that wouldn’t have completely fucked him. But that isn’t what happened. What happened was that everything went south at once. As the Camaro fishtailed into the oncoming lane, a motorcyclist came over a blind rise with too little space to get out of the way. The bike went down, rider was thrown. Max’s car did a one-eighty at ninety miles an hour,