last time I saw her must have been fifteen years ago, when she and Lucy were sharing an apartment in Washington, D.C. Lucy was ATF and Janet was FBI. I always liked her. They were good together, and nothing’s been all that good for Lucy ever since.
“I notice you don’t seem to have a gun handy, don’t seem to be looking to arrest anyone,” I say to her, “and I’m sorry if I’m bleary. If only my head would fall off. Maybe then it would stop hurting.”
“I’m not with the Bureau anymore, not even a cop,” Janet says. “A lawyer, one of those awful people, only worse. I specialize in environmental law, so I’m pretty much hated.”
“Just don’t adopt a pig. Lucy’s been threatening it. And it will be me taking care of it when she’s out of town, which is often.”
“I guess you don’t know what he did with your shoes.”
“There should be a box of boot covers in the back.” I point at the SUV I was just held hostage in, and it occurs to me that all the CFC vehicles are equipped with satellite locators. “The ones with PVC soles so I can walk around in them,” I say to her. “You followed me here. But why?”
“You texted Lucy you would call her as soon as you got in the car,” she says. “And you didn’t.”
“And that was enough for her to start tracking me?”
“She does it more than you think. Tracks you, me, pretty much everyone. And she could see you were at Fayth House and then were heading toward Boston instead of toward home. Plus, you’d left some rather urgent messages for Benton.”
She explains to me that they were very close to Fayth House anyway, taking Marino back to his Cambridge house, and were talking about the significance of Mildred Lott going out in the dark.
“She thought she heard Jasmine in the backyard,” Janet says. “She was calling out the name of her dog.”
I’m aware that Lucy has been working with British and German researchers on computer-based lip-reading technology, and Janet says the software is now good enough to use when people are turned as much as a hundred and sixty degrees sideways. In other words, you can barely see their mouths moving but the computer does.
“And she was turned away from the camera, looking in the direction of where she heard whatever she heard,” Janet says. “The security camera caught her from the side only, and it sort of does look, a little bit, at least, like she’s saying her husband’s name.”
I’m searching for Benton, wondering if he’s here. He must have alerted agents, the police, and if so, I know what that means. He found out what I feared is true. Douglas Burke came here to do battle with Channing Lott, whose shipping headquarters looms in the distance beyond the dry-docked hospital ship, a huge white prewar building with hundreds of windows, most of them dark at this hour.
“I could see someone like a prosecutor thinking that or wanting to think it,” Janet is saying. “Not Channing but Jasmine. She was calling her dog and looked really happy, thrilled and excited but frantic, and now we know why.”
My feet aren’t numb anymore, and now they’re itching.
“Not exactly,” I reply. “Why did she think her dog was out there?”
“Either he had the dog with him or more likely he had a recording,” she says. “If he stole the dog days earlier and recorded it barking.”
I continue to rub my feet as Janet walks over to the SUV and opens the tailgate.
“Try one of the big orange cases,” I call out to her, and police are everywhere, and Al Galbraith is in cuffs and is being placed in the back of an FBI sedan.
I look around at Boston cops and agents and Machado, and then I see Benton with uniformed officers who are breaching the entrance of the warehouse. What I don’t see is any sign of Douglas Burke. Three loud thuds of a lightweight battering ram and the door gives and is opened, and there are lights on inside a cavernous open space where I can see rows of shiny steel machines on wheels and coils of hoses and hundreds of wooden barrels stacked against a far wall.
Benton and the others approach a shut metal door, and I can make out the reddish tint to the floor and hear what sounds like steam blasting. I remember Burke’s accusatory comments about Crystal Carbon2, a green